Three decades in the room,
before years of research.
Matthew Jones, PGDip · MIH · cfMGr. Hotelier turned researcher. Operations leader turned writer. The book is what one stubborn, seven-year thread became.
I started my career in hospitality carrying bags as a summer elf, under the supervision of a hotel's resident blind Labrador. It wasn't the most conventional induction, but it was the moment I fell in love with the industry, and I haven't looked back in over thirty years since.
What followed was three decades across hotel operations: working through every department, eventually leading as Operations Manager and General Manager across independent, branded, and group hotel environments in the north of England and Scotland. I've opened hotels, led revenue transformations, managed complex multi-department operations, and delivered international functions. More importantly, I've spent thirty years watching what happens when hospitality works at a human level, and trying to understand why it works when it does, and why it quietly fails when it doesn't.
The gap between a good service encounter and a great one is rarely operational. It's psychological, sociological, and deeply human — and the industry has lacked the language to explain it properly.
Alongside operations, I've always been a trainer. Designing and delivering development programmes for hospitality teams taught me that the gap between a good service encounter and a great one is rarely operational. It's psychological, sociological, and deeply human, and the industry has lacked the language to explain it properly.
About seven years ago I started pulling on that thread seriously. What began as curiosity became a research project. The research project became a framework. The framework became a book.
The book
The Guest Experience: Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology for Hospitality Professionals introduces Hospitalicology — a new analytical discipline for understanding what hospitality actually does to people, and what it genuinely requires of the people who deliver it. It draws on over 180 academic sources across psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and three decades of frontline operational experience. It is entirely a personal project; something I needed to write, and that I hope the industry needed someone to write.
The part I'm increasingly open about
A significant part of my story is that I've built this career while navigating life with AuDHD — a combination of autism and ADHD that was only diagnosed in recent years. That understanding has sharpened my conviction that neurodivergent people bring extraordinary strengths to hospitality, and that the industry loses enormously by failing to create environments where they can fully thrive.
If you care about hospitality, leadership, inclusion, or building things that make a real difference, I'd love to connect.