Turning Creative Hospitality Storytelling into ROI

When a GDO and I created this podcast, as teachers, we wanted to explore different ways to share knowledge and inspire lifelong learning and hospitality, and this is exactly Shularing's mission. Shularing is an employee experience platform helping hotels to digitize their onboarding process, building the culture they want from day one. They also create personalized learning and development paths, leveraging the hotel standards, and offer a learning marketplace from up-to-date courses co-created with industry experts from their podcast series. Besides all that, they let you tap into their strong network of global consultants without any extra fees. Fifty shades of hospitality has already joined the Shularing movement, and I believe that you should too. Find out more on www.shularing.com and use the promo code 50 Shades for free auditing of your hotel's employee experience and 50% of the onboarding fee. Shularing Hub, because great hotel teams are built, not found. Good afternoon and welcome to 50 Shades of Hospitality. This is Crystal Cavan your host. Today we are very happy to welcome Scott Eddie. Scott, it's a pleasure to have you on our podcast today. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Yeah, my name is Scott Eddie. I'm based in Miami. I grew up in South Florida and then I lived in Europe and Asia for 17 years, and it's been quite a wild ride. I'm in the world of hospitality, but my background is in investment banking, and I was fully on that traditional corporate track until the firm was sold. It's really funny because the guy who was sitting next to me at the firm, his best friend was an ex-bat living in Bangkok. Every time I used to come visit, we used to hang out and get drinks and dinner, and we became really good friends. He always used to tell me to come visit him. I worked 90 hours a week. It's impossible for me to take a 24 hour flight. Basically, what my friends tell me now. After the firm was sold, he called me the next day and he said, "Listen, you have no job. Come and visit me." I bought a two week ticket, and after four days, I called my mom. I said, "This country is incredible. I have no job to come back to. I'm staying, send my things." I ended up living in Bangkok for 11 years, and that was January of 99. It really, it changed the trajectory of my whole life. I mean, basically, I was there four or five years before social media came out, and on a whim, when it did come out, I started a digital agency, what turned out to be the first digital agency in Asia, back when nobody was even used in the term social media marketing. From there, it just kept evolving, and as I said, I spent 17 years in living in his six different countries, and I've been traveling full-time ever since. Excellent. Now, you're a pioneer, Scott. You've had and continued to have a very interesting and adventurous career path. Can you tell our listeners more about this? So, you know, as I said, I grew up having a plan. You know, my father was a cop. He was a Michigan state trooper and then a Fort Lauderdot police officer. So, for me, growing up, my life was set up to be a police officer to walk in his footsteps, and I spent every waking hour outside of school at the police station just hanging out. I took my driver's license test in a police car. You know, I was hung out in the police station watching interrogations, watching, I watched a autopsy when I was 13 years old. My mom still wouldn't forget, forgive my dad for that. And, you know, I was going to graduate high school, become a cop, get married, have the two-and-f kids, the white pick of fence, retire and die. Like, that was the plan. Back then, you had plans. You know, there wasn't this whole entrepreneur thing, and everybody's going all in, you know, back then, a kid was a kid. A kid wasn't an adult like they are today. So, I had a date to join the police academy six months after I graduated high school, and three weeks before I graduated high school, my father was killed in the line of duty in a plane crash, and it just turned my whole world upside down. I didn't know how to deal with it. I didn't know what to do, what I wanted to do. I was a horrible student. I wasn't going to college. I hated it so much, and I just, I was completely lost. The one thing I did know is I didn't want to be a cop anymore. What? It took that taste out of my mouth. Not that I don't like law enforcement now, because I still, I love it. I crave it every time I see a police officer brings back crazy memories of growing up. But it just changed, and that's when I got that opportunity for the finance company, and, you know, that whole thing just changed my trajectory. Yeah. You mentioned before, when you introduced yourself that you created your own digital agency in Thailand, you know, what kind of challenges did you face, being an entrepreneur in a foreign country, and what was it like running a business there? I mean, I was the furthest thing from an entrepreneur. I just did it on a whim. It was the most exciting, and the most difficult thing I've ever done. I didn't speak the language. I didn't know the legal system. You know, I had somewhat of a network just because I've been living there for five years, so I had a lot of friends. But it just had a vision. Like, I, I, is all I know how to do is sell. That's, that's it. I'm a salesman. That's what I learned in investment banking world, and I still apply it to everything I do today. And I was just trying to, to show up with that vision and turn sales into marketing, which that's all it is. It's a gentler way of selling a marketing. What, what saved me was building real relationships. I, I didn't show up trying to westernize everything. I, I learned how to adapt, how to listen, how to operate with respect, and, and to be honest, Thailand taught me that. When I first moved there, I was an aggressive finance, investment banking, salesperson, you know, with that mentality, moving 100 miles an hour, you know, everything's about profits, you know, like, let's go. And Thailand taught me how to