Transcript: Episode 253: Twisting the Night Away
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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor with Susan Barry, episode 253. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/253.
[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now, your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.
[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Josh Ellis is the co-founder of Abra, a hospitality technology platform helping hotels deliver more personalized guest experiences through operational intelligence. His career has taken an unconventional path from studying philosophy and opening a meditation retreat in Colorado to management consulting, enterprise sales during the explosive growth of Lyra Health, and ultimately entrepreneurship. Inspired by watching his wife, Dana, build memorable guest experiences while juggling spreadsheets, sticky notes, and disconnected hotel systems, Josh set out to solve one of hospitality's biggest challenges, making guest information available to every team member who needs it. The idea won Abra the People's Choice Award at the recent E20X pitch competition at HITE. Today, we are going to talk about personalization, AI in hotel ops, and the future of hotel technology. But before we jump in, we need to answer the call button.
Call button rings…
The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at (850) 404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Ally. Here is what Ally has to say. "I have an idea for hotel software that I think would really help the banquet department do a better job, but I don't know how to get access to the existing systems to build interfaces." That's a mouthful. "How do software companies figure out how to work within existing systems?” Are you just buying the software to play around with it or what?" There's probably a really simple answer to this question, Josh, but I have no idea what it is. Do you know? What did you guys do?
[00:02:38] Josh Ellis: I do know. It was actually one of the first things that we were asking ourselves when we wanted to start Aber as well, is how do we actually integrate with all the tools that hotels are using today? So the thing that we learned is the best thing that you can do is to find a hotel that you want to work with that is interested in what you're building, and have them reach out on your behalf to begin the process of building an integration. So what we find is that it's really difficult to build an integration if there isn't a customer, a hotel that's asking for it. But as soon as a hotel begins to ask, that really changes the conversation. So if you're able to get a hotel to make a request to this vendor that you want to integrate with, that is typically the best starting point. And from there, building the integrations is pretty easy technically. But having a hotel open the door for you is a great first step.
[00:03:31] Susan Barry: Okay. So when you did that, was the hotel asking that vendor to build something, or were they saying, "Hey, give these guys access so that they can build the integration"?
[00:03:43] Josh Ellis: It kind of depends, but I think as long as the hotel is comfortable saying, "Hey, I'm interested in bringing on this platform," or, "We're working with this company that is building something for us, and it's really important that they integrate with this particular piece of technology," that is normally where the conversation starts. And then, it begins a partnership between the vendor-to-vendor partnership to build that integration. And what we found is that when we offered to build the integration, when we took that lift off of the other vendor's plate and explained the way that we were doing it and how it was gonna make their system more valuable, that really is the beginning of a strong partnership.
[00:04:25] Susan Barry: That's so interesting. So do you have to go one by one through every single system, or is there a certain critical mass where, "Okay, we're cool now. Everybody's gonna let us do this"?
[00:04:37] Josh Ellis: Yeah. I think we have noticed a shift now that we have... are working with more and more hotels. We have more and more integrations. We've now found that we can just sort of have conversations with vendors outside of a hotel needing to ask. But at the beginning, it was very much determined by a hotel being like, "Hey, I want you two to talk to each other."
[00:04:57] Susan Barry: Wow. So I will tell you what, we could stop this conversation right now, and that would still be, like, majorly valuable advice for the listeners, because I seriously had no idea what that looked like or what that process was, so thank you. Well, despite the fact that you sound like you know what you're talking about. Your path to hospitality technology wasn't exactly a traditional one. How did a philosophy major who then opened a meditation retreat end up building essentially an AI platform for hotels?
[00:05:32] Josh Ellis: Well, how long do you have, Susan? I guess the short answer is I met a girl and she was a hotelier.
[00:05:39] Susan Barry: Say no more. Say no more.
[00:05:42] Josh Ellis: So that's really where it started, is I married a hotelier. And every night I would watch her come home and struggle with the technology that she was using, trying to figure out a way to deliver the kind of service that she wanted for her guests. And eventually we got to the point where we realized that there had to be a better way, and we took matters into our own hands and built something to solve some of those challenges. I guess the longer story of it is, I've always been someone who has loved asking big questions, solving hard problems, bringing people together, and Abra really is the culmination of all of those things. I studied philosophy because I loved thinking about complex questions and thinking deeply about things. I started to get into meditation because I needed to teach myself to not think about those things so much.
[00:06:30] Susan Barry: I love that.
