Frictionless is the wrong goal

The observation

Hospitality’s unhealthy obsession

Hospitality has developed an unhealthy obsession: the frictionless guest arrival.

Self check-in.
One-click booking.
Digital keys.
QR codes for everything.

It’s less “welcome” and more “onboarding.” The goal? Remove every possible obstacle between the guest and their stay.

I think that’s backwards. The objective isn’t a frictionless guest experience. It’s a friction-worthy one.

Because friction isn’t always the enemy.

Friction creates anticipation. Friction requires commitment. Friction makes the destination feel earned instead of accessed.

Nobody remembers walking through the automatic doors at a Marriott. As operators, we’ve optimized arrival until there’s almost nothing left to arrive to.

Guests remember crossing a river by canoe. Unlocking a cabin after a mile-long hike. Following lanterns into the forest.

Not because those moments were convenient — because they felt like the beginning of something.

The best arrivals don’t just get guests into a room. They separate them from ordinary life.

A forest trail.
A lantern-lit path.
A short walk where the destination slowly reveals itself.

That’s not inconvenience. It’s ceremony.

The best destinations don’t eliminate friction. They design it. That’s the difference between checking into an accommodation and arriving at a destination.

I’m not the first to figure this out. Frank Lloyd Wright spent a career designing friction into buildings — long before hospitality started optimizing it away.

I’ll never forget entering the Martin House. First — that sucker is intimidating. From the street, it looks more like a fortress than a refuge. Second, when you enter, the entry feels claustrophobic. The ceiling is obnoxiously low. My hubby suffered at 6'1 and legit had to stoop. But even at my 5'3, I felt compelled to crouch as I entered.

Ill at ease, and having no idea what was around the corner, I continued until the ceiling suddenly gave way. I literally exhaled as the cramped entry unfolded into an expansive great room.

The technique is called “compression and release.” Wright used it relentlessly to choreograph movement through his buildings.

I wondered what would happen if I designed this same technique into guest arrival at Menizei.

The hypothesis

Intentional friction outperforms convenience

1. The arrival would create separation. Every rite of passage begins by leaving something behind. The walk through the forest wasn’t simply transportation to the tent — it was designed to put distance between guests and the routines they sought to escape.

2. Contrast would sharpen the reveal. The Salish Sea doesn’t need help feeling expansive. But emerging from a compressed forest trail onto an open bluff overlooking the water makes the reveal exponentially more dramatic. Contrast is what gives the destination its emotional impact.

3. The destination would feel earned. It’s one thing to have a view. It’s another to earn it. By giving guests just enough signage to trust they’re on the right path — but not so much that they’re certain of it — the arrival asks guests to place a little faith in the journey. And that faith makes the destination feel earned rather than simply found.

The make-over

The arrival, rebuilt as a passage

While designing Menizei, I treated arrival as a rite of passage instead of a logistics problem.

Most operators would have cleared the forest. It’s faster to build, easier to maintain and gives every accommodation an unobstructed view from day one.

I went the other direction.

The forest wasn’t an obstacle to work around. It was the arrival.

Instead of carving straight roads to each basecamp, I designed the infrastructure around the trails guests would walk. The towering conifers create the compression overhead. The path is just wide enough for guests to pull a wagon behind them — and not an inch more. Around every bend, the destination remains just out of sight.

The release? Nature did most of the heavy lifting.

Each trail suddenly gives way to an open bluff, wrapped in coastal forest with the Salish Sea stretched out before guests. After several minutes of compression, the landscape delivers what Frank Lloyd Wright painstakingly orchestrated in his architecture: the exhale.

Nature wrote the sequence. I just resisted optimizing it away.

What happened

Did the bets pay off?

• Did the arrival create separation? This is the hardest bet to measure. Guests tell us things like “the world fell away” as they reached their basecamp, and many describe the stay lingering long after they’ve returned home. But was that because the walk became a threshold between ordinary life and the forest? Or would those same guests have felt exactly the same if they had parked beside the basecamp? There’s no honest way to know.

• Did the journey sharpen the reveal? The view appears in 48% of our public reviews and 83% of our internal feedback. But how much of that reaction belongs to the Salish Sea itself — and how much belongs to not seeing it until the trail finally opens? Once you’ve experienced them together, the approach and the reveal have become inseparable.

• Was the friction problematic? This one surprised me. Not a single review or piece of internal feedback complained about pulling a wagon down a narrow forest trail where the destination remains hidden until the very end. The friction never became the story. The arrival did.

What surprised me

The fourth bet

We have security cameras in the parking area — not to watch guests, but to protect their vehicles while they’re in the forest.

Guests pause. They study the trailhead. They pull out the Guide to Forest Cocooning. They debate. One partner points confidently in one direction while the other isn’t so sure. Then they make a decision and disappear into the trees.

It’s a tiny moment of uncertainty.

One that would be easy to eliminate with larger signs, brighter markers or a text saying, “You’re almost there.”

But despite hundreds of arrivals, we’ve never received a single text asking if someone was on the right trail. Not one request for reassurance. Not one plea for better directions.

That surprised me.

It made me wonder whether we’ve become too eager to rescue guests from every moment of uncertainty.

Sometimes the first shared experience isn’t something we provide.

It’s a problem we let them solve together.

The roadmap

Scaling the Rite

The arrival was the first place I designed the friction in. It won’t be the last. Here’s where the rite goes next, across the property and the funnel.

Before	After	Status
Frictionless guest arrival	Arrival as a rite of passage	Live
Landing page optimized for direct bookings	Landing page optimized for guest intent	In progress
Sales funnels that rely on discounts	Sales funnels that hint at transformation	In progress
Packages built around upsells	Rituals built around transformations	Testing
Mirrors in every bathroom	Vanity detox	Live

One actionable takeaway

Audit your arrival

Every destination has an arrival.

A hotel lobby.
A gravel driveway.
An elevator ride.
A winding boardwalk.
A check-in desk.

Ask yourself one question:

Where could you intentionally introduce friction — the good kind — to amplify the payoff? Not friction for its own sake. Just enough resistance that the reveal feels earned.

Turns out, the missing rite isn’t another amenity.

It’s the arrival itself.