I feel like the article, or perhaps just the example, is missing the point.
>> a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room.
This reads from the perspective of a person checking in. But it should read from the perspective of the person who made the decision.
The decision was made like this;
On most days we have too many cleaners. If we reduce the cleaners we reduce expenses by x.
On some days some customers will need to wait to check-in. Let's move checkin time from 1pm to 2pm (now in some cases to 4pm) to compensate. n% of customers arrive after 4pm anyway. We start cleaning early, so chances are we can accommodate early checkin where necessary.
Where there's no room available before 4pm, some % will complain. Most of those will be placated with a voucher [1] which cost us nothing.
Some small fraction will declare "they'll never use us again". Some will (for reasons) but we'll lose a few.
But the savings outweigh the lost business. Put some of the savings into marketing and sales will go up. Costs remain lower. More profit.
There is perfect accountability of this plan - the board watches to see if profits go up. They don't care about an individual guest with individual problems. The goal of the business is not to "make everyone happy". It's to "make enough people happy" to keep profits.
[1] the existance of the voucher proves this possibility was accounted for.
So accountability in this case is working - except for the customer who didn't get what they want. The customer feels frustrated, so from their perspective there's a failure. But there are other perspectives in play. And they are working as designed.