[00:06:31] Josh Ellis: And then, I found my way into management consulting, and then ultimately into high-growth tech. It’s sort of been a winding path, but in a weird way all of it has prepared me for a lot of the challenges that I face today in running a tech company. So I feel grateful for all the twists and turns.
[00:06:50] Susan Barry: So your wife, Dana, is also your co-founder. But she's the hotelier in the family, right?
[00:06:57] Josh Ellis: She is. She is.
[00:06:59] Susan Barry: Got it. And before launching Abra, you were at Lyra Health, which was, like, a hypergrowth company. Were there any lessons from scaling that technology company that you think translate directly into what you're doing now?
[00:07:16] Josh Ellis: Definitely. So Lyra's a workforce mental health platform. So when large organizations post-COVID were trying to figure out ways to support their employees who were just everyone was struggling with their mental health during and after COVID, they were really looking for a comprehensive solution that would give their people fast access to high-quality mental healthcare. And Lyra was just so far ahead of the pack in being able to deliver that level of quality of care. And I joined sort of right after COVID, and it was just wild. Like, every day it was like, "We just landed Amazon. We just landed SpaceX. We just landed Walmart." So it was just really incredible to see how fast the company was growing. But the biggest takeaway for me that has impacted Abra is that Lyra was the most customer-obsessed company that I have really ever seen. And it was so inspiring to me to see how they were able to maintain this unbelievable growth while also just remaining wildly committed to learning and supporting their customers. And that is just something that we have built into everything that we do at Abra. I think that one of the things that Dana had experienced in hospitality tech is that sometimes the hospitality tech forgets the hospitality. And we wanted to make sure that we brought that customer obsession, that true sense of hospitality to the way that we work with our customers, and it's really been a core part of how we've sort of conceptualized the entire way that we work with our partners.
[00:08:45] Susan Barry: That makes a lot of sense. A lot of people talk about how they love the industry even if they didn't sort of come up through the industry because people are hospitable. Like, they can be mad at you and still say it really nicely.
[00:09:01] Josh Ellis: 100%.
[00:09:02] Susan Barry: Yes. Well, if I had a dollar for every article that has been published about personalization in hospitality, I would be extremely rich. Why has it been so difficult for hotels to deliver on that promise? I mean, I just heard another example on a call yesterday. People were talking about, like, "I'm the highest level loyalty member in XYZ program, and they still don't know that I'm afraid of heights and cannot stay above XYZ floor." Like, that kind of stuff. Why is that so hard?
[00:09:38] Josh Ellis: Yeah. Well, it's so funny. This is actually how I started my E20X pitch. I went through, and I looked at all of the programs for HITEC over the last 20 years, and almost every year, there's been a panel on personalization at scale or by personalizing the guest experience. But really, I think why it has been so hard is because fundamentally it's not a personalization problem, it's a data problem. The personalization is impossible without clean, unified data about guests and the infrastructure to put that data into the right team member's hands in the right moments. And I think that as an industry, we have always struggled with deeply fragmented guest data. It lives in a dozen disconnected systems. It lives in the notes field of the PMS in a big chunk of unstructured text. It lives in the minds of team members who have no great way of sharing that information. So without this sort of data, guest data infrastructure, it makes it really impossible for a front desk agent to know that this particular guest who is a multi-time repeat guest at this particular property always requests a lower floor. That information doesn't show up to that team member in the right moment for them to actually take action on it, and it lives scattered in notes, or maybe someone remembered it from a front desk agent, but then they left for another opportunity, or they moved to another property. There's just no institutional memory that hotels have to be able to remember guests and to use that memory to serve them well, and that really is why we believe that it's never been tackled, is because no one has looked at sort of the fundamental problem that sits below it, which is the guest data fragmentation.
[00:11:16] Susan Barry: So talk about that a little. I know that Abra is positioned as sort of the connective tissue between all of a hotel's technology. What does that mean in practical terms? Like I'm a front desk agent, I'm a room attendant, I'm whoever I am. How does it work?
