Webinar Replay | Guest Experience Audits: Opportunities to Improve Guest Satisfaction & Revenue

Well, thanks for coming everybody. My name’s Bob and we’re going to have a little fun today hopefully, telling a few stories. The idea here is that, and I’m sure you all know this, but really effective design and excellence in operations go together and today is all about that. It’s all about how you look at that and ways we can learn things from just looking at the way those two things interface in a destination. 

So, you know, I think we all could agree that Disney’s attention to detail and design is kind of legendary and they use it as we all do to really establish a clear place in time… a lot of cases that’s outside the real world. So I think Rick’s got a great story to kick us off!

Yeah. Now let me start with just a quick little story and this one is about a popcorn wagon. It’s about a popcorn wagon at the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. 

You’ve probably seen it. It’s right inside when you first get into Main Street USA, turn of the century Main Street USA, it’s in front of City Hall. When you first go through the… There it is! There’s that popcorn wagon right there. When you first go through the turn styles at Magic Kingdom you see above you and in front of you the train station and then there are two tunnels. There’s a tunnel on the right side and a tunnel on the left side that go underneath the train station. When you get to the end of that tunnel it sort of opens the curtains onto turn of the century Main Street USA and this popcorn wagon is right there on your left as you enter. 

I was with a group of people at Walt Disney World when I worked there. We were going on a tour, the Vice President of the park was giving the tour and actually the tour was about the theming at the Magic Kingdom. So we were in a group together and we walked by this popcorn wagon and I had to raise my hand and say “Hey, just a quick question. This wagon right here… do our guests… do they really want to stop and get popcorn on their way into the park?” 

You know, my vision is that our guests beeline it over to Space Mountain to get in line or they run to the castle. It’s hard for me to think that a lot of them are thinking “Man, I just got to have some popcorn to get my day started.” And then consequently on the exit, sort of the same question. Our guests, when they’re heading out after a long day, are they really saying to themselves “Man, I got to have one more bag of popcorn on my way to my car.” 

Well, anyway the vice president looked at me and said ‘Well, Rick, you’re right.” He said, “That is the least profitable popcorn wagon that I have in the park. It’s not here to make a lot of money. It’s here because of the smell.” He said, “That smell of hot, salty, buttery popcorn is the perfect thing to hit your senses as you walk onto turn of the century Main Street USA.” 

Great example of hopefully what we’re going to play with a little today. Mark, you want to intro everybody? Great example of hopefully what we’re going to play with a little today. Mark, you want to intro everybody?

Sure, thanks Bob. Great story, Rick. Thank you audience. 

Yeah, you probably should know who these guys are. We’ve got Bob Allen, Founder and Chief Storytelling Officer of IDEAS. And we spun from the Walt Disney World gene pool. We’re a brand and experience design company serving global destinations and attractions for almost 25 years now. 

Also speaking with you we’ve got Bob’s brother, Rick Allen. Almost fully through his lifetime Rick’s opened and operated and been the general manager of just a ridiculous number of Walt Disney World theme parks and resorts and… hang on, hang on… Rick is a career legend in delivery of bests in staff training and leadership and operations! 

And then there’s me. I’m Mark Edson. I do partnership and business development for IDEAS and generally just try to help people deliver the best experience they can within their destinations and have a great time doing it. 

And also special thanks to executive producer Hannah Baumhofer. Thanks so much Hannah for making all this happen pulling all the strings. So today, this kind of the ‘Bob and Rick show’ and they’ll riff for maybe 30-45 minutes. We’ll see how it goes and then answer some questions. So if you’ve got them please post them up to chat or just raise your hand and holler at the end. I think it’s going to be a bunch of fun. 

So today we’re going to look at some of the ways to assess a destination to ensure that you’re delivering an optimal guest experience. In our last webinar we talked about the elements that contribute to delivering what we call Destination Performance. Bob, do you want to give us a quick refresher on that? 

Yeah, I’d love to. I think it’s always great to reground in that. So Destination Performance is a model… we use a lot of models… to just take a look at it. What we found over time is when we would talk to clients… if we walked in the door and said “Hey, we’re really smart, cool, creative guys. Would you like to work with us?” Well, sometimes yes and sometimes no. 

What we did realize was that operators care about results. So we finally developed this model and said “Look, these are not the six things but these are six very primary drivers of performance.” 

