by Patrick R. Dunn
I spent thirty years keeping operations standing while everything around them came apart — 9/11, Katrina, Sandy, four continents, the kind of mornings where the plan you wrote at 8 a.m. was useless by nine. Every one of those events taught the same lesson, and it’s the one hospitality keeps refusing to learn: you never find out how good a system is on its best day. You find out on its worst. So if you want to know how good your guest experience really is, stop studying the perfect Saturday. Look at the one that went wrong.
Walk into almost any tasting room and you’ll see a business built entirely around the best day. The pour is rehearsed. The welcome is warm. The story is dialed in down to the vintage, the clone, the elevation of the block. It is genuinely impressive. It is also brittle, because a room built only for the day everything goes right has no answer for the day it doesn’t — and no answer for the guest who wants something the script never planned for.
The two ways a perfect room breaks
That’s the whole problem in one line, and once you see it you can’t unsee it: a perfect room breaks in exactly two places. Either something goes wrong — the bottle’s corked, the reservation’s lost, the room’s slammed — or someone goes off-script, a guest who wants more than the rehearsed version gives. From the staff’s side they’re the same event. The script runs out. And in that instant you find out whether you built a business or a performance.
Here’s why that instant is worth more than everything around it. Loyalty in this business isn’t a feeling — it’s the most valuable revenue you have. A wine club member is the highest-margin, most durable money a winery earns: no distributor’s cut, no shelf to fight for, a relationship that renews on its own unless you give them a reason to leave. You spend a fortune to acquire that member — the tasting, the staff, the real estate, the marketing that got them through the door. Then you protect the two moments that actually decide whether they renew with almost nothing. Because loyalty isn’t won during the flawless pour. It’s won the day something breaks and you handle it like it mattered, and it’s won the moment a guest asks the real question and a host actually answers it. A flawless afternoon earns you a nice review. A recovered one earns you a member. Nobody bonds to a system that never gets tested.
Build the recovery before you need it
Take the first break: something goes wrong. In the crisis world you don’t hope the failure doesn’t come. You assume it does, you name the handful that actually will, and you build the response before you need it. And you learn one rule above all others — you cannot route every decision up the chain. By the time the answer comes back down, the moment is gone. So you push authority to the edge. The person standing closest to the problem has to be allowed to solve it, and has to know in advance exactly how far they’re allowed to go.
Most tasting rooms do the opposite. Every decision that could fix a bad moment lives with a manager who, on a busy Saturday, is buried in the back. Does the twenty-three-year-old part-time pourer know they’re allowed to comp a flight to save a guest’s afternoon, or do they have to go find someone with rank? Who owns the recovery when a party is unhappy — by name, not “whoever notices”? What is the actual move when you’re overbooked: not the apology, the move. If you can’t answer those in a sentence, your recovery isn’t something you built. It’s a trait of your best employee — and your best employee calls in sick, takes a Tuesday off, and eventually leaves for the winery that pays a dollar more.
Building the alternative isn’t complicated, but it takes the nerve to plan for failure while everything’s going well. Name the four or five things that go wrong most often in your room — you already know them. Decide in advance what the default response is and who’s allowed to execute it without asking. Then give the floor real authority inside clear bounds, because a pourer who can fix a problem in the moment is worth more than a policy nobody can find. That isn’t loosening the standard. That’s the standard finally reaching the part of the day that decides whether anyone comes back. Luck is not a system. A plan is.
Train for the guest who goes off-script
The second break is quieter, and I learned it in a different uniform. Before any of the crisis work I spent years as a National Park Service interpretive ranger — six sites, telling the story of a place to people who’d see it once and never again. You learn fast that the script is scaffolding, not a cage. The ranger who recites loses the room by the second paragraph. The one people remember reads the faces in front of them, drops the planned line, and says the true thing instead.
