BEYOND FIVE ADVISORY
We experience hotels as your most valuable guests do.
Explore Our Approach →“Your loyal customers are your best critics.”
Our work complements internal leadership teams, brand-quality programs, mystery shoppers and established consultancies.
BEYOND FIVE helps luxury hotel leadership see the complete guest journey through a perspective that is difficult to reproduce internally: more than 30 years of experience as discerning, repeat, fully paying luxury guests, combined with leadership, culture and operational expertise. We recognize excellence, reveal overlooked opportunities and identify the gaps between departments, communication and systems that can shape how the entire stay is remembered.
We discreetly experience the property as sophisticated paying guests do—across the full arc of the stay.
About the Founders
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Beth is an executive coach, former member of Forbes Coaches Council, published business author and host of Breakthroughs: Smart Strategies for Business/Career Growth. Her work has appeared in Forbes.com, Business Insider, Yahoo and Entrepreneur. She helps leaders strengthen executive presence, strategic empathy, culture, talent engagement and cross-functional performance.
Alan spent 26 years at Cleveland Clinic, including 18 years in senior leadership. His responsibilities included regional oversight of approximately 100 operating rooms, about 13 years as department chair, institute leadership and residency-program leadership. He brings extensive experience in complex operations, high-reliability systems, staffing, talent development, safety, judgment and accountable handoffs.
Together, Beth and Alan combine the loyal guest lens with a leadership and operational lens. As discerning, repeat, fully paying luxury guests, they see what the guest experiences and help leadership understand the people, systems and handoffs that produced it.
Selected Writing · Beth Kuhel
As more properties renovate guest rooms, lobbies, restaurants and amenities, physical quality becomes a higher competitive baseline—not a sufficient differentiator. Hotels will increasingly compete through refined service, thoughtful amenities, operational consistency and the quality of the complete guest journey.
BEYOND FIVE helps hotel investors, ownership groups, asset managers and leadership teams ensure that substantial capital improvements are matched by an experience strong enough to support loyalty, pricing power, referrals and repeat revenue.
Renovation attracts the guest. The experience determines whether the guest returns.
Market Validation
The Wall Street Journal reported:
“Hotel sales rose 28% in the first half of the year; more owners are selling to buyers who will spend on necessary upgrades.”
Renovations elevate rooms, lobbies, restaurants and amenities, but they also raise guest expectations. Hotels stand out through refined service, thoughtful amenities, operational consistency and the complete guest journey.
BEYOND FIVE helps hotel investors, ownership groups, asset managers and leadership teams match capital improvements with an experience that drives loyalty, pricing power, referrals and repeat revenue.
Renovation attracts the guest. The experience determines whether the guest returns.
Our Luxury Travel Experience
Hundreds of stays across leading luxury hotels, resorts and cruises—including more than 35 Four Seasons properties, many experienced repeatedly—shape the perspective we bring to every engagement.
Two luxury cruises in premier suites, plus decades of return stays that reveal consistency, improvement and patterns a single visit cannot show
This breadth matters because today’s luxury guest compares every stay with the best experience they have had anywhere—not only with another property in the same brand.
The Beyond Five Framework
True luxury is not defined by a single department or metric. It is the result of aligning the guest experience, a broader cross-brand perspective and the strength of your organization.
As fully paying, loyal guests, we evaluate the complete journey through the eyes of discerning luxury travelers. We uncover the small moments and gaps between departments that traditional inspections may miss—and show how they influence loyalty, referrals and the decision to return.
With 30+ years of luxury travel across the world’s leading hotel brands, independent hotels and wellness resorts, we bring a broader view of what guests expect. Every exceptional experience raises the bar. We identify practices worth adapting, competitive vulnerabilities and opportunities to strengthen your position.
We work with leadership teams to understand why an experience happened. Looking at communication, employee empowerment, training, recognition, maintenance and systems, we identify what to correct and what to reinforce—strengthening collaboration and accountability so exceptional guest experiences are delivered consistently across departments.
It’s not just about meeting your property’s standards.
It’s about competing with the best experience
a guest has had anywhere.
A Higher Perspective on Luxury
Our Cross-Brand Perspective
Our perspective is informed by firsthand stays across the world’s leading luxury hospitality brands—many through repeat visits.
Sandy Lane
Las Ventanas al Paraíso
Royal Malewane
What We Do
BEYOND FIVE conducts discreet, multi-day guest-experience evaluations and focused advisory engagements. We use what the guest uses, stay long enough for intermittent issues and patterns to emerge, and pay particular attention to what happens between departments—and between standards.