If you’re an attraction owner/operator or a destination owner/operator, if your attendance is going up over time, your length of stay for each visit goes up, your per capita spend increases, your guest satisfaction ratings go up, people come back on a shorter and shorter return cycle so instead of coming every 12 months they come every 9 months and very important nowadays in the days of Trip Advisor and related that intention to recommend, that notion of the guest going out saying, “We had a great time. You should come with us.” 

Those are six things that if all those needles are moving up our argument is you’re probably going to be performing pretty well. Certainly financially but not just financially. What we find is in a destination where these things are clicking along, morale is better, retention is better, the sense of brand is more deeply understood. So we really love to come at every assignment we do, honestly whether it’s a park or a science center or a museum or even a hospital, with this kind of model in mind. 

So this year we started getting asked by a lot of our clients, “How do we achieve that? How do we achieve this “Destination Performance” stuff? We’re not new. We’re already up, we’re running, we’re cranking along, but I don’t think this is the year for me to do a whole lot of capital investment.” 

Now frankly that could be any year but the answer led us to this new idea we have that we’ve called The IDEAS Experience Playbook. So here’s kind of the way that works. 

The notion was to come up with an approach that says, hey, let’s look through two lenses. Let’s look through… just as in the popcorn story and in the next couple we’re going to tell you… let’s look through, first of all, the lens of intentional design. What are design factors and executed design factors that we think are driving guest behavior? And then what are the operating factors, right? What are the issues around the actual person-to-person delivery of a branded experience that are really important? And that’s on the ground by people. 

So the combination of aesthetics, graphics, pallette, adjacency, visual and sensorial intrusions, all those things, combined with that personal guest engagement turns out to be the formula for where we stand on the curve of achieving Destination Performance. When we look at both sets of those things, interestingly, those are the things that actually get wrapped up inside of what we would call “the brand”. So really it’s a three-legged stool. It’s design, it’s operating and it’s the way the brand is amplified or not amplified by those performance factors. 

So it turns out and it would be fair to ask, “Oh, do you have 19,000 volumes of citable reference?” and the answer is no. As Mark mentioned and Rick and I think are exemplary of the team that we represent, we have done a fair amount of research and work with some great researchers but we’ve also been doing this a long time, as many of you have. So we really have great ingrained hard lessons learned frankly and we’ve made notes. 

So the idea is there’s 32 factors when we do a playbook analysis that drive all these all these performance factors. Nicely, they fit into these 6 major categories so everybody in the room is going to understand. Yeah, guest interaction, how’s your facility looking, ease of use and accessibility. We all know that if we have a great park but you have to walk four miles through the rain to get there from the parking lot that can put a damper on the guest experience you know. What’s the quality of the experience and what’s the quality of the experience relative to what the expectation is that was set by our marketing? Safety… very very critical and perception of safety. And then efficiency, you know, am I able to get through my day and do that in a way that I feel like I really got value? 

So those are the six categories. What we thought we would do is tell a few stories from the field from recent outings with our new playbook tool and just sort of illustrate how this works. So Rick I’m going to toss it back to you for one of those stories. 

Sure, great, yeah let’s start. I want to start with one that’s in that “guest interaction” bucket and specifically a story about the difference between friendly employees and employees that engage with guests. 

We went out and saw a client, who just like all our clients, wanted to increase their overall guest rating, that intent to return. That’s so important in terms of revenue and everything else and they had a great survey out. They talked to their guests quite frequently. They asked, “How friendly are our employees?” and that’s a great thing to ask. 

They drilled down further than that. They had asked about specific behaviors about those guests, what those guests experienced with their employees. Did the employees say please and thank you? Did they use the guest’s name? Which is wonderful. Did they end an interaction with, “Is there anything else I can help you with?” Those are all great and they contribute to employees friendliness so friendly employees for their survey were high but they couldn’t get that overall guest intent to return needle to move. 

So our playbook assessment found that their employees were friendly when they were approached but they had to be approached. They had greeters in key places and hundreds of guests passed them by and the employees didn’t talk to those guests unless the guest asked them a specific question. 

We’ve found that engagement is a key driver of the valued guest experience and also helps to maximize revenue. Friendliness is only half of the battle. Are the employees approachable? Do they have open body language? Are they talking to other employees while they’re on stage which puts up a barrier for guests? Do they initiate contact? 

