Pleasure: The Central Notion of the Guest Experience
“You should not create an experience around an existing product, but rather design a product with the guest experience as its foundation” (Elisa Gorbatoff).
What do you think? It seems that the hospitality industry is in perfect alignment with this vision!
What Does the Guest Experience Revolve Around?
The guest experience can be structured around three facets:
- The environment: the decor, the design, the staging, the image of your hotel
- The guest’s active participation: what you will make them experience
- Storytelling: the story you will tell to transport them into your universe
But that’s not all!
To offer a great guest experience, you need to think about it as a whole. For this, we suggest 4 areas of reflection:
- How can you lead your guests to take a specific action so they can live the experience you want them to have?
- What sensations do you want to provide your guests? (what you want them to feel)
- What story or stories will you tell to draw them into your universe?
- What is the duration of the guest experience — the time you think is necessary and appropriate for guests to live the proposed experience?
The idea is to help you ask the right questions to go even further in designing the experience you offer your guests. You need to be both innovative and responsive to their expectations while surprising them — and that is where it gets challenging!
Improving Your Guests’ Experience
The guest experience must create value, both for guests and for your establishment.
To create value and boost the guest experience, there are five levers for creating experiences:
- Brand enhancement
- Stimulation of the five senses
- Surprise
- Offering the extraordinary, the never-before-seen, centered on an original and unique concept
- Building connections by fostering human contact
Yes, this is linked to what you just read above! Each of these elements is a factor of added value. What will make your venue unique will depend on highlighting one or more of these factors.
Your guests need to build a connection with your hotel. If you manage to create a relationship with them and maintain it afterward, you’ve won!
If your guests live a unique experience, the perceived value of your hotel will be positive — they will be satisfied and will come back.
Let’s finish with some tips that can help you improve the guest experience at your establishment:
- To enhance your establishment and make your guests dream: offer them a room directory in your image that showcases your hotel and its services
- To stimulate the 5 senses: offer a culinary concept, play with the textures of your products, scent the rooms and common areas, set the mood in your spaces with music
- To build connections and foster human contact: save your teams’ time by digitizing their repetitive, low-value tasks
