Ben Watson, ABFP®

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I was sitting alone in a bright back room of the Bellagio Resort in Las Vegas. the scent of Casablanca Lilly’s covered the room . On the terrace water danced in a fountain, the sound and the bouncing light. Steve Wynn, the legendary Las Vegas hotel developer, walked in. He was legally blind. He moved slowly, gingerly using his hands to find his way. I watched him take his place across from me. I asked him what made a person successful in hospitality. He answered at once. “People want to be around other people,” he said. Put them near water, natural light and beauty, and they will come. They will come for the place, and for the chance to have a positive and unexpected experience with someone they don’t know. Beneath the spectacle and business strategy was a simple idea from a man who couldn’t see, yet had the clearest vision of any CEO I remember talking to: people want to be together in places that make them feel good, and they want those encounters with other people to go well. His job was to create environments where that was possible. That idea feels especially important now. We live amid political extremism, corruption and distrust. Our phones compete for our attention. Surveillance follows us through the devices we use. Artificial intelligence can imitate conversation and generate endless content. In this environment, one of the most precious things we have is our attention: the ability to be present with another person and to recognize that person as more than a profile, a customer or a stranger passing by. Subscribe now A positive interaction with someone we don’t know can be surprisingly powerful. A welcoming greeting at a hotel. A thoughtful exchange with a server. A laugh shared with someone in line or beside us at a concert or a sporting event. These moments may last only a minute, but they change how we experience life —and how we feel about the people in it. Hospitality, at its best, creates the conditions for those moments. It brings people into a shared space and gives them reasons to feel comfortable there: light, water, art, food, music, care. The setting matters, but so does the way people treat one another within it. Beauty may draw us in. Human warmth gives the experience its meaning. The act of helping someone feel welcome among people they have never met turns a transaction into an encounter. This doesn’t require a resort or a grand design. It can happen in a neighborhood restaurant, at a community gathering, in a small hotel or at a live event. It can happen whenever someone pays attention, makes room for another person and helps a stranger feel that they belong there, at least for a while. We talk about attention as something to capture, measure and sell. But attention is also something we give. To listen closely, to notice another person, to offer a sincere welcome, to make joke —these are ordinary human acts. Their value grows when so much of life encourages us to look away from one another. I keep thinking about Wynn’s answer because it pointed to human desire to share a place and have the experience leave them feeling more connected, more alive, more hopeful about the people around them. In a time when distrust can feel like the default, creating a place for strangers to meet and have a positive experience together is not a small thing. It is hospitality’s deeper promise—and a quietly radical act.