We can help drill down on that and we can help to understand why or why not they’re doing that. As we all know, everybody on this call, employees are all different. Some are extroverts and engagement with guests is easy for them and very natural but introverts, you know, they might need some training and some tools. 

I will tell you one that I used when I was at Walt Disney World all the time. I’d get a department of a hundred people and we needed to help get them out and learn how to engage with guests. So I’d divide them up into groups of 20 and I get 20 in a room and I’d look at them and go, “All right guys, we are going to have a contest. I’m going to put up a picture of a typical guest.” Maybe this guest has a Cubs hat on and he’s wearing a university shirt or something like that. I’d say “Okay, if you saw this guest, I’m going to hit the stopwatch and you have 20 seconds… What are things you could say to interact with this guest? You’re going to all do it as a group. I’m going to capture it here with my marker on the flip chart. Ready, go!” 

And they’d start throwing them out, “Hey, go Cubs!” “Right, okay, cool. I got it. Good.” “Hey, I love University of Michigan! That’s a great shirt!” “Great, I got it, okay.” “Hey, what’s your favorite attraction?” “Perfect, I’ve got it.” “Hey, where are you from?” “Great, perfect. I’ve got it.” 

20 seconds later you got 16 or 20 things up on that flip chart and all you got to do is pause and say “Folks, that’s it. That’s all you got to do.” And it really gave our teams confidence to know that they could go out there and start to engage with guests. 

A lot of times we’ll find that our employees need to learn to disengage as well. There are tips and tricks for that. Instead of saying “Have a nice day.” which you know in my mind’s kind of a B minus. You get a little credit for that but not much but can you close out with something more personal that shows that you’ve actually been interested in that engagement with that guest. 

If an employee just gave directions, let’s say to a show, and instead of saying “Have a nice day.” the can say “Hey, enjoy the show and, by the way, when you’re done come back and tell me how you liked it!” Well I got to tell you, maybe 1 out of 12 will come back but you can picture somebody might say “You know what, I’m going to swing back by and I’m going to go talk to Steve and tell him I love the Dolphin Show. That was really great.” 

Your food and beverage cashiers, when they’re cashing out a meal they can say “Have a nice day.” or they could say “Oh man, you got the chicken sandwich. That’s my favorite! You made a great choice.” Then you know dads are going to look up and go “See that, family! See! Yeah, I’m I’m a good lunch picker. I made a great choice.” 

All of those things, that engagement, can increase all of those guest engagement scores and that doesn’t really cost a nickel except for a little bit of training.

You know, Rick, I’ll jump on that with a quick other story. We did some work early on for a really interesting waterfront resort over on the Gulf. It was a classic place. It had been there for years and the honest truth was the guy was redeveloping it. He had to knock this kind of grand old dame of a building down and rebuild it because it wasn’t salvageable but it had a lot of cache. The local population was really concerned about it. 

So one of the things we did… and this was many years ago… this is more common now… but one of the things we said was, “Look, we know from research and more from talking to your staff what’s on a guest’s mind when they check in is ‘How quick can we get to the beach?’” These guests were mostly northeastern guests and they would come for a pretty lengthy length of stay. This wasn’t a weekend kind of resort. So we said, “Don’t build a front desk. Do the front desk functions, you already got the credit card, who the guest is, but just don’t build the physical barrier, don’t put it there.” 

And then we extended that out and said, “As long as we’re not going to have a front desk you don’t need a lobby. What’s a lobby?” Build a living room. Encourage guest interaction. Encourage people to hang out. Put really comfortable rocking chairs in there. 

And, you know, there were some raised eyebrows when we laid this out particularly from the architects. I don’t think they went whole hog but I think they met us halfway. I think it just points out that you can actually create design incentives for really good staff guest engagement. 

Yeah, I’ve got to tell you what that story reminds me of. I was the opening general manager for Disney’s Art of Animation Resort which is big, big resort and, you know, for thousands of rooms and it had a huge front desk. 

Well the design idea was, it wasn’t my idea, but was for the first time ever to get rid of that long barrier, just like you talked about. We didn’t get rid of the front desk but we created pods so you could walk between them to engage with the guest. 

I got to tell you it was the first time we did it and our cast were scared to death. They loved that barrier. They were afraid people were going to walk around and do things and we didn’t know what but the truth was the minute we opened the guests loved it and the cast loved it and that’s the way they’ve done their resorts and rehabs from that point on. It’s a great point. 

