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Series: Recruitment, AI & HR in the hospitality industry · Post #25 of 90
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The status quo has a defender that nobody invites: the brain
Why change fails not because of bad ideas, but because of a very good lawyer
The last two articles on this blog were about pension commissions, contribution rates and percentage points. Dry, necessary, and frankly: not the kind of text you read by the fireside. Today it will be easier, I promise. But it's no less serious, because the topic we're dealing with now sits at the table in every meeting, unasked, unpaid, and with a success rate that any lobbying group could learn a thing or two from. At the end of this article, we'll come back to the two dry topics, and to a few others that are currently affecting the hotel industry at the same time. Promise.
A client who never complains
Imagine a lawyer who knows only one argument: "We've always done it this way." They never lose a case because they never conduct a hearing; they just sit there and wait until everyone else is too tired to continue the discussion. It is precisely this lawyer who lives in your head, and in mine too, and he has a name from decision research: status quo bias.
The two economists Samuelson and Zeckhauser first systematically described the effect in 1988, in a series of experiments in which people, when faced with identical options, were significantly more likely to stick with the existing choice, even if another option was demonstrably more advantageous (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988). The result was so robust that it has since become one of the most frequently replicated findings in decision-making research.
Why the brain hires this lawyer in the first place
The really interesting question is not that people stick to the status quo; every manager probably already knew that from their own experience. What is interesting is why. An imaging study by Fleming, Thomas and Dolan (2010) showed that decisions against the status quo actually require more neural processing resources than maintaining the status quo, especially in brain regions involved in controlling actions and processing conflicts. In simple terms: your brain treats "everything stays as it is" as the default setting, and any deviation from that literally costs more energy, regardless of whether the deviation is a good idea.
This also explains why the effect is strongest at precisely those moments when a lot of energy has already been used up anyway: after the tenth meeting of the day, just before the end of the working day, in the middle of the season. At such moments, the cognitive system prefers to resort to fast, automatic processing instead of the more strenuous, analytical examination of new options (Kahneman, 2012). The same roster is not adopted time and again because it is the best. It is adopted because it is the one that requires the least thought.
Where this lawyer is particularly well paid in the hotel industry
Three areas of the hotel industry are particularly susceptible to this effect, and it is precisely these three that have the most lasting impact on the success or failure of a business: personnel management, recruiting and quality management.
In personnel management, the bias is most evident in the same management style being used all the time, regardless of whether it actually works for the employee in question. In recruiting, it manifests itself in the same job advertisement every time, the same interview guide every time, the same source from which recruitment has been taking place for years, even though the applicant market has long since changed. In quality management, it is the most inconspicuous and therefore the most dangerous: as process documentation that was written once and has not been questioned since, because the certificate is still renewed every year.
What these three areas have in common is a fundamental structural problem in the hotel industry, which the status quo bias only exacerbates: the notoriously poor balance between day-to-day operations and strategic reflection. Anyone who works in fire-fighting mode all day simply has no cognitive capacity left to ask the systemic question in the evening as to whether the process that has just failed again is still the right one. This is precisely the mechanism from Fleming et al. (2010) in its operational form: those who are already exhausted do not make a new decision; they continue to manage the old one.
What has quietly disappeared in recent years
Here, the status quo bias not only becomes a brake on new ideas, but also a silent unwinder of good old habits. Because convenience works both ways: it not only prevents new things from being introduced, it also ensures that tried-and-tested things are cut back on unnoticed, usually with the argument "we don't need that anymore", rarely with a real check as to whether that is true.
The professional mystery guest visit is an example of this. For years, this has been a standard tool for uncovering weaknesses from the guest's perspective, which no internal audit can find, because no team can check its own operational blindness. In many establishments, it is the first item to be cut in the next budget round, with the argument that they know their own weaknesses anyway. This is exactly the kind of statement that the inner lawyer likes to make.
The external consultant with industry experience is a second example, which is particularly relevant at the moment. They are increasingly being replaced by an AI tool that, although it produces text, has no seniority, does not know hundreds of establishments with which it could compare its own business, and whose results are only as good as the person operating it and their ability to ask the right questions in the first place. This is not an argument against AI; it belongs in every modern business. It is an indication that it complements experience, not replaces it, and that "we are now saving on the consultant" is often more of a cost decision disguised as a strategic one than a genuine strategic reassessment.
