A little thing happened once I became the owner of a hospitality business. I started noticing how bad hospitality has become.

It's like the whole process of hospitality and food and beverage businesses is designed to annoy people.

From hotels that still, in 2025 can take up to 10 minutes to check you in, to cafes that take their most popular meals only to mess them up because some new chef with a fragile ego has come in with their ideas - and you never want to upset the chef…

The process of enshittification.

It's a process that writer Cory Doctorow describes as "enshittification." It's where something starts well, gets a loyal following, gets popular and then turns to sh*t.

The first time I walked into the first cafe I bought, all I saw was years of enshittification. Seating that looked great but was uncomfortable. A menu that has so many choices that it took people ages to make up their mind. A refusal to carry certain kinds of milk because of some reason that some barista gave three years prior that had now become some weird law that nobody understood why was in place. Even the opening time had been changed two years prior to suit a staff member that no longer worked there, but had never been changed back to suit the customers who had abandoned us to get their coffee from McDonald's instead because McDonald's was open.

The cafe had been successful for years but had steadily eroded away all the the things that had made the cafe successful until it was an arrogant, entitled and self-absorbed entity that had come to treat customers as the enemy, rather than as the lifeblood of the place.

The enshittification of accommodation.

I experienced it recently in Brisbane at the serviced apartments I stayed at. The property was ok. The facilities were ok. The location was great. But the managers of the property were doing the absolute bare minimum.

They were present. They were efficient. They were doing their jobs.

But it's like the whole stay was spent having to go back to them to to find out information and get access to things that should have been included.

Wifi? The property had it and it was free. But you needed to get a special code from reception to use it. But no one at reception was actively offering it to their guests. You had to ask for it.

Parking? They had it. And it was reasonably priced for inner Brisbane. But unless you asked for it, you wouldn't know that they had it. There is no sign suggesting that they do. Or where it is. And reception certainly didn't say anything until the next day when I happened to ask about it.

These are small things. But they are obstacles that the management are putting in the way of a good guest experience.

Two questions would have turned the whole experience into a seamless and more efficient experience.

1. Do you require parking while you're here?

2. Would you like access to the free wifi?

And if they really wanted to add some bonus points, some kind of pointers about the property could have helped. Like where the lifts are to get to the room. And the fact that there is a pool and a gym that I didn't even know about until after I checked out.

The whole process had been "enshittified" the point of me writing a newsletter about it. And all of this would be simply because the people doing the managing of the property aren't trained to be hospitality managers. They're trained as property managers. If they were even trained at all.

So what's the way around this decline of the things we're doing in business?

Preventing enshittification before it soaks in.

First, it's about getting yourself some strong Standard Operating Procedures. These things are all about providing the best possible experience for the customer or guest, but I've never once seen a business advisor suggest this use for a set of SOPs. They only ever talk about the benefits of streamlining, optimising and making things for efficient for the business owner. These procedures are as much an insurance policy against enshittification of a business over time as they are about squeezing the absolute most out of every single customer that you can. But since Accountants these days like to refer to themselves as "Business Advisers" we can expect that the advice to be skewed very much towards financial outcomes, rather than the kinds of behaviour towards customers that leads to good financial outcomes.

How do you know if your business has been enshittified?

1. You find yourself doing everything you can to charge extra for everything that you can. You even have a big menu of extras that you have attached high premium to so that you can force a customer to not want the extras.

2. You find yourself doing everything you can do to reduce the cost of the one thing that your customers love about you most, while also increasing the price of it as often as you possibly can.

3. An increasing number of customers keep coming back for help, clarification and complaints due to a lack of clarity about what they are getting for their money.

4. Your staff put customers through a "system" where the customer is reduced to a number or a code in order to get what they want. There is noting more dehumanising that giving a customer a number.

5. You are constantly messing with your products and services to reduce cost and increase profit without any accompanying increase in the value being offered to the customer for it.

Margins and numbers are only half the story.

I know these things sound like the kind of things that any accountant would be telling you to in order to maintain your 20-30% margin, but simply messing with costs and pricing is a pathway to ruin. There are many other ways to increase profit margins and reduce costs apart from messing with your product. But that takes creative thinking and that's not a strong point for accountants.

It's why I have accountants to oversee the charts and consultants to oversee the experience. They are two very different skillsets with two very different approaches - but they are both there to achieve the same thing - to ensure the business is sustainably growing while avoiding unnecessary enshittification.

Because enshittification isn't inevitable if you you're willing to do the research, the creative thinking and the work involved with preventing it.

Most won't bother.

Will you?