So, I’d love to have us move on to another story. This one, and this happens a lot with our playbook work, this one is a case where we found some people behaving really, really well. We love to call that out too because when you’re doing something right sometimes you don’t notice it so it’s really good to say, “You see this. This is really working. Keep doing this.” 

So Rick’s got a good one.

Yeah, I’d love to share it. As you said Bob, every project that we go to we find elements of incredible success and that’s just as important. You may think you’re doing something pretty good but when you get that third party validation… look them in the eye and go, “You know what guys. You got something here that you’ve just got to keep doing.” It really helps people know where to put their their focus. 

We went to The Florida Aquarium and we got to walk around and do an assessment out there. Now you would expect at The Florida Aquarium to see wonderful examples of animal related shows and we will and we did. It was marvelous. That was certainly something that I expected and it was exactly delivered as promised. 

What you might not expect is that the food court was exceptionally clean. And I can tell you a food court cleanliness is tough. My experience, I was there on a Saturday during spring break at lunchtime and so they had no bigger bar. Their capacity was probably stretched to the limit and yet what I saw was wonderful. 

There were no trays or food on tables at all that guests weren’t sitting at. Tables were wiped clean with the right cleanser. Chairs were pushed in, tucked back in after the guest had left by the team. The high chairs were cleaned, wiped off and put back for the guests to get. They weren’t scattered all around. The trash cans were all empty and doing exactly what they needed to be available for the guests and employees were asking guests who were sitting there if they could help them clean tables. All of that is just excellent and I can tell you I’ve run a dozen food courts at Walt Disney World. I never had one that clean and so that was really a surprise and and great to see. 

Mark, I know you were out there too on a different day and you had a similar experience.

Yeah, I went on a different day and I’ll tell you, that mentality, that sentiment is pervasive throughout the entire facility. It is exemplary. Just stunning is a great word. Everywhere we looked the facility was in a phenomenal state of repair and it was just great to see. It felt good to be a guest there so I’ll leave it at that. They should be very proud of the job they do.

I would just knock on, again sort of from the wearing the designer goggles for a sec, just some fundamental things that when you look at this food court operation that resonate. 

None of these are world beating “Oh my gosh, we spent $20 million on that.” The location of this food court is near a wall of windows that open up onto a great outdoor area at Florida Aquarium. Well that natural light pouring in the building completely changes the entire mood and sensibility of that food court. 

Where there is lighting, and this may sound like a really weird detail, but the color temperature of the lighting has been specifically designed. It’s warm so you don’t feel like it’s an institutional feeding environment. Think about that term, and that is the term that’s used, institutional feeding. Who wants that? This is a warm inviting spacious sense that you get being here. 

Another one is designing ease of use. The idea is, I know automatically where to stand, where to go. I know what the flow is. I don’t feel like, wait a minute, how do I do this? Do I order over here and move over? It’s all really clear exactly where I go. 

There’s this really nice combination, really thoughtfully developed, between how much is self-service because to some extent guests love self-service. Particularly if you have a four-year-old, a six-year-old and a seven-year-old with you. On the other hand, you also want to know there’s some staff interaction, a nice balance. 

Finally, us designer-themey folk can overdo it and there’s nothing worse than going to a food and beverage operation and the theming is so cutesy on the menu that you have no idea what you’re ordering. So this is just right. It’s enough themings that you remember you’re at an aquarium but it’s not so overbearing that you don’t know that you’re getting chicken tenders for Johnny. 

All those things kind of go together. The intentional set of design with the operating integrity and the cleanliness really make it a delightful break. 

You got another one, Rick? 

Yeah. This one’s actually a Disney story and it’s in that ‘facility and maintenance’ bucket that we looked at. 

I know a lot of people on this call, everybody will know that operators are looking for metrics when it comes to maintenance. That comes down to how much things are working. What percent uptime do we have and what percent downtime do we have. That works for attractions, that works with hotels. We you can measure everything in a guest room and public space guest room like how the AC runs, how much it is working, the TV, how much it’ working, the lights, how often you have to replace it… 

Do you know that your preventative maintenance plans are working? So you get a metric and that’s nice and easy to use on how good we’re doing at maintenance.