The third example is the digital strategy once it has been established. Many companies have been running the same website, sales and channel strategy for around ten years, not because it has been reviewed and found to remain optimal, but because it has never been seriously called into question. It is precisely in this environment that the market is currently changing faster than the strategy itself, and more on that in a moment.
Why this doesn't get smaller at C-level, but bigger
The easy mistake now would be to dismiss the status quo bias as a problem at the operational level, the reception management, which would prefer to keep the old Excel spreadsheet, the kitchen team, which is sceptical about the new merchandise management process. In fact, research on organisational resistance shows that the effect at the management level does not become weaker; it is just better disguised. "We've always done it this way" becomes "this is not yet the right time strategically"; convenience becomes risk assessment, which sounds much better in the board meeting, but is often the same mechanism in a better suit.
Especially at the C-level and general manager level, the bias encounters a second amplifier: the greater the scope of a decision, the greater the perceived cost of a mistake, and the more attractive the option of deciding nothing at all becomes. Doing nothing never feels like a decision. But it is one, every time.
Back to the beginning: why now is not a good time for this lawyer
At the beginning, there was talk of the two dry articles on pension reform and the minimum wage. They were not a coincidence; they are part of a much larger picture. The hotel industry is currently simultaneously affected by more external factors than has rarely been the case before, some of them burdensome, some of them also a real opportunity, but all with the same consequence: they are changing the basis on which previous decisions were made.
On the labour and social policy side, there is the abolition of the special mini-job status, the minimum wage increase to 14.60 euros as of 1 January 2027, and the associated reorganisation of contribution obligations. On the regulatory side, the European AI Act, with its transparency obligations for AI systems, will come into full force on 2 August 2026. In parallel, the European Platform-to-Business Regulation (P2B Regulation) has been requiring booking platforms to provide more transparency about ranking criteria since 2020, without many establishments making consistent use of these rights. On the technological side, the way guests find and book a hotel is currently undergoing a fundamental change: Booking.com has introduced its own agentic AI tools with Smart Messenger, Auto-Reply and the AI Trip Planner, and findability is increasingly being handled by AI assistants instead of traditional search results. In addition, there are the reporting obligations of the European sustainability directive CSRD for larger companies and the requirements of the NIS2 directive for the IT security of booking systems, an issue that is only becoming more urgent due to increasing networking.
Each of these points in itself would be a good reason to review existing processes. Together, they create a moment when the lazy lawyer in your head has more to do than ever before, and that is precisely why any decision to stick with the status quo should be examined particularly carefully before it is given the go-ahead.
What this does not mean
There is no reason for self-punishment at this point. The status quo bias is not a character flaw, nor is it a failure of leadership; it is a very human, very well-researched characteristic of an organisation that really only wants to conserve energy. The problem only arises when an organisation pretends that this lawyer doesn't exist and sells every decision in favour of the status quo as a purely rational, factually justified choice, even though it was often simply the path of least mental resistance.
The more interesting exercise for the next meeting is therefore not to be fundamentally suspicious of the status quo. It is, in view of the current simultaneity of external changes, to ask very specifically: What and who does this business really need, now, under these new conditions? What effect is this role supposed to have for the company, for the business itself, and for the people in this business, both the internal and external guests? These are questions that no lawyer in the world can answer with "that's always been the case".
Sources
Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision-making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1 (1), 7–59.
Fleming, S. M., Thomas, C. L., & Dolan, R. J. (2010). Overcoming status quo bias in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (13), 6005–6009.
Kahneman, D. (2012). Schnelles Denken, langsames Denken (Thinking, Fast and Slow). Siedler.
European Commission. (2026). Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Regulation, AI Act): Schedule for phased application, transparency obligations effective from 2 August 2026. Publications Office of the European Union.
European Parliament and Council of the European Union. (2019). Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 on promoting fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services (P2B Regulation). Official Journal of the European Union.
Booking.com. (2025, November). Booking.com introduces new agentic AI tools, expanding its GenAI portfolio for customers [press release]. https://news.booking.com
Note: At the time of publication of this blog article, some of the deadlines and reform projects mentioned (AI Act, mini-job reform, minimum wage) are still in the legislative process or are being implemented in stages.
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