adapt, how to listen, how to operate with respect. And, you know, they, this is why there's so many people from Southeast Asia in hospitality, especially in the cruise world. I mean, you're talking probably 70, 80 percent is because they have hospitality and kindness inside of them. It's, it's crazy. Yeah, you're not the first person to, to say that. A lot of people have, have mentioned this natural way of being is just naturally hospitable. Yeah, they're just, they're just born with it. But, but make no mistake, being entrepreneur in a foreign country is not for the faint of heart. It forced me to grow up fast, trust my instincts, and, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. Now, you've been working, as you mentioned, in the digital world for several years, a pioneer. How has it evolved? I mean, you can really see, you, you have seen the very beginning of the digital world, digital marketing. And here we are, 2025. What are your takeaways? It's changing every way you can imagine. And some you even can't. When I started, we were begging clients to get on Facebook. We were telling them, you know, this is the main pipeline of communication, or it will be, there were no influencers, no video marketing, no DMs being used for customer service. Today, everything is faster. Everything's more personal. Everything's more visual. The attention span is short, but expectations are high. And now with AI coming into play, I mean, we're going to see another huge shift. We're going to, we're seeing a disruption like nobody's ever seen before. But that doesn't scare me, it excites me. Because the fundamentals, storytelling, relationships, trust, they don't change, just the tools do. And can you tell us more about turning hospitality storytelling into return on investment? Yeah, I mean, ROI is the ultimate bag of goal at the end of the rainbow. Too many hotels and cruise lines, they, they focus only on the features, the pool, the room, the view. People don't connect with that. What they remember is the feeling, the experience, the why. So I focus on storytelling that sells. Not just looks great. Yeah, you need that. That's the easy part. Yeah. That might, that might be behind the scenes video with the staff member who's who's been there for 20 years, or that drone shot that emotionally transports you into that property. Now, when you show the soul of a brand, you build trusts, and that trust is what drives bookings. That's the ROI. You were, you mentioned artificial intelligence. What kind of changes in digital marketing do you see for the future? And what role will artificial intelligence play in these changes? The biggest shift coming is personalize personalization at scale. Now, AI is going to make, make it easier to serve the right content to the right person at the right time. And that's powerful. But here's the catch. AI can't fake authenticity. So while AI will take over some of their repetitive stuff, some of the stuff that honestly it should have been replaced with humans a long time ago, brands that win will still need to show up as humans. We can't automate heart. AI should support the message, not become the message. The future belongs to the ones who figure out how to blend data with emotion. And what role will hospitality staff play in all of this? Is, is, is, are their jobs going to change? Are they going to have to evolve? How do you see this moving forward? Yeah, I mean, their, their jobs are going to change. Not everybody, but a lot of people. I mean, if you're smart right now, take time and take 20 minutes a day, go online, just learn, test, try, you know, try out these new tools. Watch this conference AI, read the article about AI, learn, learn, learn as much as possible. You know, I spend between two and three hours every day, either watching and or listening to things on YouTube of people that are smarter than me, not as smart as me, people that are just bland, whatever it is, I just want to learn. I don't care who it is. I don't care if they have one follower or a trillion followers. I don't care. I just want to learn. It makes me a better marketer. It makes me understand the industry more. I read on one of your LinkedIn posts that artificial intelligent isn't replacing hospital hospitality jobs. It's exposing the ones that should have evolved years ago. Can you elaborate and tell us more about that? Yeah, and I, and I stand by that AI didn't come out of nowhere. It just revealed how slow some areas of hospitality has been to evolve. If your job can be done better by ChatGBT, the sad AI's fault, that's a wake up call. Hospitalities should be about emotional intelligence, personal connection, storytelling. Now, those things, they can't be automated, but if someone's been hiding behind the desk doing templated emails for 15 years and calling that innovation, AI's going to force a very uncomfortable, but necessary shift in your life. Do you have some like real examples of where or hospitality physicians that you see are going to maybe disappear in the next few years because of artificial intelligence? I think that if you have an assistant that you don't have a lot of face to face interaction with and they're basically just organizing your day, they're creating your calendar, they're just making sure that you're hooked up on phone calls, making sure you have summarized brief of this after a phone call. I think those jobs are done like very, very, very soon. Listen, there's virtual assistants that have probably done it better than your actual assistant for many years, but now it's about speed. If I'm paying somebody, I don't know, $5,000 a month and they're actually sitting right next to me in their office and my office is here and I can get somebody, I can get a ChatGBT type program to do their same job and it takes a tenth of the time and I'm paying a couple hundred dollars a month. Are you kidding me? They're going to be gone in two seconds, but if you constantly learn about this industry, constantly just learn new tools and and make your job irreplaceable, make yourself irreplaceable. I think that's what everybody