[00:11:35] Josh Ellis: Yeah, definitely. Well, this goes to the listener question at the beginning of how do we build integration, so this is a huge part of what Abra does. So essentially you can think of Abra as being a system that integrates with all of the tools and all of the systems where guest data lives, so the PMS, the CRM, the task management system, the restaurant reservation system, the spa reservation system, guest messaging platforms. And we integrate with all of those tools natively, and we pull all of the guest information that lives within those systems into a unified institutional memory of every guest. And then we use that memory to ensure that we're putting the right information into the right team member's hands in the right moment so they can actually use it to meaningfully impact the guest experience. So for the front desk agent, what this looks like is, for many front desk agents, a big part of their job is sort of quarterbacking data across the hotel. Like, guest data lives in the PMS notes field. It's very unstructured, and they need to kind of take that information out, send this note to the housekeeping team, send this note to the food and beverage team, ensure that this ends up in the amenity and this ends up in their room assignment, and there's just a lot of sort of quarterbacking of data that front desk teams do. Abra removes all of that because we know what to do with each piece of data and who needs to know it. So for front desk agents, they're like, "Oh, I don't need to build arrivals reports and VIP reports and daily information sheets." All of that sort of gets generated automatically because we have all of the data. So that's one way that we're supporting front desk teams. The other is by ensuring that the information that's collected within Abra lives directly within the workflows that they're already using. So we built a browser extension. So what that means is the front desk agent is in their PMS, they're checking in a guest, and rather than needing to go into 10 different systems to see all the information about the guest, they open up a little quarter window, and it has full guest context right directly within their already existing PMS workflow. So that's sort of how it works for front desk agents. For housekeepers, what was really important to us in designing Abra for different parts of the hotel was having it sort of fit within their workflows. So what that means for housekeepers, we're pushing information directly into the housekeeping system. So information like when a ticket is created to go and service a room or to deliver something to the room. We're pushing information about the guest into that ticket so the housekeeper isn't just serving the guest in room 211, they're serving Mr. Jones, who is a five-time repeat guest who's celebrating his anniversary, and Mrs. Jones's first name is Jeanette. So she can go with a little bit of context to be able to personalize that interaction and make the guest feel truly known. So Abra really is not about creating another tab or another system for people to check. It's about empowering the workflows that team members are already using with data that they've never had access to so they can have the superpower to make more meaningful connections with guests.
[00:14:31] Susan Barry: I think you may have already answered this next question, but I'll pose it either way just to see if you've got anything else to share. I sometimes wonder, and by wonder, I mean I'm pretty sure, that we as an industry often add technology without really solving any problems. How can we innovate without making the operation even more complicated than it already is?
[00:14:59] Josh Ellis: This is something we think about so, so much, and the reflection that I have on this is that there are so many problems to solve in hospitality. Like, there is no shortage of problems, and there is no shortage of people who are creative and who are innovative and who want to build solutions to solve these problems. And I think it is incredible that there is just so much energy around innovation and solving all of the different things that make hoteliers' lives challenging. What I think is the important thing is that we have a foundation to build all of this innovation on top of, so that all of the new silos, in some ways, that we're adding, have something that brings them all together and allows them to work more intelligently together. So, our point of view is how we innovate while ensuring that we are not overcomplicating is by ensuring that we are putting a solid foundation in place, a solid sort of data and intelligence foundation, that as we add new systems and as we solve different problems, those different point solutions are all working together in harmony to improve the guest experience and improve the staff experience, and that's really what Abra exists to do, is to really catalyze innovation and help to ensure that any additional tool that a hotel brings on is gonna work together in the whole.
[00:16:31] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of Top Floor with some very practical, specific tips to try either in their businesses or in their lives. One of the things that I love the most about how you describe Abra is the gamification piece of it. So, when you hear about clean data and synergy and all that stuff, people might think like, "Okay, but who gives a darn? Like, who's gonna use it?" And I think you have a really unique way of making sure that it actually gets used. So talk about the gamification piece and what you've learned about motivating frontline teams in terms of using this new tool. I wonder if there's a way for gamification to work even if a hotel doesn't have Abra yet.
