Experience: The Great Play of the New Hospitality

Originally posted on the 4Hoteliers website by Osvaldo Torres Cruz. Excerpts below.

Experiential Hospitality is based on the design of positive holistic experiences on the guests. This design is very much determined by emotional and behavioral patterns of every guest in particular. It has been demonstrated that the success of these designs significantly influences the level of relations established between the Experience Managers, namely, the human resources of the Hotel (especially personnel having maximum contact with the guest) and clients.

The Experience Manager must adapt his behavior to each of the individual designs, thus becoming an actor who performs authentic intention – laden actions allowing his target audience, i.e. the guest, feels stimulated and able to receive the manager’s message as a whole, generating positive emotions and feelings to achieve his hopes and aspirations.

Pine and Gilmore in their book “Experience Economy”, refer to theatrical experiences, “Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage” so in the Experiential Hospitality we conceive the Theater as a role model which is operatively applied as a new reference frame on our own concepts that can be compared with basic concepts on Design Experience, such as:

1. The Theatre and the Experiential Hospitality. The play is composed of a theatrical script or libretto which is no more than a letter containing a story to be lived by the characters of the script. It consists of parliaments or dialogues that must be spoken and played by the actors. The play is a narrative, which has a plot that unfolds into three stages: display, knot and outcome. For its part, the Experiential Hospitality gathers the set of processes and procedures on which the Experience Manager is based to put his performance into act. It consist of actions related to the adequacy of the attributes of every service that the Hotel offers in order to generate sensory stimuli capable to arise emotions and positive feelings in three times or principal moments: before, during and after the stay of the guest at the Hotel.

2. The script and processes to complement the experiential design strategy. There can be no play without a script, which is nothing more than a letter containing a story to be played by the actors. On many occasions there are scripts which are written specifically for a cast of actors according to their different histrionic abilities.  There can be no conceived experience without a script, which is just the set of processes and procedures of the services the Hotel offers to Experience Managers to act designed strategies. The degree or level of execution of the procedures designed will depend on both technical expertise and emotional development of the Experience Managers.

3. Writer or playwright and designer of experiences. All script should be written, as well as all experience must be designed. The writer or playwright is the person who writes the script of the play, based on a particular story which will be represented in a scenic space. The Experiences Designer is in charge of designing the sequence of processes and procedures of the service as a means of complementing the strategy. Each script corresponds to a particular history, i.e. to the described issue, as well as each Experience Design corresponds to the needs and aspirations of every particular guest.

4. The actor and the Experience Manager. An actor is a person who plays a role, that is to say, he acts. Apart from playing a role, acting also comprise a process of personal research that the artist makes to discover the future creature that he is going to bring to life. This starts through a meticulous internal process made in order to decode the self of the character, bring it from the depths to the surface and transform it into an integrated creature. The Experience Manager is without a doubt, an actor. He has to represent on a daily basis so many characters as guests attending. This requires a capacity equal to that of an actor when splits to play different roles.  He must investigate what kind of person he has to deal with, and start assembling the character to apply the pertinent design of positive holistic experiences, based on the guest emotional and behavioral patrons with which he will have to interact. For each client profile a particular character must be incarnated which will lead to interpret authentic actions laden with such a degree of emotional intention that will enable the observer (guest) feels understood in the pursuit of his objectives, thus giving rise to our coveted fidelity behaviors.

Summing up, we can say that in the Experiential Hospitality, the Hotel turns into a huge theatre space in constant dramaturgical creation and execution, where so many stories are represented as guests exist, by a group of actors able to unfold into thousands of roles at the same time with the unique and sublime aim to offer to the audience an unforgettable experience tailored for their hearts and minds.

Click HERE to read the entire article from the 4Hoteliers website by Osvaldo Torres Cruz.