Operational excellence isn't about removing cost. It's about removing cost from the places guests don't value, so you can invest in the moments they will never forget.

I've found myself thinking a lot about value engineering recently. Which probably says more about where I am in my career than anything else.

Twenty years ago, I'd probably have been talking about creativity without limits, big ideas and making beautiful things. These days I seem to spend just as much time talking about budgets, operating models and where the money's gone. That's the reality of the world we're all working in. Materials cost more, labour costs more, guests expect more, and owners quite rightly expect stronger returns. AI is helping us make smarter decisions every day, which is brilliant, but it has got me wondering whether, in all our pursuit of efficiency, we're in danger of optimising the humanity out of hospitality.

Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but it feels like a genuine risk. Hospitality has always been a people business, yet more and more, the decisions we make are driven by data. Don't get me wrong, I love data. Better information leads to better decisions and better businesses. But guests don't experience spreadsheets, procurement strategies or operating models. They experience moments. They remember how somewhere made them feel, and that's a very different thing.

I re-read Will Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality recently and I’ve been returning to one idea ever since. His 95/5 rule. Be absolutely ruthless about getting 95% of your operation running brilliantly so you've got the freedom, and the budget, to make the remaining 5% unforgettable. I love this thinking because it doesn't position operational excellence and hospitality as opposites. In fact, it argues the complete opposite. The better we become at running the machine, the more opportunity we create to do something wonderfully human.

That got me thinking about value engineering. I've lost count of the number of workshops I've sat in over the years where the conversation inevitably becomes a tug of war. The contractor is trying to protect the budget, the designer is trying to protect the idea and the operator is wondering who's going to have to live with whatever comes out the other side. If we're honest, they can sometimes feel more like a WWE match than a collaborative workshop. The funny thing is that the one person who rarely gets invited into that conversation is the guest, which has always felt slightly back to front to me.

Surely the first question shouldn't be, "Where can we save money?" It should be, "What will our guests actually value?" They're similar questions on paper, but they lead to completely different decisions. Once you understand what people genuinely care about, it becomes much easier to strip cost from the things they'll barely notice and invest more confidently in the things they'll never forget. For me, that's what good value engineering looks like. It's not about spending more or less; it's about spending with intent.

We saw this first-hand at Keane when we worked on Treehouse Hotel London. The hotel occupied the shell of an old office building, which immediately created commercial constraints. We could have spent a significant amount of money trying to disguise the building's past, but instead we chose to celebrate it. We exposed materials wherever we could, embraced the honesty of the architecture and used simple, cost-effective finishes where they made sense. Those decisions weren't purely aesthetic; they created efficiencies across the project that allowed us to spend money where it would have a much bigger emotional return.

Rather than investing in finishes that most guests would struggle to remember six months later, we invested in moments. Bird boxes hidden throughout the hotel. Playful details that rewarded curiosity. Nostalgic touches that quietly reminded people of childhood without ever feeling forced. Looking back, I doubt many guests checked out talking about the exposed concrete, but I bet plenty left smiling because of those small moments of discovery. The building became the backdrop. The memories became the experience.

For me, that's Hospitality Thinking in its simplest form. It's recognising that every decision affects somebody. The guest, the operator, the team delivering the experience, the brand itself and, of course, the commercial performance of the business. Too often we optimise for one at the expense of another, when the real opportunity lies in finding the balance between them. That's rarely the easiest conversation to have, but it's almost always the one worth having.

Technology will continue to change the way we design and operate hospitality businesses. AI will become more capable, data will become richer and commercial pressures are unlikely to ease any time soon. None of that worries me. What would worry me is using those tools to create experiences that become progressively more efficient but progressively less human.

Operational excellence shouldn't be the destination. It should be the thing that creates space for hospitality to flourish. Because in the end, people don't return because the procurement strategy was clever or because the operating model shaved another half a percent off costs. They come back because something about the experience stayed with them. If we can use operational excellence to create more of those moments, then I'd say we're investing in exactly the right things.