[00:17:27] Josh Ellis: Yeah, definitely. So I think first let me talk about why gamification was important for us and why we even kind of arrived at that. So one of the insights that Dana had from her time in ops was that the most valuable information often lived in the minds of team members who had no great way to share it. The casual conversation with a guest has with a bartender, or with a bellman, or with a front desk agent where they're sharing, "Oh, I'm going to a baseball game tomorrow," or, "Oh, I'm missing my puppy at home," or "I love the martini, but it like needs to be extra dirty." Like, those little tidbits of information just live in the minds of team members, and those are we call it, like, a hidden goldmine. That is the most valuable information we can use to truly show a guest that we know them and deliver those moments of personalized above-and-beyond service. So when we built Abra, we knew we didn't wanna just get the data from the systems. We knew we also needed to capture the information that lived in the minds of team members, to have that flow into the institutional memory as well. And we knew that we had to be really creative in how we ensured that we were actually capturing all that information. So we learned two things. The first is that, before you can even think about gamification or reward and recognition, the first thing that you need to do is you need to make it so simple and so frictionless that there is no frustration or delay or overcomplication for staff members to add information. So that was the first thing we needed to do because even if you gamify it and there's a lot of friction, the gamification is gonna be hard. So the first thing that we did is we made it incredibly easy for staff members to either type in natural language or to be able to just sort of share this information that they have about guests and to have that naturally be translated and put into the unified intelligence that we're building. So that was the first step is, like, really making it dead simple. But the second is really building sort of that reward and recognition and the gamification layer as well. So every single team member within Abra has a profile, so we're able to track the number of notes that they've submitted, the number of wow moments or moments of above-and-beyond service that they've been a part of. And what we've found is that people really value being recognized for when they go above and beyond in their role. And what we find with a lot of our properties is there's sort of this very cool flywheel effect that happens when they share a note to a profile. That note turns into a moment above and beyond service. And then there's a notification that goes out that John the bellman was involved in this moment of above-and-beyond service, and the general manager sees, and executive leadership sees, and there's a sense of pride and excitement that they were involved in this thing that made a guest stay feel special. And it sort of creates this flywheel of, "Oh, okay. If I do this, then these great things happen for me, for guests, for the hotel." And we see that just more and more of these things are happening, with the properties that we work with.
[00:20:31] Susan Barry: Most hotels, I would say, already have CRMs, CDPs, guest messaging platforms. How do you think that operators should think about how they connect those investments instead of replacing them?
[00:20:49] Josh Ellis: Yeah. A question that we often get is how is this similar to a CRM or a CDP? And really what differentiates Abra is we are built for operations, not for drip campaigns. CRMs and CDPs are incredibly powerful tools that support with marketing and the massive distribution side of hospitality. But they really have a hard time making their way into operations and actually turning data into usable insights for a front desk agent or for a bellman to actually deliver great service on property. And Abra is really purpose-built for operations. And one of the things that really surprised me when I first started to dive into the world of operational technology in hotels is that there really isn't one system that the entire team has access to. So there's this sort of very fragmented.
[00:21:42] Susan Barry: Isn't that weird? Just the phone.
[00:21:43] Josh Ellis: It is so crazy to me. Right. I know. It always was just so wild. It's like, okay, there's a housekeeping system that they live in, a maintenance system that the maintenance team lives in. There's the food and beverage systems that they live in, and the PMS that the front desk lives in, but there's nothing that sort of brings all those together. And when there's a really disconnected staff experience, the result is a really disconnected guest experience. You know, you share with the front desk that you have a gluten allergy, but then you show up at the restaurant, and you're asked, "Are there any allergies that we need to be aware of?" And then you get gluten-free or gluten-full cookies delivered to your room as an amenity. And I think this is something that every hotel struggles with. A nd the result is a lot of wasted spend on amenities that aren't actually helping to earn loyalty or to make an impact on the guest, and an opportunity and missed opportunities to show guests that we really care about them and you've really been listening. So what we really see is that when you bring all of the systems together, that is where you can have, like, true jump steps in terms of the impact of technology. Most tech out there is really good. Like, we're a mature enough industry that a lot of the different operational tools are really good. And yes, you might have some some improvements from switching from one to another, but where you really see massive growth and massive sort of shifts in the way the technology is being used and the way that your team is operating and the guest experience that you're able to deliver is by thinking of it in a different way, and not just sort of improving the silos, but really bringing everything together. Having there be one brain that allows all those things to work more intelligently together, especially as it relates to improving the guest experience and really making guests feel cared about and known.
[00:23:30] Susan Barry: All right. Well, we have reached the fortune-telling portion of our show, so you're gonna have to look into your crystal ball and tell me what's gonna happen, and we'll see if you get it right. What is a prediction that you have about the future of guest personalization in hotels?
[00:23:48] Josh Ellis: So I think there's gonna be two types of hotel companies in the future. There's gonna be those that have invested in an infrastructure for guest data, and there's gonna be those that haven't. And the ones that have invested will have the AI future that we're all dreaming of. You know, something that is hyper-personalized, hyper-efficient, hyper-profitable. But the ones that don't invest in getting their data in order, I think that is when we get into the things of what we fear with AI. The slop that everyone is worried about of, okay, yes, we have AI agents that are interacting with guests, but they're making mistakes. They're doing things that aren't improving the guest experience. So I really think there's gonna be a firm dividing line between those that invest in their data infrastructure and those that don't.
