Home Away from Home Experiences, Five Levels to Reach It - Through The Eyes Of A Hotel Butler - By Osvaldo Torres Cruz
We are about to close the first decade of the 21st century during which Hospitality Industry has grown and expanded so that its related offers have considerable increased. As a result, hotels nowadays are focused in a great battle to conquer the most important trophy the guest carries along: his power of choice.
New strategies for the recruitment, retention and loyalty of guests, targeted towards not only to the rational but also sensorial world of guests, began to be used. Accordingly the concept of Experience, starts to be used for the first time among the Hoteliers, giving way to the new world of Experience in the hotel business, which focuses on the increasingly growing psychic needs of guests in order to achieve their emotional satisfaction.
It has been well proved that the design of experiences is closely linked to the generation of positive emotions and feelings in the guests. To this end Hotels have a valuable tool: the services they offer. The great challenge they face is: how to make available those services as a function of the experiences they wish to offer to their guests?
The attributes of the services have to be generators of stimuli to act as triggers of positive emotions and feelings in the guest receiving the service; however, how can we know which stimuli we have to include in each service and how to achieve it? The answer to these two great questions resides in the most important luggage that the guest carries along when arriving to the Hotel: his emotional world.
As to my experience I could say that to decode the guest emotional world we need five basic tools that will be marking the levels of experience, levels that will complement each other, being impossible to upgrade to a higher level without having established or completed the previous one.
I propose to analyze each level and its base tool.
- Experiential Organizational Culture.
 Base Tool: The Human Resource as  main experience maker .
Undoudtedly is the basic levels to be taken into account by the Hotel, as it will define the basis for the success of the holistic experience. The staff motivation viewed as an element of personal motivation will make the human resources to be better aligned with the company objectives and displays the importance of their role as managers of the guest experience. The will and motivation of human resources will generate a high degree of empathy which is essential for the accomplishment in the achievement of each subsequent level. Â
2nd level: The Relationships.
      Base Tool: The relational personalized service.
The personalized service becomes an act of providing service aimed to establish a system of relations and links with the guest, which will influence his behavior motivating him to open his emotional world and share with the experience maker his emotional needs. On the other hand, daily and personalized assistance will enable the establishment of solid and everlasting Guest-Hotel ties.Â
3rd Level: The Opportunity.
      Base tool: Moments of truth
Moments of truth, according to its definition, are those when the guest is in direct contact with the service. However, there is another meaning in the hotel business Experience, these become per se Moments of Opportunity which will allow us to get in touch with the guest with the objective of deciphering that emotional world so coveted. This is when the guest offers the opportunity to get to know him, as his emotional reactions arise when stimulated by the service.
4th Level: Identification Points.
      Base tool: Differential Information
This information is nothing more than the disclosure of the Identification Points between perceptions that the services generate in the guest and his emotional patterns, which are by definition standard models or patterns of emotional behavior. The more identification points, the greater meaning of emotion and hence of experience, since these emotional patterns are linked to the personality and way of life of the guest. They make the framework into which the various emotional experiences integrate, marking the emotional tone with what the guest gets perceptions of life, regulating the experience and giving real meaning to the state of being.
5th Level -Emotional Services.
     Fundamental Tool: The services attribute.Â
The services should be intended to meet these three questions:
What hopes the guest the service will make him feel? –
What sparks off an emotion in him about each particular service? –
How can we generate perceptions consistent with his emotional patterns and lifestyle?
The design of services in a way that its attributes can be used as triggers of sensorial stimuli capable of inducing an emotion and positive feelings, enables us to adjust them to the guest emotional patterns, causing identifiable perceptions inducing to differential meanings.
Once these levels are established and also achieved, this fact enables us to create the largest number of identification points related to patterns according to the guest lifestyle, thus making the best use of the differential value of the experience that the guest is living.
This identification and differentiation will make the final meaning of the experience to be his own, i.e. it will make the guest to feel at home and this is nothing more than the fact of having experienced a real Home Away from Home Experience, leaving indelible imprints on the mind and heart of the guest.
Osvaldo Torres Cruz
Hotel Butler
[email protected]
