Thriving in an experience economy

Our multifaceted industry is built on creating positive experiences, and above all, experiences to remember. Despite a tumultuous 2020 and the enduring hardships faced by our sector, the purpose of hospitality remains the same, with guest experience unshakably at its core.

What's more, with every month spent waiting out the pandemic, the joy associated with travel only seems to become more pronounced. Because of this and several other factors we have the power to influence, we needn’t worry about tourism losing its lead role in the experience economy.

What would make sense to do in this period of low demand, might be to study just what it means to be in the business of memorable experiences.

Can something as abstract as an experience, dream or memory really be quantified by data and defined by economic theory? To what extent do small comforts and fleeting pleasures determine the wider perception of a hotel's brand and offering?

In this article, we'll look at how emotion affects memory, what types of experiences are most effective in inciting emotion, and the role of hotels in the system of experiences we know as tourism – a vital part of the experience economy.

We'll put these ideas in the context of real data and findings derived from recent surveys and day-to-day business, comparing areas of interest pre- and during COVID. There's plenty to explore on this topic, so if you're ready to get back to basics and gain insight into the fundamentals of memorable experiences, make yourself comfortable.

Emotion and memory when traveling

Unlike the drudgery of day-to-day life, our travels make a lasting impression on us, becoming sticky in our memories for years to come. These departures from normality incite emotions that, according to several studies , make it easier to remember events.

These studies have also revealed that:

• Positive emotions are better remembered than negative ones
• Positive memories contain more detail than negative ones
• Strong emotions can eclipse the memory of less exciting moments

In the context of hospitality, the insights these conclusions provide are endlessly useful. To start, the importance of proper time and effort spent by hoteliers on the puzzle of delighting a group of unique individuals , each with their own preferences, quirks and comforts, is evident. To be remembered at all is to be unforgettable!

We can also see that small details really do make a difference , and won't be forgotten when part and parcel of an overall positive experience.

Finally, the cherry on top is that a positive hotel experience can negate the stress and boredom of the journey it took to get there . What could be better than erasing airports, customs queues and luggage-hauling from your brain?

Before we delve into the types of emotional trip experiences that become memorable, let's briefly turn our attention to the concept of an experience as a commercial entity .

The experience economy, explained

Interestingly, the limitations of sold experiences double as the very things that make them special. Unlike products, experiences are intangible, impermanent and difficult to control , as they are consumed immediately, as soon as they're delivered.

No doubt, photos are a way to capture memories and produce tangible takeaways from experiences. Some might even argue that certain people (often from younger generations) see a photo and an experience as one and the same thing. For the rest of us, a true experience requires presence and cannot be held in one’s hands or stored away.

In a well-known article on Harvard Business Review , Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore elaborate on the rapidly growing value of experiences in the worldwide economy.

In their words: "An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event."

This way of thinking is already being adopted by many in the hospitality industry. The value of extraordinary experiences is well-recognized – and positive experiences can be achieved just as well in a self-catering apartment or hostel as a luxury hotel.

Measuring delight in an experience

In fact, the experience of a guest can be measured in much the same way, whatever a hotel's perceived quality. Using this model for customer satisfaction in the tourism industry, we can measure levels of delight derived from experiences. See how the satisfaction levels delineated by Fuchs and Weiermair in this 2003 study can be identified in a hotel stay scenario.

As we have learned, strong positive emotions have an extraordinary effect on what we remember. In an industry specialized in offering top of the line experiences, what possible luxuries remain to set your hotel apart from the herd? What is the next frontier in customer satisfaction when high standards of comfort have become de rigueur ?

Autonomy and the right to choose

If the mechanism of memory and these differing levels of satisfaction tell us anything, it's that experiences need to be designed. But what to do about the problem (and blessing) of our individualism as a species?

Pine and Gilmore summarize this predicament: "While prior economic offerings—commodities, goods, and services—are external to the buyer, experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level.

Thus, no two people can have the same experience, because each experience derives from the interaction between the event and the individual’s state of mind."

One approach emerging as an effective solution across the industry is to increase flexibility and modularity when it comes to guest experience. Some hoteliers are giving proper recognition to the value these individual elements provide by turning to attribute-based selling to present their room inventory in a whole new way.

If this shift is too large a step for your hotel at this juncture, we at upselling engine Oaky have taken pains to understand the guests of our hotel customer base, which spans 2000+ hotels across 90 countries. A survey we conducted in 2019 provided key insights into what guests missed from their stay and what they found memorable.

Combining this with our own data on best-selling upsell offers, we built a Deal Library to house highly requested and tried-and-tested deal templates for our hotelier customers to browse and make use of.

Below is a selection of research insights that went on to influence our Deal Library.

Before and during COVID

The combined data from hotel guest interviews and the performance of live deals across Oaky's customer base has highlighted several key differences between the period from September 2019 to end of March 2020 (pre-COVID) and April 2020 to end of October 2020 (current COVID period).

While COVID-conscious deals developed particularly for this period were popular, other deals that affected the atmosphere/luxury level of the room and ability to entertain oneself in the room also proved attractive.

Factors influencing the increased uptake of these deals include less external attractions being available in the form of restaurants, bars and group activities; increased vigilance around contamination , and increased patronage from domestic visitors and those who have something to celebrate .

• In-room offerings have always been popular, but now more than ever before.
• Features geared towards domestic visitors , like reserving parking spots and bringing a pet also saw an uptick in requests.
• Lockdowns and limited overall capacity in restaurants and cafes mean that people are now accustomed to pre-booking tables and dining slots.
• New concerns and obstacles to booking a hotel room could indicate that a larger proportion of a hotel's booked rooms now accommodate guests celebrating a special occasion. The performance of celebratory deals like "Bubbles in the room" has reflected this.

Designing emotional journeys

In the case of travel and holidays, many will agree that absence only makes the heart grow fonder. When travel restrictions eventually relax, the projected surge in travel – and more significantly, where it's distributed – will, to some extent, reflect the destinations and hotels that have remained top-of-mind during the pandemic.

Hotels that aren't expecting a returning flock of loyal guests might want to consider an updated approach to guest satisfaction – one that prioritizes the experience economy and the creation of positive, "sticky" experiences.

In order to leave a lasting impression, hotels should design experiences that incite positive emotions. Taking recent trends into account, a generally positive experience derived from a beautiful property and excellent service standards is no longer enough.

Our industry is well and truly on the way to a more flexible future that gives guests more control over their stay and fortunately for us, offering empirically-tested experiences for guests to choose from is easier than it sounds.

Whether this is through attribute-based selling or smart upselling, hotels can easily create a modular offering of experiences. It's achieving the right balance that requires some attention.

Our advice would be to mix in experiences that satisfy performance factors (as many hotels already do) but be sure to have a healthy offering of experiences that aim to induce delight across a wider group of demographics (i.e. festive experiences) and more specific demographics (i.e. romantic experiences). A positive association with your brand is the natural path to referrals, recommendations and revisits.

Relying on qualitative and quantitative data acquired from hotels that are currently live is a straightforward way to achieve this.

Oaky's Deal Library facilitates this, making the addition of delight and performance factors as easy as two clicks.