If you think inclusion is a box-tick exercise, you’ve missed the point – and the money. Leaders who ignore it are sabotaging their own service standards and bottom line.

 

National Inclusion Week felt really necessary this year. Before you roll your eyes, hear me out. In hospitality this isn’t about hashtags or posters. It’s about your people. And if you don’t get that right, your guests will feel it. Let’s deal with the word woke. It’s been twisted into an insult, but its roots are powerful.

 

In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly warned travellers to “stay woke” to danger. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King told graduates to “remain awake” to injustice. It was about paying attention to unfairness. Somewhere along the way, we lost that meaning. Real inclusion isn’t political correctness; it’s human connection. And if hospitality isn’t about that, what is?

 

A hotel manager once moaned to me about “all this inclusion stuff” because a new starter wanted better work-life balance. That’s not inclusion being a problem – that’s leadership missing the human in front of them.

 

We’re quick to see the roles – housekeeping, front desk, kitchen – before the person. But those people carry ideas that can sharpen service. 

 

Your night porter may know how to speed up check-out. Your weekend server may spot a gap the old hands miss. The question is whether you listen. Try asking your team: “What’s one thing you’d change to improve our guest experience?” If you’re surprised by the answers, you’ve not been listening hard enough.

 

Hospitality runs on adrenaline. Busy service, full venues, back-to-back functions – these all cause our brains take shortcuts. And those shortcuts can wreck team dynamics. David Rock’s “Scarf” model nails this. Five things trigger us: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. Threaten any of those, and people react like they’re under attack.

 

The team member who keeps asking for updates mid-service? They crave certainty. The one resisting new procedures? They need autonomy. The server hanging back in meetings? They’re struggling with relatedness. Stop snapping at the behaviour, and look for the trigger underneath. Once you see what someone needs, you can lead them differently.

 

We’re in uncharted territory. For the first time ever, six generations are serving side by side. From the Baby Boomer concierge who knows every guest by name to the Generation Z barista who instinctively understands TikTok-driven expectations. And yet, instead of treating this as an advantage, we moan about “kids these days” or roll our eyes at “old-school thinking”.

 

Big mistake. Younger staff aren’t lazy because they reject 60-hour weeks. They want something better. Older staff aren’t dinosaurs – they bring resilience and depth. Put them together and you’ve got a powerhouse team. If you stop treating difference as a headache.

 

We love labels – front versus back of house, seasonal versus permanent. Labels are tidy, but dangerous if they stop you seeing the human. Flip them. Every difference can be data: “What are you spotting that I’ve missed? Every frustration can be feedback: What’s this teaching me? That’s how you stop kitchen versus floor becoming a turf war.

 

Inclusion doesn’t live in HR policies. It lives in the huddle where you listen; the meeting where the quietest voice speaks; the moment you say, “help me understand” instead of “that’s not how we do it”. Those small acts build safety. Safety makes people care more, notice more and deliver more. Inclusion isn’t fluffy waffle – it’s commercial. Done right, it makes service sharper and loyalty stronger.

 

So, let’s reclaim the word. W.O.K.E = Welcome Others’ Kindness Everywhere. That’s hospitality at its core. Staying awake to when your team feel unseen or undervalued, because the way you treat them is the way they’ll treat your guests.

 

Inclusion isn’t a programme; it’s a practice and a leadership habit. Next time someone shows up differently to what you expected – whether they’re 16 or 60 – pause. Ask: Am I seeing a problem to fix, or a possibility to explore? Because inclusion isn’t woke. It isn’t difficult. It’s just wise. And it’s good business.

It was a welcome return to the wonderful dining room at The Cinnamon Club in London’s Westminster, where my wife and I last dined many years ago when certain Indian restaurants were in the early days of breaking out of offering identikit menus and serving more regional cuisine.

 

We were back for some more of chef Vivek Singh’s excellent dishes, and to take advantage of the restaurant’s superb value early evening menu. At £38 for three courses, it is a great bargain because none of the dishes appear to be dumbed down/smaller versions of the regular menu, and it also comes with additional touches such as amuse bouche. 

 

This menu is available from 5.30pm to 6pm and would have previously been called a pre-theatre menu, but nowadays many places offer such deals to obviously attract more people at these earlier times. But is it really necessary today, because we are in the midst of a seismic shift in the way people eat out. It was prompted by covid-19, and has, if anything accelerated post-pandemic. Night owls are becoming a rare species.

 

We’ve had a deluge of statistics and data to highlight how the country now dines out earlier. The average preferred time for bookings at pubs, bars and restaurants is now 6.12pm, and as many as 48% of bookings in the first quarter of 2025 were for tables between 12pm and 6pm, according to research from CGA and Zonal. And it’s not just the old-timers who want to be comfortably tucked up at home earlier after a night out, because the survey found as many as 22% of 18 to 34-year-olds are now going out earlier than they were a year ago.

