Exclusive Feature: At the luxury, boutique lifestyle end of the lodging industry, what really makes the difference are the memories and not just the 'experiences', plus 'Creating Experiences' has become a huge cliché.

During the recent IHIF 2019 I have counted over 50 instances where speakers and panelists used the phrase “Experiences”, while some of the speakers were using the newer more stylish phrase of “Transformational Experiences” which is the new mantra at the luxury end of lodging. But let me ask you: what’s really behind it?

Do we hoteliers actually know what we talk about? Some of us do, but many of us just follow the trend.

Professor Daniel Kahneman, the famous Psychologist Nobel Prize winner that won his award on the subject of “Behavioral Economics”, says in his lectures and writings that there is far too much focus on “experiences” and that he believes that what really matters are the “memories”.

“We do not choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.”

Experiences are “now”, and - in many cases - short lived moments. What we want for our guests is to have a multitude of experiences that would be translated and “stored” as memories. In other words, we want to create significant events that can become etched into our guests’ memories.

How long is a moment? Dr. Claudia Aguirre in her blog (See reference) is writing that in Psychology it is estimated that a moment may last up to three seconds and putting it into perspective, that means we experience 20,000 moments in a waking day, with at list 500 million moments by the time we reach our 70th. birthday.

Significant Events

The term “Significant Events”, as used here, refers to events that stand out and are therefore remembered, usually because they contain peaks in sensations that trigger positive (and yes, in some cases also negative) feelings or emotions.

Research has shown that the positive emotions or feelings that are more likely to build “loyalty” (another overused and little understood phrase) are “HAPPY” and “PLEASED”, so that the more experiences you gain, the more likely it will be for these emotions to be evoked and thus the more “memorable” they will become and the more positive of an influence they will have on future loyalty to a specific hotel and also to a brand.

Here is one example: a luxury hotel hires professional Chauffeurs for their inhouse limousine service, and many hotels chose to utilize outsourced service provider – that is a big mistake!!! You maybe saving on costs but you miss out on an opportunity.

Chauffeurs are, in a way, the “face” of the hotel. Picking up our guests at the airport, driving the guests for tours or around the city.

Driving the guests upon check-out back to the airport. We need to make sure that our guests will not only enjoy a safe and comfortable ride but also enjoy a “story”. How do we go about achieving this?

I believe we should do so by hiring Chauffeurs that have really intriguing past careers, such as ex-policemen, ex-ambulance drivers, a former Fire Chief and in the case of Israel (my home country), ex-army tank drivers or an APC armored troop carrier…
The people we should be looking for are “authentic Storytellers” and not fakes or trained ones.

At the end, our luxury guests will not remember if they were driven by a Mercedes S CLASS, a BMW 7 Series or A Rolls Royce or a Bentley - they probably have a few of those back home.

What they will likely remember are the interesting and rather unique interactions they had with their Chauffeurs.

We guide our guests into our unique “story” and each and every member of the team is a “story-teller”.

So now that we know that what we actually want to achieve are good and happy memories, we have to make sure that our guests will have a great last impression; it is as important as the first impression simply because it is the last experience our guests have.

Let me share with you some of my own personal memories: in one of the virtually thousands of hotels I stayed in during my long professional career, when I checked-out at the executive lounge, I was presented with a box of chocolate pralines, but not just everyday pralines; my hosts figured out which variety of pralines I chose to eat out of the pralines I had in my suite and presented me with an assortment of those very same pralines. Now, even if some of my experiences of that specific hotel were not perfect, my memory of that hotel are the great chocolates I got and that unique level of personalization.

Another personal example: six year ago, in August, we toured South of Germany, and we overnighted in Füssen, a small, medieval Bavarian town.

By coincidence, on the same day we visited that lovely town, our young daughter Shiri (then 10 years old) had her 10th birthday.

The head of the local tourism board found out about it and arranged for a small birthday cake to be served to us at the world famous NEUSCHWANSTIN castle at the end of our tour of the castle, with the cake bearing the simple inscription “Happy Birthday Shiri”.

That’s one memory Shiri will hold and cherish for the rest of her life.

Nowadays, some luxury hotels are adopting new trends in social media to their “stories”, offering their millennial generation guests “Instagram concierge”; now, I am all for it, but are we actually creating memories or is it just another experience?

The world is fast changing and evolving; however, my friends, the human psyche remains the same.

My “one dime” advice to you all is this: let’s drop the fancy words and let’s stop using overused Jargon words!

Let’s keep our compass bearing right and remember the core fundamentals of our business: we want our guests to simply be happy and pleased with us.

Sources:
www.vestedway.com/the-riddle-of-experience-versus-memory
www.headspace.com/blog/2015/08/19/remembering-vs-experiencing

Joseph Fischer is the CEO of Vision Hospitality & Travel - An international lodging & hospitality consulting firm. He is a veteran hotelier with over 30 years of extensive management experience in the global lodging Industry. A strategic “out-of-the-box” thinker, visionary, with plenty of tangible and ready-to-be-implemented ideas. Joseph is a frequent contributing writer on 4Hoteliers.com global new portal.

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