has to concentrate on right now. Yeah, let's let's talk a little bit about hospitality management, hospitality leaders. What tactical shifts should every hospitality leader start making when it comes to artificial intelligence? First and foremost, at the top of the pillar, you got to invest in training. Don't just hand your team an AI tool and hope for the best. You've got to all learn, show them how to use it to enhance their creativity, not replace it. Now second, rethink job roles. AI is taking tasks off the table. So, reallocate that time towards guest experience. And third, stop thinking AI is just a tech department issue. It's a brand issue, a culture issue. Leaders need to be experimented with it with themselves. If not at least trying it, if you're not, if they're not at least trying it, they're already behind. And what are you seeing out there? Are you seeing is there is there a pushback? Is there reluctance to get on board? There's tremendous pushback. There's tremendous reluctance. Somebody would rather write an article how telling how AI is going to replace their job rather than spend that time in learning how not to get it to replace their job. You know, and don't get me wrong. There are a lot that are diving deep into this and are training and are learning, but not nearly enough. Not nearly enough. And what's happening at the corporate level? I mean, the people that are running these huge hospitality corporations and are you starting to see them steering their businesses in this way, understanding what you're talking about right now? A little bit, but they're not investing in enough training. They're not learning it themselves. And if they are investing in training, they're not learning it enough at the top level. You know, I mean, it's very hard to get somebody who's making a big cushy salary to sit down and invest time into learning something where they're only going to be in the industry for another 5, 10, 15 years. They're like, okay, I'll just write it out. So I mean, going back to what you've said because you've mentioned a few times about the lack of training. I mean, don't you think in the hospitality world that this is something that we hear all the time, that there is not enough investment in training people and continuous training, lifelong learning, you know, making sure that you're putting the right people in the right positions, recognizing talents, saying, okay, we're going to go to help you here. We're going to train you. I mean, we've heard this over. Do you over and over again? Do you agree that that's what the problem is? Yeah, it's a huge issue and it just goes back to corporate culture and it's the reason that you had this massive, this mass exodus away from the hospitality industry during the pandemic. People, why would they come back to an industry where they weren't appreciated in their job? You know, it's just, it goes back to corporate culture. I mean, forget about AI, forget about investing in training. It's, it's about, you know, management getting out there, putting the arm around somebody and saying, I appreciate you. I hear you. I see you. Now, let's try to rectify this situation. And do you think that there has been a shift after the pandemic? Do you think that the leaders of the hospitality world have recognized that this is what needs to be done if they want to keep talent, if they want to attract talent? I think they're changing because they have to, not because they want to. They're changing because of the mass exes. They're not, they're not, they didn't wake up realizing, oh my God, you know what? I haven't appreciated my staff yet. Let me start doing that today. No, they woke up and they were like, oh my God, I lost half my staff and there's no, there's nobody in the talent pool out there. So it's just hilarious. It's hilarious. Although I do think I do, we, luckily, we've interviewed quite a few GMs and people in the hospitality world that I think do appreciate the people that they're working with. I think it also depends on the person and luckily. And don't get me wrong, there's exceptions to every rule. I mean, I've enjoyed lots of people in this industry that do a marvelous job. But I'm speaking about the mass and the majority, you know, it's unfortunate, you know, I want, I want this industry to thrive. But at the same time, I want every employee to be heard and seen and felt like they're an integral part to the ecosystem. Yeah, well, yeah, they're most important. You know, I have both. As you know, Scott, 50 Shades of Hospitality is an educational podcast for young people who are now considering a career in hospitality marketing or studying hospitality marketing. What advice would you give them? Be obsessed with people, not platforms, learn storytelling, learn psychology, understand what makes people feel something. The tools will change under times over in your career, but the ability to connect with people, make them trust the brand, make them feel something. That is kindness. Also, travel, see the world, stay curious. And if you want to succeed in hospitality, get comfortable, would be it uncomfortable, because it's a very uncomfortable industry, because this industry moves very fast and it favors only the bold. Let's talk a little bit more about that. That's, I love what you just said. That's so true. Hospitality attracts certain kinds of people that don't want to get into boring jobs, poor people who do want to meet people from other countries and learn about other cultures. And do you see young people today? Do you see that this is something that is still going on with young people? Are they, are they still interested in getting into jobs that make them feel uncomfortable, that ask them to be bold and adventurous? Or are you seeing some hesitation there? Do you think young people today are more hesitant, more anxious, perhaps, about getting into a field that is ever changing and requires boldness and an adventurous spirit? I think that with the current state of the world and social media the way it is, and because that's such a big part of the young people growing