A tasting bar is the same room. A host who has memorized the story can deliver it flawlessly to an empty bar. Put a curious guest in front of them — one who asks the off-script question, who wants the real reason the family kept this block when the market said tear it out — and the over-rehearsed host has nowhere to go. The performance was perfect. The connection never happened. And connection is the only part the guest carries home.
Look closely at where it breaks, because it’s almost never the wine knowledge — they have that cold. It’s how they hear the question and read the person asking it. A guest says “is this a good one?” and the rehearsed host launches into tasting notes, when the real question was help me not feel out of my depth here. One host hears the words. The other hears the person. That’s a soft skill, and soft skills are exactly what nobody trains, because they’re harder to put on a checklist than the appellation and the aging regimen. The knowledge is the easy eighty percent. The judgment to read a stranger and answer what they actually asked is the hard twenty — and the hard twenty is the part that gets remembered, repeated, and renewed.
You don’t fix that with a tighter script. You fix it the way you train a ranger: give them the story deep enough that they own it, so they can tell it in their own voice, off the page, shaped to whoever is in front of them. A host who only knows the words is trapped by them. A host who understands the place can follow a guest anywhere and still find the way back. Depth is what buys you improvisation. The delivery doesn’t have to be perfect — it has to be theirs. And that takes practice nobody schedules: putting hosts in front of the hard guest, the quiet guest, the one who clearly doesn’t want to be there, and coaching how they read and respond, not what they recite. It is slower than handing out a script. It doesn’t photograph well. It’s also the entire craft.
Your standard is your floor, not your ceiling
Which forces a harder question about what you actually mean by a standard. Most operators define theirs by the ceiling — the best pour, the most polished welcome, the perfect Saturday they’d put in the brochure. That’s backwards. Your standard isn’t your ceiling. It’s your floor — what a guest can count on when the bottle’s corked, your A-team is off, the room is slammed, and they’ve just asked the question nobody rehearsed. The brochure is what you’re capable of on your best day. The standard is what you guarantee on your worst. Guests don’t become members because of your ceiling. They become members because they learned to trust your floor.
How to test your own guest experience this week
You can measure that floor yourself this week, and you should — it takes an afternoon and no consultant. Start with the failures you named. Walk up to three of your hosts separately and ask each what they’d do in each one. Don’t coach. Just listen. A healthy room answers in one clean sentence, with a real move and the authority to make it. An unhealthy one hedges, defers, or goes looking for a manager — and now you know your recovery is a person, not a system. Then ask each of them the off-script question, the one with no slide behind it: why this block, why this choice, the thing a guest would actually wonder. Listen for whether they meet you with something true or retreat into tasting notes. Inside a minute you’ll know whether you’ve trained hosts or trained reciters. Do it honestly and you’ll have a sharper read on your retention risk than any dashboard will give you — because the dashboard only ever shows you the best day.
That’s the work I do when I walk a winery’s guest experience from the outside: I’m not grading the welcome, I’m finding the floor — watching what the room does when something breaks, and what a host does when a guest pulls them off the script. But you don’t need me in the building to start. You need the nerve to go look at the part of your operation nobody’s measuring, on purpose, before a guest finds it for you.
Your team has rehearsed the perfect visit a thousand times. Go ask them what they do when it goes sideways — and what they do when a guest wants more than the script gives. If they can’t answer, that’s not a gap you can leave to luck. It’s the most expensive blind spot you have, sitting in the one place you never look. That’s your retention problem. You just haven’t met it yet.
Patrick R. Dunn spent thirty years in global crisis and operational resilience leadership, and before that worked as a National Park Service interpretive ranger. He now runs Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice for wineries, hotels, and restaurants, and writes about the places that get it right — and the ones that don’t — at vianarra.kit.com.
Patrick R. Dunn spent thirty years in global crisis and operational resilience leadership, and before that worked as a National Park Service interpretive ranger. He now runs Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice for wineries, hotels, and restaurants, and writes about the places that get it right — and the ones that don’t — at vianarra.kit.com.