A guest experiences one property, but that experience is delivered across reservations, the front desk, concierge, housekeeping, dining, spa, recreation, engineering and management. Some of the most consequential service failures occur not within a department, but between departments—when important information does not travel, systems are not updated or no one takes responsibility for closing the loop with the guest.
Individual departments may each perform exceptionally well, yet the guest experiences one continuous journey—not separate departments. BEYOND FIVE sees the spaces between them: overlooked handoffs, communication gaps and friction points that can prevent an otherwise excellent stay from becoming exceptional.
We trace how one decision or change affects the rest of the journey and translate our observations into clearer ownership, stronger communication and coordinated action—helping leaders and teams create seamless, memorable experiences that earn loyalty, advocacy and return.
A dinner reservation, for example, should help inform the timing of turndown service so housekeeping does not arrive while the guest is preparing to leave. If the concierge changes the time of an activity, that change may also need to reach housekeeping, dining, transportation and, most importantly, the guest. The guest should not be required to coordinate the property’s departments.
Because we experience the property in real time as fully paying guests, we connect these moments across the complete stay and turn them into practical improvements that strengthen consistency, trust, loyalty and revenue.
Our distinctive perspective combines more than 30 years as discerning, repeat, fully paying luxury guests with leadership, culture and operational experience.
★ Reservations & pre-arrival
★ Arrival & departure
★ Rooms, suites & sleep
★ Housekeeping & turndown
★ Dining & beverage
★ Spa, pool & wellness
★ Fitness & recreation
★ Concierge & activities
★ Safety & guest suitability
★ Maintenance & technology
★ Renovation & repositioning
★ Service recovery
★ Personalization & preference retention
A Critical Measure
At a luxury resort, the spa is not ancillary. It can be one of the most personal and memorable interactions of the stay.
BEYOND FIVE evaluates the environment and amenities as well as therapist listening, intake, communication, pressure, responsiveness to injuries and preferences, privacy, professionalism and appropriate check-ins throughout treatment.
An exceptional therapist listens, adapts and confirms that the treatment is meeting the guest’s needs.
A therapist who ignores stated limitations or repeatedly applies unwanted pressure can change how a guest feels about the entire property. Spa evaluation belongs at the center of luxury guest-experience intelligence—not at the margins.
LISTEN ADAPT CONFIRM
A Distinct Specialty
Beth and Alan are committed daily exercisers and active travelers who evaluate hotel fitness facilities as real guests do—during sustained workouts and across repeat stays. That routine gives BEYOND FIVE an informed comparative perspective on what makes a luxury-hotel fitness experience genuinely effective for active travelers, without relying on a checklist alone.
We assess cleanliness, equipment quality and selection, layout, spacing, ventilation, temperature, water and towel service, and technology reliability—including Wi-Fi, streaming, charging and connected screens. We also notice the operational details that shape the shared environment: noise, trainer activity, crowding, maintenance response and whether the facility remains comfortable and usable throughout a real workout.
We identify the gaps—and the details that distinguish an exceptional fitness experience.
How We Evaluate
A request made repeatedly is no longer merely a guest request; it may be evidence of a systems problem. The first reasonable request should create organizational knowledge.
We identify excellence as deliberately as shortcomings. Thoughtful shout-outs help leadership reinforce the behaviors and memorable moments worth replicating.
A guest’s experience travels through family, social and professional circles. The value of the relationship includes repeat business and the potential business within that guest’s sphere of influence.
Why Beyond Five
Professional rigor.
That breadth, longevity and return experience create a depth of insight that a single visit cannot replicate. They reveal patterns, changing expectations and the details that distinguish a consistently exceptional guest experience.
Return stays reveal consistency, improvement and patterns that a single visit can miss.
Our perspective is broad; our use of it is discreet. We welcome questions about the scope of our experience and discuss relevant properties, destinations and examples privately.
Featured Podcast Episodes
01 Bob Chapman — Treating Employees Like Family Is Key to Business Success Listen ↗
02 The Corner Office with Adam Bryant — The CEO Test Listen ↗
04 Nick Liberato — Netflix’s Restaurants on the Edge: What It Takes to Make It to the Top Listen ↗
05 Mallory Weggemann — Hope and Resilience from a Paralympic Gold Medalist Listen ↗
The Beyond Five Perspective
We experience hotels as your most valuable guests do.
A Private Conversation
BEYOND FIVE works selectively with luxury hotels, resorts, hotel investors, asset managers, ownership groups and hospitality organizations seeking an experienced, independent perspective on guest experience, competitive positioning, loyalty and long-term customer value.