[00:24:38] Susan Barry: As a follow-up to that, do you think that the resistance to investing is financial, mindset, both, neither, something else?
[00:24:50] Josh Ellis: Yeah. I think it is just such a confusing time in technology right now. Like, there are just so many new solutions. Everything with AI is moving so incredibly fast. We're in this sort of paradigm shift right now, and I think there's just an uncertainty of what that means for what's next and what AI is gonna look like in hotel ops. Like, how can we keep the human connection, but also still have our industry work more efficiently with this tech that's now available to us? But I think that is the biggest sort of resistance that I see. And I mean, it's understandable, right? We've never experienced anything like this. So yeah, that's what I would say.
[00:25:37] Susan Barry: That makes sense. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about selling hospitality technology, what would that be?
[00:25:47] Josh Ellis: Can I share two?
[00:25:48] Susan Barry: Of course. But you only have one magic wand, so you know.
[00:25:52] Josh Ellis: Okay. All right. Sounds good. And hopefully it has a couple of abracadabras in it. So the first is that I think, understandably so, operational tech has long been thought of as just purely a cost center, and not a revenue driver. And I think understandably, a lot of hoteliers and decision-makers and hospitality organizations are sort of stuck in that mindset of like, "Operational tech, I have my budget for it, you know. It kinda is what it is, and it's really just a cost that I just need to outlay to be able to deliver the kind of service that we're delivering.” I really wish that there would be more of an open-mindedness to seeing differentiated solutions as being true revenue drivers in a way that would allow you to make faster decisions on things that could potentially have massive returns for your business.
[00:26:44] Susan Barry: So what you're saying is you wish it wasn't so dang slow.
[00:26:51] Josh Ellis: It's not necessarily the slowness. Like, I understand the desire to be really thorough and to make sure that you're not bringing on a solution that's gonna add work for your team or to add lift. Like, there's already a lot of tabs, there's already a lot of tools, and I understand that hoteliers are really protective of their employee experience and not wanting to bring tools on them that's gonna make it harder for them. I think that it's just almost just this general mindset of just fitting tech into this bucket of like, "This is just something I need to spend on," that it's harder to wrap for some hoteliers to wrap their head around. The potential sort of jump steps that could happen in productivity and guest experience if you make the right investments. Does that make sense? And then the second thing, this is my second magic wand sort of twirl, I think that there's a lot of trauma around technology in this industry. I think that hoteliers have a lot of trauma. Like, I think that for many, many years, and I think personalization is a perfect example of this, like hoteliers have been promised personalization at scale. They've been promised a lot of things by technology vendors for a long time, and I think there's been a history of overpromising and under-delivering. And I think because of that, and understandably so, there's some trauma in terms of how this industry and the relationship with technology. And from what I have seen from the startups and the other sort of this new wave of hospitality technology is that there is a really different level of commitment to really being great partners in this. And really bringing a level of service that I think has been hard for hospitality tech companies to provide in the past.
[00:28:43] Susan Barry: What do you think changed?
[00:28:44] Josh Ellis: Well, I think AI has made it a lot more efficient to run a lot of different parts of the business that can allow tech companies to invest more in their relationships and in serving customers. And to be able to be much quicker in responding to customer needs. Like, think about 10 years ago if there was a request that a customer had for a change that needed to be made in a piece of technology, like, there was so much work that needed to go into the scope. Now with AI, it's so easy for AI native development teams to take customer feedback and have that show up in the product in a matter of days, you know? So I think that there's just this ability for the tech industry to be so much more responsive to our partners in a way that was much harder in the past. And I hope that over time, as hoteliers see this, some of that trauma will wash away and there will begin to be more trust of vendors and being true partners and being able to build solutions that are gonna really make an impact and truly listen to what hoteliers are saying. So I guess my magic wand would be to have that process happen faster, and to sort of for that trust to come sooner than it would take of the many years that it will take to wash away some of the trauma of hospitality tech past.
[00:30:08] Susan Barry: You're not wrong about that trauma piece. I will never forget, I'm not gonna tell you what year this was, but my hotel was very slow to implement a sales and catering system. We did everything manually for a lot longer than a lot of people. And so we finally got Delphi and had to spend weeks upon entering in backlogs so that we would have historical data in the system. Like the trauma of that, that is a long time ago, and I still can feel in my body what it felt like and how furious I was that I had to do that.
