Introduction
In this episode, Tiago Araújo is joined by Joelle Edwards-Tonks, Chief Commercial and Operating Officer at SunLife, to explore how luxury resorts blend high-touch service with digital tools. With 25 years across brands like Four Seasons, Shangri-La, and Oetker Collection, Joelle talks about why digital should enhance rather than replace the human moment, what actually drives guest action, and how capturing preferences in a guest profile keeps personalisation both real-time and scalable, even when a long-serving team member walks out the door.
Transcript
Tiago Araújo (00:00): Hello everyone. For this Virtual Coffee, we have here with me Joelle Edwards-Tonks, the Chief Commercial and Operating Officer of SunLife Mauritius. Thank you so much, Joelle, for joining us.
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (00:17): Thank you for the invitation, Tiago. It’s a pleasure to be here today with you.
Tiago Araújo (00:22): Awesome. Before we start with this Virtual Coffee, if you want to give a quick intro of yourself and SunLife too.
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (00:32): Sure, yeah. I’ve been in the hospitality industry for 26 years now, working for some big international groups. I worked for Four Seasons, I worked for Shangri-La, I worked for Oetker Collection. I was based in Paris for a long time before joining SunLife, who I joined six years ago. I’m now based in Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, lucky me. Here with SunLife we have five luxury resorts, and we also run two golf courses. One of them is the very famous ÃŽle aux Cerfs, which is a beautiful golf course on its own island. We welcome guests from all over the world. Our main focus markets are in Europe, but we also have a lot of guests from South Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe as well.
Tiago Araújo (01:36): Awesome. Thank you so much for the intro. One of the things that made me reach out was that we at HiJiffy noticed that earlier this year, SunLife received two very important awards at the CIEL Innovation Awards. You got recognition for innovation across, and I’m reading it right now, guest and employee experiences. And we noticed, reading SunLife’s LinkedIn post, that it mentioned both awarded projects share basically the same vision: creating meaningful, human-centred experiences for your guests and staff. I’d like to know if you can share some insights on how you balance, and it’s been a very big topic, with all the AI, how you balance the high-touch human service with digital communication, to drive guest engagement, drive revenue, and drive more guest satisfaction too.
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (02:48): Yeah, it’s a great question, and as you said, a very hot topic at the moment. I think balancing is really the key word you used there, because it is about balancing that high-touch service with the digital communication, and that’s certainly not opposing each other today. I think that digital allows you to be very present before arrival, during the stay, and post-departure. And then the magic, if you like, happens with our people, with our teams. I think the digital aspect really brings the convenience, the anticipation, and that personalisation that we’re all in the industry striving for. And then the human touch complements that with the emotion, with the surprise, and the connection you can have with your guests.
So I suppose, ultimately, digital is there to enhance the human service. It’s not there to replace it. I think there’s a real opportunity today in our industry, if you get that right, to free up your teams to really focus on what matters and to be on the floor. I’ve had these discussions with my teams a lot. I think there was a bit of confusion at the beginning, when all these digital tools came out, where everyone thought, “Great, we’re going to digitalise the guest’s experience,” a very no-touch experience, which is absolutely not what we want to do. For me, the digital is there to support the teams, free them up. It’s all going on in the background, if you like, making them more efficient and more productive as well, and giving them that extra time to spend with the guest and bring that human touch to the guest experience.
Tiago Araújo (04:46): Yeah, I normally say that digitalising the guest experience is really about taking the eyes and the face of the people who work in hotel operations away from the laptop or the computer, and being able to have direct eye contact with the guests and have time with the guests, instead of having to do repetitive tasks. And it’s a responsibility the whole hotel tech ecosystem has: really making it so people who work at front desk don’t have to be there looking at the laptop for a long time.
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (05:21): Yeah, no, absolutely. And as much as we can provide that to our teams, then I think the guests will benefit from that direct contact they have with the staff on the ground.
Tiago Araújo (05:36): And I was curious to know, what kind of guest communication actually drives action right now in a resort setting? For example, inspiration, convenience, or timing: what kind of guest communication works best right now?
