by Osvaldo Torres Cruz,
February 2011


As I commented previously in other articles, the new decade is framed in the context of the economy of Experience where the Hospitability industry faces a new challenge: the discovery, handling and use of the emotional world of its main client, the guest.

The guest is an emotional being and arrives at the Hotel carrying not only his luggage, but his feelings as well, a precious treasure that will influence whether his satisfaction is met or not. That's why, nowadays, the main challenge for all hoteliers is to understand the guest emotions.

The generation of positive emotions through the services offered, makes the guest to live his stay at the Hotel as an experience, engraving in his mind authentic and genuine sensations identifiable with him as a person, creating values and meanings that remain in his long-term memory, the place where lived memories are stored.

The emotional memory is located in the hippocampus area (1), that part of the brain well worth feeding to extend the good feelings and keep alive the Hotel-Guest relation.

There is a memory called declaratory or explicit referring to the experiences available to consciously evoke some concrete stimuli, facts or specific events. It keeps relation to the events about which we can talk or think. Moreover, all information on the emotions is stored as a declarative phenomenon which, obviously, relates the hippocampus to the emotion. (1).

For hoteliers one of the ways to get to that point is the personalized service of relations, as this offers the unique and true possibility to generate bonds and thus to establish the necessary complicity levels to obtain the guest to let us enter into his emotional memory.

In order to reach the hippocampus of the guest, where the emotional memory lies (1), we must:


The Hotel Butler service offers an unparalleled opportunity to be present at the right moment to discover the foundations of the guest emotional habits, which determine how his affective behavior works, thus addecuating the Butler service attributes.

In this way emotions which the guest can identify with his personal patterns will arise and he will award them a differential emotional meaning to remain in his long-term memory as an imprint or recall of significant value. 

 

The Hotel Butler personalized assistance will, in addition, let the Hotel to assess the experience devices (physical objects) that will trigger the mechanisms to recover the memories associated with the experience once the guest has left, making the Hotel to remain actively present in this memory, resulting in a future return or in a possible recommendation.

¨Yes Mr. Butler, I let you get into my hippocampus¨, is the best statement we can expect from a guest we are assisting, as it will lead us to design experiences to gratify his heart and mind.

References: 1- Taylor, Ann "Introduction to psychology: a humanist scientific vision". 2003 (Pearson Education)