In the hotel industry, everything is equated to an experience
Planning a holiday used to be straightforward – one picked a destination, selected a hotel, booked a room and planned activities upon or after arrival. Not anymore!
In a landscape currently shaped by social media including Instagram, TikTok and the like, experiences are a priority and hotels and restaurants need to adapt. Leading the charge for both restaurants and hotels are buzzwords like authenticity and experiential.
Experiential hospitality and experiential travel which was earlier restricted to luxury or niche travel segments have expanded industry-wide, and in today’s reality is deemed unavoidable. That’s because over the years, guest expectations of hospitality have cascaded downstream from the luxury sector to the mid-tier operations. What is aspirational at the upper end of the hospitality sector eventually becomes expected at the lower price points.
Gone are the days when excellent service was the stamp of a luxury experience, and one that was delivered only by the best of companies. Today, it is an aspect of the service sector that has come to be expected by every customer.
A real frustration that hoteliers face, when scores of guests move through their restaurants, function spaces and lounges, is the question “who are these customers and how do we offer them a great experience?” Like it or not, in the hotel industry, everything is equated to an experience.
Someone said the hotel industry is as much a part of the product economy as it is the service economy. A hotel can be a product first and a service second. – meaning hoteliers need to first get their product right before the service even matters. I’ve encountered hotel experiences that I wished I didn’t have to and it had nothing to do with service. Unsurprisingly, most experiences are traditionally associated with operational headaches at hotels.
Philipp Klaus and Stan Maklan put forth in 2012, a scale of customer experience quality. It included four inputs that led to overall customer satisfaction – one of which is product. Their hypothesis aimed to validate that the customer evaluation of an experience is not merely based on service encounters.
All experiences are human experiences
Many in the hospitality industry are realising that providing exceptional service goes beyond meeting basic needs. When a guest arrives, he or she wants to be warmly welcomed with a smile. That’s for sure. But today’s guests seek an experience that goes beyond traditional personalisation. They expect to encounter memorable moments that delight and engage them on a personal level. So, where and how does one start doing that?
To begin with, the best gift people working in the hospitality industry can give their guest is the gift of attention. Too often do we spend time analysing past behavior, guessing what the guest may want, without understanding enough of what they actually need and that includes the ‘human experience’. We can speak about “the human experience” by talking about emotion. We are, after all, guided by our emotions more than our logic. And in an age where patience is an unappreciated quality – that’s challenging!
Customer experiences usually generate positive or negative outcomes, and the entire approach to customer experience should embrace two basic goals – generate positive emotion and prevent negative emotion. And despite how simplistic that may seem, remembering this key idea can provide a crucial foundation when doing the testing effort of improving our customer’s experiences.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
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