up, I think that the entrepreneur culture that's going on right now, I think a lot of people will try and fail at that. And then they will step back and get into an industry. And, and why I say try and fail is because that industry is very hard. It's very lonely. It's very difficult. And it's not all the rainbows that you see on social media. Entrepreneurship is, it's a wonderful and horrible industry at the same time. Not, not industry. It's, it's, it's a mindset. You want to do something on your own. And I get that. But some people are better at number two's or number three's that companies versus doing it all on your own. I myself, I didn't run my agency. I started it and I was the figurehead. But I didn't run my agency. I would never run an agency. I am a terrible person at the top of the pyramid. But I'm great at like two, three, four in the company. You know, I want to get in the dirt. I want to, I want to do the things. And I think that I don't think, I think very few people are built to be entrepreneur. So I think many, many people will fail and then fall back into a regular job. But I do think that there are a lot of people that are interested in hospitality. I think that, you know, it's the biggest industry in the world as far as the old sector is concerned. And it drives the sectors in most countries. And I just think there's tremendous opportunities moving forward. And I think that very forward thinking and fast moving individuals will invent things under the umbrella of hospitality that we haven't even seen yet. You know, that you and I can't run faster. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. We can't. It's moving so fast. It's hard to fathom. Yeah. Yeah. You wake up. It's interesting what you said about, you know, the tech and, you know, the tech people, I think this has been a problem in technology, at least what I've seen because I started using technology a long time ago too. But it's moved so fast. I think a lot of people feel that they're always running after the train. They learn, they learn something new, they learn about a new technology and it's already changing. How do you address that? How, what do you tell people when they say, well, you know, yeah, okay, today it's AI tomorrow. It'll be something else. That's a real, that's a real complaint, I think, but how do you address this fear of technology? I think that you're always going to have those people saying those things. I think that negativity is something that's that's overwhelmingly horrible in in the world. And I think that, listen, it's simple, like just, just get on the horse and try it. You can't, how can you bash something that you haven't given a fair chance to, you know, spend 30 minutes a day learning about it for a month and then say you don't like it, but give me the reasons why and give me an alternative. Yeah, fair enough. Okay, employee, I won't, I won't let AI take your job. Give me an alternative why you do it better. Yeah, I'll give anybody a fair shot, but you got to come at me with something intelligent. You got to put some thought behind it. Can't just say, I've been here for six years. Well, I don't care. I found something that can do it faster and quicker. If you don't want me to replace your job, tell me what you can do that AI can't or tell me how you can compliment AI to make it work better than it will if you're not here. Yeah, that's, you can never replace humans. We have a certain inequality that will always be needed. You know, I loved when we were in the pandemic, you heard face to face call conferences are going to be out. They're done. The business travel industry is dead forever. Do you know that we've already surpassed pre-pandemic levels? You can never replace this. No, no, you can never do it. Yeah, and that's what hospitality is all about. Yeah, it's about humans. I also think too that, you know, humans are so different. We've talked about this several times on the podcast. There will always be people, for instance, business travelers who are in a hurry. They don't, you know, they just want to get in and out of their hotel. They want everything to be done as quickly as possible. They don't have a problem with automation. And then you've got people, for instance, like my husband who wants to talk with the women cleaning the room and and talk to the people in the restaurant and have discussions and ask their opinions. And I think that hospitality has to have, it has to be a place where anybody who is part of that business and is buying and paying for hospitality can find what they're looking for. And so yeah, you're right, you can't, there's no way you could replace human beings. I mean, I've a few times when I've been asked to use machines. I've bristled about that. I don't know. I'm the kind of traveler that I like to meet people and talk to people and, but you have all different kinds of travelers. And hospitality has to, you know, meet all these people's needs, which is not so easy. Scott, thank you so much for joining us today and giving us some insights into digital marketing, storytelling and the role that artificial intelligence will play in the future, in the hospitality industry. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. When a GDO and I created this podcast, as teachers, we wanted to explore different ways to share knowledge and inspire lifelong learning and hospitality. And this is exactly Schularing's mission. Schularing is an employee experience platform helping hotels to digitize their onboarding process, building the culture they want from day one. They also create personalized learning and development paths, leveraging the hotel standards and offer a learning marketplace from up-to-date courses, co-created with industry experts from their podcast series. 50 Shades of Hospitality has already joined the Schularing movement, and I believe that you should too. Find out more on www.Schularing.com and use the promo code 50 Shades for free auditing of your hotel's employee experience and 50% of the onboarding fee. Schularing Hub, because great hotel teams are built, not found.