October 21 - October 23, 2026

Chicago, IL

Sessions

Thursday, October 22, 2026

NIC Insights Session: Service as a Strategy: Building a Culture of Radical Hospitality



Date and Time:Thursday, October 22, 2026 | 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

Moderator

Debbie Brown

Owner & Principal

dbconsulting LLC

Panelist

Dirk Burghartz

President

Áegis Living

Panelist

John Hetzel

Vice President of Culinary

Atria Senior Living, Inc

The most effective service organizations don’t treat hospitality as a soft amenity; they treat it as a core strategy that drives loyalty, pricing power, and long-term value. In senior housing, operators are increasingly looking beyond the sector to study how leading service cultures anticipate needs, design moments of delight, and hardwire those behaviors into everyday operations. The result is a model where exceptional service is not just a resident satisfier, but a structural differentiator in markets where choice, transparency, and expectations are all rising.

This session explores how senior housing leaders can learn from proven service playbooks, translate those principles into their own communities, and apply them in ways that move both experience and financial metrics. Speakers will examine what it takes to operationalize a hospitality-first culture at scale: embedding it into hiring and training, empowering frontline teams to act on insight, and using data to create consistently personalized experiences that support occupancy, length of stay, and reputation. Attendees will come away with a clearer view of how “service as a strategy” can strengthen the resident value proposition, energize teams, and ultimately enhance the performance and competitiveness of senior housing properties.

Event Website Sponsor