The Notebook and the Card on the Bed

By Alexandra Suárez-Carlo, Founder, Lateral Strategy

You check into your room and see a beautifully designed card on the bed:

“Help Save the Planet. To conserve energy, water, and reduce waste, we do not provide daily housekeeping. If you would like your room serviced, please contact the front desk.”

By day two, the trash is full, the towels are damp, and the room no longer feels cared for. Suddenly the question is not only about sustainability. It is about trust.  Is ‘not having my room serviced’ a thoughtful, responsible decision? Or am I being asked to absorb an operational choice that was made somewhere else?

I think about this more than I probably should.

Because this little card captures something I see across so many organizations today. Many companies say they care deeply about Customer Experience. And most genuinely want people to have a good experience. But then, somewhere between the intention and the actual moment a person lives through, something gets lost.

That gap is where the real work of Customer Experience and Service Design begins.

Hospitality has been teaching us how to close that gap for a very long time.

What Hospitality Understood Before Customer Experience Existed

Hospitality is the practice of making care operational.

I began my career in hospitality in 1999, long before Customer Experience became a corporate discipline and long before journey maps showed up in conference rooms. At the Four Seasons Hotel, I carried a small notebook with me. I wrote down things that seemed tiny at the time: a guest’s preferred newspaper, the wine they loved at dinner, the names of their children, the reason they were traveling. When that guest returned months later, I could welcome them not just politely, but personally.

Looking back, that notebook taught me something I still believe today: hospitality is the practice of making care operational. Not care as a slogan. Not care as a card on the bed. Care as hundreds of small decisions that help people feel seen, safe, respected, and at ease.

That is also what makes hospitality responsible. Not a separate message, not an ask placed on the guest, not a compliance checklist sitting behind the scenes — but a better-designed way for people, places, and operations to work together.

The Gap Between Intention and Experience

Today I work across industries redesigning services. Most organizations I work with genuinely want to do right by their customers, their teams, and increasingly, their communities and the planet. The intent is there. The systems built to deliver it are often designed around operational logic, not human behavior, and that’s where it breaks.

Because too often, sustainability has been designed as an instruction to the guest. Hang the towel. Scan the QR code. Opt in. Opt out. Forgive the reduced service because it is “for the planet”.

That may be well-intentioned. But from a customer experience perspective, it is a fragile design. It depends on the guest doing the work, understanding the reason, accepting the tradeoff, and feeling good about it. On vacation. In a room they paid for. Often with very little context.

That is not human-centered design. That is a policy asking to be trusted.

The Power of Being Close

Earlier this year, I saw this play out in a room full of independent hotel owners, operators, designers, and brand leaders at the Independent Lodging Congress Confab in San Juan, where I helped lead a Human-Centered Design Lab with the Center for Responsible Hospitality (CRH), a nonprofit making responsible hospitality more visible, measurable, and actionable. The findings became Designed, Not Declared, CRH’s new report on rethinking responsibility in the guest experience. What stood out was not that these operators needed convincing to care. The care was already there: in sourcing, in staffing, in design, in local partnerships, in how owners thought about their buildings, their teams, and their communities. 

You don’t need a sustainability program when your produce came from down the road and your cook knows the farmer’s name.

Independent hotels often operate with fewer resources, fewer layers, and fewer systems. And yet, many of them deliver experiences that the big brands spend millions trying to replicate. Why? Because decisions happen closer to the guest, closer to the supplier, closer to the street. Employees are trusted to notice the things dashboards can’t capture: the guest who hesitates before asking for help, the traveler scanning the lobby unsure of where to go, the small look that says something isn’t right. Those signals guide decisions in real time.

What surprised me most in the Confab was not that independent operators cared about responsibility, it was that their closeness to the guest, the team, and the place gave them access to ideas the big-brand playbook structurally can’t produce. Solutions that depend on knowing the neighborhood. On a staff member trusted to act in the moment. On a supplier relationship that doesn’t need a procurement system to function. These are not small advantages. They are the kind of advantages that make responsibility feel like part of the experience instead of a layer on top of it.

It’s the same reason a ten-table neighborhood restaurant can feel more thoughtful than a sixty-table chain. Smaller menu. Shorter feedback loop. The supplier is also a neighbor. That closeness keeps the experience honest, and quietly, it also keeps it responsible. When a dish is late, the front staff feels it: there’s no dashboard between them and the awkwardness of the table.  They witness the body language.  You don’t need a sustainability program when your produce came from down the road and your cook knows the farmer’s name.

Most big systems can’t replicate that. But independent hotels can, and many already do. They just rarely get credit for it, because the industry’s frameworks for “responsibility” were built around what big brands can measure and not what small operators actually do.

The Moment Theory Meets Reality

A hotel may be reducing water, energy, chemicals, labor pressure, or waste. All of that may be real. All of that may matter. But if the guest experience feels confusing, diminished, or unsupported, the responsible choice starts to feel like a service cut with better language.

That is the tension at the center of responsible hospitality. It is not enough for a decision to be good in theory. It has to work in the lived experience of the guest, the employee, and the place. This is where Human-Centered Design becomes so important. It asks a simple but powerful question: what happens when real people actually move through this experience?

And here is what I keep coming back to: hospitality has been answering that question for a very long time. Long before customer experience became a corporate function, the best hotels were already practicing what every industry is now scrambling to learn — that experience is built in small decisions, that closeness to the customer is a design asset, and that care has to be operational to be real. The work of responsible hospitality is not separate from this. It is the next chapter of it.

The best responsible hospitality will not be declared on a card. It will be felt: in the way expectations are set before arrival, in the way a room is designed with care but not excess, in the way staff are empowered to share what is real about the place, in the way local relationships become part of the experience rather than a marketing claim, in the way operational decisions support people, planet, place, and performance without asking the guest to carry the whole story.

So maybe the question is not only:

“How do we tell guests we are responsible?”

Maybe the better question is:

“How might we design responsible guest experiences that actually add value?”

And that’s the question CRH set out to answer in Designed, Not Declared.

About the Author

Alexandra Suárez-Carlo graduated from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration and has spent her career at the intersection of hospitality, customer experience, and innovation. After beginning her professional journey in luxury hospitality, she went on to found GoLateral, a consulting firm that helps organizations design better customer and employee experiences through research, service design, and Human-Centered Design.

Today, she is the founder of Lateral Strategy, a Customer Experience and Innovation consultancy, and a Mural and LUMA Institute Human-Centered Design trainer. Her work focuses on helping organizations design better experiences by understanding human needs, reducing friction, and aligning operations with what customers value.

She remains convinced that great hoteliers taught her some of the most important lessons about experience, trust, and responsibility, rooted in the simple belief that the best experiences are built through small moments that help people feel seen, cared for, and at ease.