 

Will Beckett, co-founder of Hawksmoor, has said: “No one goes out late anymore. Before covid, a prime reservation slot was 7.30pm/8pm and a skilled restaurateur could turn tables in an evening. Now, the prime slot is 6pm/6.30pm, and very few people want to eat after 8pm.”

 

Hawksmoor does not have a discounted early evening menu, and why would it when you consider its trading patterns today? So why, are so many other restaurants offering cheaper early evening dining? In addition to bespoke early menus, there are apps out there being used by many restaurants offering discounts for the earlier hours.

 

Later timings are also being promoted, with The Cinnamon Club offering a 9pm-9.30pm two-course menu for a mere £25. Meanwhile, at Bob Bob Ricard, the 12pm to 6pm three-course £35 menu also comes into play again for 9pm bookings.

 

Renowned restaurateur Jeremy King has been particularly vocal about the dearth – or is it death – of late-night dining that was a mainstay of his earlier days running fashionable venues such as Le Caprice and The Wolseley. To pull in the night owls at his current places, The Park and Arlington restaurants, he has been offering diners booked from 9.15pm onwards (9pm on Sundays) 25% off their total bill. Are these late-night promotions worth the effort? 

 

Maybe the hospitality industry needs a total rethink about how it promotes booking times and devises its menus. It seems the time that needs promoting more nowadays is the former prime slots at 7.30pm/8pm, not the timings around 6pm. And should restaurants simply abandon any post-9pm business?

 

Against a backdrop of rising labour costs and customer behaviour having shifted to earlier dining hours, the focus of businesses should be more skewed to this early part of the evening, and the cut off time for final bookings should be much earlier. Bringing the resources forward to offer a full-on service in the early evening – and not having the team still setting up during this time – would be a sensible approach.

 

While earlier dining looked to be a short-lived phenomenon post-pandemic, the evidence increasingly suggests it is here to stay, and restaurants need to adapt to this new trading environment. Meanwhile, I’m going to try and enjoy as many early-evening menus as possible while they are still around.

For the last decade, hospitality brands have poured significant investment into search engine optimisation (SEO). Ranking higher on Google became a race for digital visibility. The logic was simple: the higher you appeared, the more likely guests were to click, book and dine. But the digital landscape has shifted. Guests aren’t just “searching” anymore. They’re asking: “What pubs are open near me?” “Are there pizzerias that allow dogs?” “Where’s the nearest steakhouse?”

 

Increasingly, the answer isn’t coming in the form of a list of blue links. It’s arriving as a single, definitive response from ChatGPT, Siri, Alexa or Google’s own artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search. Instead of a 40% click through rate for position one, 20% for position two, 10% for position three etc, it becomes a “winner takes all” distribution. The single answer that is surfaced will almost always win. The guest doesn’t scroll through options. They don’t weigh ten tabs against each other. They receive one answer, and if it isn’t your business, you may as well not exist.

 

This is where answer engine optimisation (AEO) enters the conversation. Unlike SEO, which was about being part of the options presented to the guest, AEO is about being the answer. It’s often referred to as “zero-sum visibility”. The goal is no longer about ranking higher. It’s about being the response.

 

Discovery is only half of the story. Stripe and OpenAI’s recent partnership show us what comes next. Their launch of “instant checkout” inside ChatGPT, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, signals a near future where discovery and transaction meet in the same conversation.

 

Imagine a guest asking ChatGPT: “Find me a table for two at a cocktail bar in Manchester at 7pm tonight.” Instead of being sent to a booking website, the transaction happens inside the chat. In the same flow, guests could be offered add-ons – a premium cocktail flight, a celebratory dessert or a gift voucher for next time. No redirects. No friction.

 

For restaurants and pubs, this is seismic. It moves the point of conversion out of your owned channels and into an ecosystem of conversational interfaces. Booking engines, loyalty platforms and point of sales systems will need open application programming interfaces to plug directly into these AI agents. Transactions will increasingly happen at the point of intent, wherever that intent emerges. It’s no longer about waiting for guests to find your website; it’s about ensuring your brand is present and bookable wherever they choose to ask the question.

 

Hospitality has always been about removing friction for the guest. First, it was reservations by phone. Then it was seamless online booking. Next came mobile ordering and QR codes. Each wave reduced barriers between intent and action.

 

Conversational AI represents the next great expansion of the front door. Guests will increasingly expect to discover, decide and transact in the same conversational thread. And once they’ve booked, the same system will nudge them toward pre-purchase add-ons, personalised offers or loyalty enrolment.

 

This is not “nice to have” – it’s where digital behaviour is headed. The brands that adapt fastest will set the standard, and those that hesitate will lose share of voice and share of wallet.

