I know a lot about hotels.
I’ve stayed in a hotel between 110 and 150 nights per year for 15 consecutive years.
Some have been great. Others, markedly less so.
But what I love about hotels is that they are endlessly fascinating laboratories into customer experience choices. You see, nothing is random in a hotel. Every hanger, light switch, and pointless bedside telephone was placed there after much mulling by several groups of people.
We talk about customer experience a lot in business, even right here at Convince & Convert. But I think we tend to overcomplicate it. Customer experience (CX) is simply “how we make our customers feel.” These collected feelings are crucial to the success of any hotel brand, because ultimately, it’s just a bed in a room.
The explosion of hotel brands in the past 5-10 years is breathtaking. Like ABInBev pushing dozens of variants of Bud Light on the marketplace, the major hotel players (Marriott, Starwood (now combined), Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG) keep spinning off new brand children to appeal to tighter and tighter market niches.
There are several “design-focused” hotel brands that deliver a customer experience/feeling of sleeping in a modern art museum.