For a couple of years I was the general manager at Future World for Epcot. Here’s a picture of Test Track. Here we had a new theory we wanted to play around with because, you know, I was in charge of operations so we didn’t control as much maintenance. They did a great job. This didn’t have anything to do with them but we couldn’t control that as much but we wanted to figure out what we could do when it came to mitigating the effect of downtimes. 

We knew that no matter how good we were, things were going to go wrong. Things are going to go down, attractions are going to stop, and in those unavoidable times you can show your guests you’re on top your game. That’s what we were focused on. 

A bad example being… have you ever gone into a restroom in a location and the urinal is out of order and so it’s covered up with a big black plastic trash bag? Well that’s awful, right? Then maybe there’s a hand scrolled sign next to it that says “Out of order” like the guest would need to know that in a written way, that it’s out of order. 

Now the difference between having a professionally made cover for that urinal or a professionally made sign, that’s incalculable. Those are very important to give options for guests. If there is a service that’s out of order you can put up a nice sign that says “We apologize this service is momentarily out of order but here is the closest place this service is available.” That is something you can put up. 

So this example that I want to tell you is when I was at Future World. Test Track is an attraction at Future World if you haven’t been there. It’s a fantastic high-speed thrill experience and you’re test driving cars and you can see in this picture there’s actually right behind that sign that looks like a ramp sort of tilted back… that’s the ramp that when the cars zoom around inside the attraction they come around outside the attraction and they’re going fast and it’s it’s great fun. 

Sometimes it would stop working, relatively frequently it would stop working, so we did all the things we should do. We put up nice signs when it went down. We posted it on our park app to let all the guests in the park know that it was down and I would put our cast members out in droves at the front of the queue to apologize and to help answer questions of any guests that came up. 

Those are all good things but what is the number one thing that our guests that would walk up to that queue would want to know? “When is it going to come back up?” That’s the number one, obviously, that they want to know and that’s a tough, complicated question. It’s a complicated attraction and we didn’t really know that answer so our cast constantly had to say “We don’t know sir, I’m sorry. We don’t know when it’s coming back up.” 

But we did sort of know. We kind of knew in most cases when Test Track went down, most cases it was because of a familiar issue and so with those issues we knew that it might come up in X number of minutes. Let’s say for the story 60 minutes. So we would know but we were afraid to share that. Our cast were afraid to share that because what if they were wrong and they told the guest that it would be 60 minutes and they would come back and plan their day around it and now you’ve got a very upset guest and you’ve got a bad guest situation. 

That was tough. So we tried something. We got everybody together and we trained everybody to say “All right we know that for about half of our downtimes we mostly know when it’s going to be able to come back up.” And if it was one of those downtimes we’re going to communicate to everyone that it should be 60 minutes so don’t tell the guest that but tell them 90 minutes so we’ll pad it a little bit. 

But the second part was more powerful. We said, “…and here’s a secret. When Test Track comes back up we run the cars for 10 minutes. That’s part of our bringing it back up procedure. We run the cars for 10 minutes and so they go zooming around that track that you’ll see there and you can hear those cars roaring all over Future World so when you hear those cars going come back and see us and we’ll get you right on.” 

And I’ll tell you, it worked. Our percent downtime, the number of times we were down, didn’t change. None of that changed but the percent of negative guest comments we got about test track being down went down 40% and besides a little bit of training that didn’t cost us a nickel in capital or anything else. 

Yeah, it’s a great story and you talk about the fear factor there too. You know, staff members want to take care of the guests but they don’t want to get criticized either. So you figured out a great bridge. 

Look, we could tell these stories all day and we will if somebody raised their hand and said “No please don’t stop, keep going!” We have a bunch of them and you probably have a bunch of them too! And we would love to hear some of yours but maybe I can kind of put a button on what this all has been about. 

So we’ve tried to demonstrate that a methodology, this thing we’re calling The Experience Playbook that combines the right kind of assessment number one. So the assessment methodology has to be clean and accurate combines that with insightful operating and design experience. So you put those two things together. We think we figured out a way to help operators really discover some enhancement opportunities that are straightforward to implement, drive Destination Performance and a lot of which, not all but a lot of which, aren’t going to start with “You’re going to need to put in $30 million worth of new capital.” 