 

Arguably, the funnel is shortening and flattening. A guest going from intent to transaction will require less time and less touch points. Brands optimised for conversational answers and real-time booking will capture disproportionate share, because guests won’t scroll, they’ll simply say “yes”.

 

For leaders, the challenge is clear: the next battleground isn’t just your website, your booking widget or even your digital adverts. It’s how discoverable and transactable your brand is within conversational ecosystems. That requires investment in three areas – data clarity and structure, system interoperability and brand authority.

 

Every menu item, every opening time and every location must be machine-readable and consistent across channels. Your booking engine, loyalty programme, and point of sales must connect seamlessly to external AI agents via APIs.

 

AI will only choose you as “the answer” if your brand is credible, consistent, and contextually relevant. This isn’t a hypothetical future; it’s unfolding now. And as discovery collapses into conversion, the margin for error disappears.

 

Technology in hospitality should never be about features for the sake of features. It should be about helping the guest find what they want instantly, in the channel they choose. AEO is simply the next evolution of that principle. So, here’s the question every boardroom should be asking right now: When a guest asks their next question, will your brand be the answer, or will someone else?

A few years ago, we introduced our Goldilocks programme, “writing the perfect rota, that’s not too hot and not too cold”. This always gets a giggle (or a little groan), but in essence, it’s a name that sticks, and our customers love it.

 

The theory goes that systems can change some habits, but by no means all of them. The rest of the change needs to be done by people, to people. For some systems, such as a property management system, the implementation will automatically change more of the business behaviours (but it still won’t stop you rejecting the booking if you don’t want to take it). But with people management, old fashioned persuasion is the key.

 

If your kitchen team like doing prep in the morning, or if your front of house team always do admin on a Monday, then the chances are that putting in a system won’t change these habits. The real change comes around when experts persuade other people to think differently and convince them that there is a better way. Not easy, but doable.

 

Since our first project, we have completed hundreds of Goldilocks visits and have been constantly learning how to refine the art of getting people to better themselves. Too often, the solution is easy but the wrong habit is embedded, and persuading people to change what they have always done is hard. It takes 66 days to change a habit, so maintaining the new behaviour needs constant reinforcement too if it is not going to wither on the vine.

 

So, what are the main elements of a Goldilocks visit? Of course, it all starts with shift management, challenging and adjusting how a shift is run to optimise the team’s efficiency. We all know too many staff leads to worse service, as I witnessed recently – I walked into a major casual dining group, was confronted with the “please wait to be seated” sign and waited five minutes (probably three in reality) while two staff members finished their conversation before attending to us.

 

What we define as slack tasks and when we do them is another vital element of the process. Moving rostered fixed tasks to slack tasks to be done in down time is, of course, a massive cost saving, but you won’t achieve any of it if you don’t have the mindset. This is a really hard change programme.

 

Considering a site’s nuances and giving the managers the opportunity to really get their point across always gets their buy in. They can talk about their challenges, but with a bit of guidance and a fresh set of operator’s eyes, they always start to think about the way they do things and whether there’s a better behaviour that will drive sales, save them some cash and ultimately improve the guest experience.

 

The changes we have seen are better than even the optimist Alastair might have wished for. In bigger sites, savings of £40,000 a year are the norm. But the real surprise to me is in smaller sites. The old saying with labour management is that you can’t save much in smaller operations. Our Goldilocks programme begs to differ, with savings of circa £20,000 at the “lower turnover” end of the scale. This strangely means that the proportion of labour saved goes up as the size of the site goes down. This is not what most people, me included, expected – so why is that? 

 

The chances are the organisation managing these smaller sites maybe doesn’t have the internal skill set to optimise or hasn’t given it the focus because it doesn’t believe it can get any better – but it can. I always love the counter-intuitive solution where you must re-think your starting position, and this is certainly one of them.

 

The interesting bit for me is why people employ us versus doing it themselves – I am always one for doing things myself and tend to be a bit reluctant to enlist outside help. I blame cost, but in reality, it is because I hate admitting I am not good enough at everything and I simply do not have the time! 

 

The reality is spending a day just “doing rotas” is hard to schedule and hard to stick to when you have all your other business pressures, despite the fact this could (or should) sit at the top of the priority pile. The real differentiator is the stories that people can tell to convince people they aren’t alone; there are many who have been through the same journey, and they are still great operators who can be even better. I think the psychology of the programme is the most important element.

 

Helping our large customers make far more money is satisfying, but one of the most gratifying elements of our programme has been, quite literally, saving single site operators. When someone is going to go bust if they don’t do anything about labour cost, they certainly have the motivation to succeed. It is such a great feeling when we can finally help them make their business work. These are pubs, and communities often rescued. And that’s it – creating a rota that is not too hot, and not too cold, does make a difference.