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (05:55): Do you know, I think it’s probably a combination of all three. You mentioned inspiration; I think that’s the part that sparks the desire for the guest. That would obviously be through a lot of the digital tools we use, be it the website or social media. And then the convenience is removing the barriers, I guess. So you’re making it easy to book, for example. That’s the convenient part. But it’s really then the timing that converts, I believe. Guests in resorts, because I’m dealing with resorts now specifically, are in a very specific mindset when they’re on holiday in a resort. They’re very open-minded, they’re relaxed.
I suppose the inspiration, the convenience, and the timing have to happen at the right moment. You have to give them the right message, which will increase conversion, and through the right channels. So it’s how you’re reaching out to them and what you’re saying. I think people don’t want to have things pushed upon them. Today they prefer more suggestive communication, that will then inspire them and convert them, hopefully, to maybe that little extra spend when they’re on site. But it’s definitely a combination of the three. I’m not saying we’re getting it right today, but it’s something I think we should definitely be striving for.
Tiago Araújo (07:42): Yeah, you were talking about extra spend just now, and extra spend in terms of upselling is something that really happens more, I would say, in hotels that have a longer stay. And that’s one of your cases. To be honest, in the cases of SunLife and other hotels I’ve talked with that have a longer stay, one of the other challenges I see is around the communication and the touchpoints within that long stay. My question for you is: how do you approach personalisation here, so it feels tailored to them, but at the same time it’s a long stay, and making sure you have those touchpoints during the long stay that, who knows, can bring that extra spend, or something else in terms of guest experience improvements, or a reduction of the repetitive tasks that hotel operations may have during the longer stay with the guests?
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (08:47): Yeah, I think, obviously, longer stays are a great opportunity, aren’t they? You’ve got a captive audience for eight or nine, if not more, nights in your resort. Yeah, the big one is preferences. Being able to observe those guests over that period of time, noticing their preferences. And then, of course, the key thing is to get those into a profile, so that it can prompt suggestions, like I mentioned earlier, during their stay, and also personalise future stays. I think true personalisation is adapting in real time as well, so that the guest doesn’t feel that whatever service they’re getting is pre-programmed. If you can really achieve that art of observing and adapting a guest’s experience based on real-time observation, then I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head. Because at the end of the day, guests just want to feel understood, I think. They want to feel that somebody’s understood them and noticed what they like and what they don’t like. And when we can achieve that, then that’s really pushing the guest experience to its best, I think.
Tiago Araújo (10:22): Yeah. At the same time, there’s the balance here between being very tailored to that specific guest and, on top of that, being scalable, right, for an organisation like SunLife? Because I would say, I don’t know, but I would say that in SunLife it’s impossible to have a staff member always be with the guest, right? So how do you see that in terms of scalability? Is it something that worries you, or not that much?
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (10:55): You know, I think we’re very lucky in Mauritius to have teams who are wonderful and very heartfelt, with great attention to detail. They remember the names of guests who came five years ago or so, which is fantastic. But, definitely, as we always say, that’s great as long as the staff member is still there. The day they walk out the door, as the lucky ones do, to a lovely retirement, all of that information has just walked out the door with them. So how do we make sure we retain that information? That has to be through the tools and the systems we have.
So there’s a necessity for a lot of training and standard operating procedures, to make sure we’re capturing that information and not just keeping it in our heads, but translating it into systems that anybody can then use. I think that’s one of the messages I’ve given the teams even quite recently: anybody should be able to walk into a guest’s reservation or a guest profile and understand everything about the booking and everything about the guest. Every tiny little piece of information we have needs to go into that profile, to be able to then give that personalised service.
Tiago Araújo (12:40): Yeah, that’s even more important when the percentage of repeat guests is so high. I talk with a lot of hoteliers who have a very big percentage of repeat guests, and there’s actually a correlation between hotels that have a very big percentage of repeat guests and islands. Most of the hoteliers I know, I don’t know why, but there’s a correlation. Most hoteliers I know who have a high number of repeat guests are on islands. And that’s where it’s even more important to know everything about your guests, because if they keep coming, their expectation is even higher that you already know.
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (13:17): Yes, it’s even higher. Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of repeat guests in Mauritius, and we do have a lot of repeat guests in our resorts, definitely.
Tiago Araújo (13:29): Amazing. Thank you so much for joining this Virtual Coffee. I hope you enjoyed it.
Joelle Edwards-Tonks (13:34): Thank you. I did. That was great, to have a chat, Tiago. It was great to see you. Thank you very much for the invitation.