I guess I would parse that a little by saying… when we look at the 31 key individual components that drive those six broader categories of assessment they’re not all of the same weight and we have again using years of experience and kind of going through research documentation we have from projects, we’ve been able to come up with a system that really spits out a score that says, “Okay, look, here is your score. If you’re here, you should expect those destination performance factors to be rising up over time and getting you where you want to go. If you’re here, you’re probably not doing worse than anybody else. If you’re here, you have some real opportunity.” 

We want to show you not just what to work on but we want to show you what to work on first, second, third, because you want to get the big rocks in the box first. You want to get the ones that really drive guest behavior squared away as quickly as possible because that’s really where your opportunity is for real quick wins in terms of the way the destination performs. 

So Mark, that’s what we wanted to cover today. I don’t know if anybody has any questions on their mind or anything else we can talk about? 

Yeah, those are awesome.

Mary just offered one up. Thank you Mary. “Can you translate this discussion to membership based organizations that run monthly events?”

Isn’t that fascinating? The answer is yes. To do that properly we probably have to think about it a little but let’s just riff a minute. 

I don’t think the criteria are different. They may be nuanced based on the kind of destination it is but members… and I’ll equate that for instance in the theme park world to annual passholders, right… frequent flyers, right… 

Members have an even higher, tougher set of expectations and they need us to create environments that don’t feel one and done to them. I don’t know all the answers. Do I think the methodology applies? Absolutely. It may be adjusted and tweaked for a membership environment but I think it’s probably more important to understand. 

By the way, and Rick you can talk more about this than I can, but this is not something where… okay, we learned these things, we did some stuff, we fixed it, it’s all good. This is an ongoing, dynamic, neverending, you know, you look all the time at these things. So I would think again with membership… higher expectations, lots of repeat attendance and probably a sharper hawkeye frankly on every single thing. So maybe even more important to stay on top of the game. That’s my initial response.

I’ll throw one out, Bob, to add to that. Mary, it’s a great question.

My experience… I spent a lot of time running some Disney Vacation Club properties and so those are obviously members and before I got to a DVC I was working at regular resorts for years. Boy, I tell you when I first got the DVC it hit me right between the eyes the difference that a member had in terms of expectations compared to a different sort of regular… I guess you’d call it a “regular”… I don’t know if that’s what you’re referring to, it may very well be. 

I remember this story specifically, for some reason we were having some trouble getting our keys to work all the time. That’s awful in a hotel.

One guest had that situation where their keys didn’t work. Right away they said “Well, I want to talk to the general manager.” And of course I said to the cast “Sure, I’ll be happy to talk to them but did we do what we normally do?” We run keys out there and we had a process to try to make sure that everything was done. And they said “Yeah no we did all that and they ended up getting in their room in 3 minutes.” 

And so in my head it was kind of, okay, well, I think we did what we were supposed to do. The guest grabbed me and was very sincere and he said, “I wanted you to know something. I talk about being a member of the Disney Vacation Club to all my friends ad nauseium. I tell them all the time how great it is, how wonderful it is. I brought these friends to join me here and when the key didn’t work I was embarrassed. Now they’re making fun of me the whole time.” 

Normally a guest would say they were inconvenienced. There are a thousand things that a key not working is going to do for you… but not embarrassed. That’s a very strong opinion so I think to your point, you really have to dive deep with a much more surgical level to get down to what the important things are because they’re just maximized in terms of their expectation. 

I hope that addresses what you might be looking at. 

Thanks Rick. I got one more. This just in. I’m laying it down real time. 

Just so everybody knows we’ve ordered Mark some glasses, so don’t worry, this will get better.

Haha… 

“I would like to know how your methodology translates to cultural projects and heritage based clients. How does your language shift so as to not scare them off with theme park talk? As we all know, heritage cultural clients say ‘We don’t want to Disney-fy our property.’”

Sure! I mean, first of all, I don’t think there’s, even within the theme park world, there aren’t two destinations that are alike. Not only do we face that with much more culturally authentic experiences but you face it in for instance in the aquarium and science center and zoo world. 

That it’s not about that fantasy piece at all. It’s about delivering real science, real learning, the real understanding of animals, plants, whatever the topic is. 

So the broad answer is, you adjust the language, you go understand what they’re there to do first and you take that at face value. We want to understand the brand. Who are you? What do you say you’re going to do? Why do people come visit you? What was your intention? 

