James Woudhuysen, Visiting Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University in Leicester, will deliver the BHA’s Inaugural Annual Lecture at Grosvenor House on Thursday 27 June.

Here, he talks to the British Hospitality Association about his vision for the future of the hospitality industry, what he will be addressing in the forthcoming lecture, and why he hopes the industry will rise to the challenge of “sustainababble”.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

James Woudhuysen has something to say about hotel room facilities:

“Whenever I travel there are a number of items I need: earplugs, a decent razor, a plug adaptor…

“They give you a mini-bar but no toothpaste; mandatory body-lotion, which if you’re a man you don’t want, and which if you’re a woman is just gunk; and if you’ve been on the Tube they don’t give you a face-pack to get London off your face.

“It would be nice,” he adds, “to have something really useful.” Strong words for hoteliers indeed – and a strong flavour of what we can expect to hear from James Woudhuysen at next month’s Annual Lecture.

To the uninitiated, James Woudhuysen is a sometimes controversial proponent of common-sense Big Ideas. A scroll through his website unearths enlightened and enlightening comments and essays on a number of subjects, including branding, energy efficiency, food miles, technological innovation, transport, mobile phones, recycling, and urban planning.

By addressing these and other subjects, he poses and answers the difficult questions many of us are unable to consider - with climate change, for example:

“Climate change is not a climate catastrophe,“ he says. “The current conformity of thought on the subject – a “sustainababble” – is no substitute for genuine innovation.”

He added, “I have a simple formula: more thoughtful energy supply equals less thought on energy use.” Inevitably, overall energy volume will increase with population, he argues, while the individual is penalised for these increases, and the government’s austerity drive to decrease energy use and reduce waste is misguided.

There is, it seems, nothing he does not, or will not, write or speak about; although he also states that he does not – or cannot – forecast the weather, the stock market, or your own personal destiny.

Similarly, James also refuses to be drawn upon a prediction for the time when robots will check us into our hotel rooms or bring food to our table. He does, however, offer a unique and interesting insight into future technological developments in the hospitality industry.

“We have grass on the roof of the Connaught Hotel, organic hotels, power showers, internet bookings – but how do we really make IT impact on this industry?

“I anticipate that we will see more research into sleep, with technological innovations in different types of pillow, wall thicknesses, curtain material.

“Further into the future we will also see new developments in biometrics, face and voice recognition, language translation.”

James’s influential ideas and works are widely read internationally. He has been published in German, Danish, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, and he has consulted or given keynote speeches to over 50 of the world’s top corporations. James Woudhuysen’s client list has included the Design Council, Lego, Lloyds TSB, the Science Museum, Siemens, among others.

At the BHA’s Annual Lecture, James will outline how modern Western society has become hampered by a predilection for “form over content: branding, psychobabble, sustainababble”, when what is needed is “a bit of realism”, and for the hospitality industry in particular, a closer focus on “functionality” through technology.

The Lecture will be a genuinely interesting and thought provoking beginning to the BHA’s Annual Luncheon, which will take place on the afternoon of the 27 June at Grosvenor House on Park Lane.

Tickets are still available for both events, and booking forms can be downloaded from the British Hospitality Association’s website at www.bha.org.uk

For more information about James Woudhuysen, please visit his website at www.woudhuysen.com