[00:30:56] Josh Ellis: Yeah. And I think every hotelier has that story, right? Th- every hotelier has that story of like, "Oh, God, we brought this thing on, and they promised it was gonna be easy. And six months later it was still a mess, and our team wasn't using it, and all these hours and money." And I understand. Like, that is like a deeply impacting experience that would cause you to be cautious in bringing on new tech. But I think we're in a new era now where the responsiveness and the speed of delivery is just at an exponentially higher pace than it ever were before that allows. If there's something that isn't quite right, we can fix it, and that can happen much faster. And I think the time to value for software and for technology in this industry and just in general is just at a level that has never been possible before, and I hope that that will give hoteliers more confidence in bringing on new tech and finding partners that can be responsive to them and the things that they need.
[00:31:58] Susan Barry: Okay, folks, before we tell Josh goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.
Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”
[00:32:13] Susan Barry: Josh, what is a story you would only tell on the loading dock?
[00:32:17] Josh Ellis: All right, so I'll tell one of mine, and then I'll tell one of Dana's. Okay. So the one from me is, so I worked in restaurants for a long time, like through high school and through college. And I remember I think I was probably 16 years old. It was my first day. I was a busser at a restaurant, and the way that the restaurant was set up was there was sort of like a raised area, and then there were steps down, and in front of the steps down was the whole bar. So, like, all the bar guests, like, were facing away from me, sort of with their backs towards the stairs. So I was carrying a tray. It's like the first time I've ever carried a tray. I'm walking down the stairs, and I dump the tray forward. Everything hits the ground, and it was a lot of red wine. And it hits the ground, and it literally looked like a murder scene of just red wine just spraying across the back of all probably 15 people that were sitting at the bar in front of me. Yeah, it was such a mess. It was really quite the scene. I did not get fired. I luckily had a manager who's very understanding and very thoughtful and all of that. But I will never forget that day of just seeing it happen in slow motion and just understanding what was about. It was really quite the story. So that was my first ever hospitality, my first day in the hospitality world.
[00:33:46] Susan Barry: Then maybe you have wine glass trauma like me, hotel tech trauma.
[00:33:51] Josh Ellis: Yes, there you go. And then, so Dana worked at a lot of ultra-luxury properties. The beginning of her career was sort of in guest relations and VIP management and all of that, and she has so many wild stories of just crazy guest requests and all of that. But the one that always sticks in my head 'cause maybe a funny way, but also I don't like thinking about it. There was one guest at one of the properties that she worked at, he came maybe a couple times a month, an older gentleman, an executive, and his request was that a Twister board needed to be set up in the main area of his room. This was his only request. He had to have a Twister board set out on the day they had to move the furniture, and there had to be a Twister board set up in the middle of the living room.
[00:34:55] Susan Barry: Did he have company? Nobody knows, huh?
[00:35:00] Josh Ellis: Nobody knows, but that was the request.
[00:35:02] Susan Barry: Here's the thing that I wanna understand. Like, there are crazy requests, and that, my friend, is maybe the craziest. But, like, how do you have the audacity to make that request? I would literally expire before I could say, "Can I please have a Twister board?"
[00:35:25] Josh Ellis: And also just, like, and there's no, like, hesitation in the request. It's like, "You will move the furniture in the room, and there will be a Twister board, like, in the center of the living room of the suite."
[00:35:36] Susan Barry: Hold on a minute. Did she ever find out why?
[00:35:43] Josh Ellis: No. Your, your imagination has to take this one, Susan.
[00:35:50] Susan Barry: That's insane.
[00:35:51] Josh Ellis: And maybe you don't want it to.
[00:35:52] Susan Barry: No, I do not. But did it have to have the spinner with it to pick the color?
[00:35:58] Josh Ellis: Had to have the spinner with it. And it was the same Twister board, and he stored it at the hotel. And they would have to set it out.
[00:36:04] Susan Barry: No. No, thank you. Josh Ellis, you have delivered Twister trauma to me this afternoon.
[00:36:18] Josh Ellis: Oh, gosh, that's another type of hospitality trauma.
[00:36:19] Susan Barry: Yes. Thank you so much for being here. I know that our listeners were both delighted and horrified by your appearance on Top Floor, and I really appreciate you being here.
[00:36:31] Josh Ellis: I hope more on the delight side.
[00:36:32] Susan Barry: Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/253. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all-around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.
[00:37:10] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.