We want to start and know all that and then we’re going to look at, okay, given that are you executing well against that goal across these 30 or so touch points of execution because if I’m in a culturally driven experience I’m going to look for different things than I am if I’m, you know, at a regional park for instance. I think that’s the first step. 

It’s not a one-size fits-all in terms of the thematics and in terms of the storytelling that goes on but the way that gets done has some commonalities. Engagement is engagement, irrespective of whether we’re talking about a cultural experience or a very fantasy experience, a very high-tech experience or a very hands-on experience, right? Cleanliness is cleanliness. Safety is safety. We can still look at those things and understand how they would manifest in a cultural environment versus something that’s a little bit more manufactured. 

Rick, you got any knock-ons for that? 

Yeah, so Melody this may be just because this is me but where I think the language is out there now, particularly in parks but in hotels too and other experiences… the high tech nature that we seem to be heading towards seems to encourage theme parks and what not to use all that high-tech phrasing and all that stuff. 

Pretty soon guests are just staring at their app the whole time. They have to know what a FastPass is and you have to know what the rules are with all of that and all of that could scare off people in a much more detailed way that we don’t need to do. Maybe that’s what you’re talking about. 

I would imagine you’ve got clients that say “We don’t want a Disney, that’s not what we want.” And I think the low tech way of making all that work is something that everybody should focus on and we would be able to help focus on as well.

Just a quick thought about that, as we talk about this a lot. We were talking about it this morning actually. People will often say, “What do you think the trends are? What’s going to drive guest engagement going forward?” 

One of them is, frankly, said sort of bluntly, dialing down the tech and dialing up the touch. People are hungry for human interaction right now. We’ve been a little isolated by lots of things like you know pandemics and technology and just the general pace of life. 

We see in guest survey results and just in observation, we see a real premium attached to that heart moment where something happens between people. In a destination, and I’m going to use the word park in its broadest thought here, but in a destination like the ones we work with and that we’re all talking about there’s an environment that sets the stage for that heartfelt moment to occur. So the more, not in a silly way, but the more we can design opportunities for person to person moments, we really think that’s going to be valuable. 

I would go back to the heritage question and say I think that’s even more important when you’re dealing with a cultural immersion. It isn’t enough… I don’t want to just see the artwork and hear the music. I’d like to feel like I’ve actually had an experience. I’d like to be touched. I’d even like to be invited in to, you know, in some way. Could I walk… not in a cheesy way… but could I walk away feeling like okay I’m now at least a partial member of that culture, right? 

That happens between people way more than it’s going to happen with, you know, to quote John Hench one of the founders of Walt Disney Imagineering, “Nobody walks out of the parks whistling the architecture.” It’s going to happen between people and we lean way into that. It’s why we put so much emphasis on that engagement part.

Yeah, those touch points, those experiences are what create the long-term relationship, that bond and then they become ambassadors for you. Your guests become ambassadors for you out in the marketplace.

Well and we know, I mean, there’s millions of stories like this. It used to happen at Walt Disney World all the time, you know, you get a guest letter that says, “We need to know when Louise is going to be working the dinner shift at California Grill because our children love her and we’re going to only plan our vacation when we know she’s going to be there.” I mean that’s how powerful that is. 

And again… and it’s a bit of a soap box I guess but I’ll own it. More than ever now since there’s so much of the tech going on and it’s so ubiquitous… doesn’t mean we don’t use that by the way… we use that too… we all should use that… we should make it work for us. But there’s so much opportunity to get back to that heartfelt moment. That’s going to be more and more important, we think, as we go forward.

Thanks for that question too, Melody. 

So we’re running 45 minutes in. Do you have time for one more? We appreciate everybody joining us. You got time for one more or do you want to wrap up?

No, I mean, I think we’ve flogged it pretty good. 

Let me maybe double back to where we started a little bit since you’re invitin’. The core thesis, just again, is great designers really have to have an understanding of how a destination is going to operate on every level and successful operators have to have input into the design and then know how to set their staffs up with systems and protocols and training and training and training so that that design intent can be delivered experientially.

It is really great when you have the opportunity to do that on a green field basis, meaning we’re going to start from scratch. We’re going to build a new park. That’s awesome. That’s great. We all get a few of those in our life but that’s not usually what we’re all doing. What we’re usually doing is changing the wheels on a moving train and trying not to slow the train down or get our fingers run over. 

That reciprocal dialogue, that interdependence between the great design effort and the operating effort and the thing that’s kind of in the middle of that as a dotted line is the whole human factors part. I think, it’s funny, I guess I’ll tell one more story a little off topic but an awful lot of my own learning about how this works… I learned by being a fairly mediocre and badly paid guitar player. 

What I learned was there’s always going to be somebody with a better lick than yours. There’s always going to somebody who can flat pick faster than you can. The way to make it work is to really, really, really understand your audience. Who’s in the bar? Is it the school teachers convention or is it power pole linemen from Oklahoma? Both deserving of our respect. 

I’ll go all the way saying you’d better fall in love with your audience at least for the time you’re together. That space is what you want to work in and if you’re willing to take the time to really understand the audience and respect and love them then you’re going to know really clearly, “Well, that’s not the set I’m going to play for the telephone lineman. They’re going to want to hear a little Merl Haggard.” 

So I’m good because I’m here to entertain. I’m here for, you know, I’m going to say “those guys” because this really happened and they were all men. They want to have a couple beers and laugh a little bit and that’s their bag. Okay! Let me give that gift. Let me give those guys the thing that’s going to make the first two hours of their evening go really well. 

I think if we keep that perspective… we always say, whether it’s a new build or you’re retrofitting or you’re fixing, “You can’t design guest experiences from the ground up. You have to design them from the guest out.” And that has to be more than a platitude. If we live that practice I think we’re always going to be a bit more successful.

So, I was gonna just add on… Melody asked one more question. She said, “I heard a story in relation to Rick’s popcorn stand story of an ice cream kiosk in the main Magic Kingdom Castle Plaza. I heard that it’s the number one selling kiosk in all the parks because after the guests have experienced this incredible walk down Main Street engaging all of their senses the last sense is taste. That ice cream is irresistible. Is this a real story?” 

Number one, I have not heard that story. Number two, could it be true? Man, there are guys that sit around and think about this stuff and they lock them in windowless rooms and make them, you know, do research to figure out if that is true. 

So, Melody, I don’t know. It might be. I don’t know if that’s the number one selling one but I will tell you this… It’s an old story but when you go down Main Street outside the bakery they pipe the smell from the bakery out to Main Street and that’s a real thing and that absolutely increases revenue.

Well, you know the original version of that is on Disneyland’s Main Street USA park… when the park opened… at the candy shop they took a hair dryer and they taped it to a stick and they took a cookie sheet and poured vanilla extract in it and blew the hair dryer across the vanilla so that it would go out underneath the window because the smell of vanilla makes people crave candy. 

I mean so… first of all Melody… is that a real story? Of course it’s a real story! You just told it! It’s not only real, it’s true. Storytellers always tell you, “All stories are true as long as the telling lasts.” I suspect there’s a lot of truth in it and I suspect we’ve all, again, you’re in this business, all of you… you have these stories. 

I’ll just sermonize one more little bit. It’s one thing to know the stories and even be able to tell them. It’s another thing to make them real. It’s another thing to make those stories come to life and put them into practical use and I think that’s part of what this. 

An awful lot of the time we look at these results from this playbook stuff we do and go talk to the client and they go, “You know, we know that. We know that! Why aren’t we paying attention?” Right? So some of it’s maybe a whole other webinar someday. Although I’m not qualified to be in that one but I’d love to attend it! 

I have a colleague at Harvard who wrote a whole book on what he calls “the action gap”. Right, so here’s what we know and here’s how it leads to the right thing to do and here’s doing that thing and then there’s this gap in between. How do you get across that? But I think that’s really what it’s about. Part of it is retelling these tales to enough people that they become culture, right? 

What comes first: culture or stories? My answer is stories. Culture is woven from the fabric of stories. So the more we tell them, even if they’re aspirational, the more we tell them the more they’re likely to be reflected in behavior as part of a cultural norm. 

It’s a great line. Woven from stories. 

Well, I think we are kind of wrapping up here. Thank you all very much for joining us. We look forward to having you join us for the next one. We’ll post this video up to the IDEAS Orlando website one day really soon. We will look forward to connecting with you all once again. Here’s contact info for all of us. You can always find us at www.ideasorlando.com too.

…And the next one, Mark, the title I think is “Kangaroos: What Are They Really?” Right? Isn’t that what we’re doing? 

Appreciate everybody being here.

Haha. Yeah. Thank you everyone. It was a blast.