Try walking in my shoes:A piece of common sense advice for managers in tourism

A pecha-kucha presentation at Crossover Conventa Conference

Ljubljana, August 2016.

How to make more money per tourist?

Most of the people in tourism are somehow concerned with this banal, but tough challenge. As blunt as it may sound, daily revenue per tourist is a fundamental indicator of performance. And we’d like to show how it can be improved if we think as designers. As we are partly from Croatia, let’s take it as an example.

Spain 100 - Croatia 66

66 100Despite this years’ tremendous growth, Croatia will still lag way behind Spain. The difference has been ascribed to having fewer resorts and less developed cultural content. As such, this gap is structural and there is no shortcut across it. But this only makes earning every new euro as vital as it is hard.

Vicky, Cristina, Split

Obviously, you can’t simply build a hundred resorts and become a cultural powerhouse overnight. Croatian tourism boards have correctly adopted a long-term strategy to build narratives about Croatia, but great stories, movies and literature take time to develop. While an episode of Game of Thrones drove even more tourists to Dubrovnik, Spain, Italy and Greece had for long enjoyed attention of best-selling authors and moviemakers. So, if you know someone like Elena Ferrante ask them to write about Croatia.

A penny for your thoughts, smile, email…

However, we can still figure out an added value our guests will be willing to pay an extra euro. Mind you, in Croatia, this extra euro means hundreds of millions more for infrastructure, education, marketing. While we wait for the grand strategy to bear fruit, there is a lot of smaller things we can do.

Devil is in the details.

Tourism is a complex ecosystem but whether you run a resort, a bus station or merely rent your apartment, it all comes down to the way people experience your service. To make people come and come back, look systemically at every detail of your practice untill you can make it worth at least a cent more.

By doing so, you will actually create a customer journey map. It’s an indispensable tool in service design and tourism. It shows you step-by-step how the people interact with your service, what they think, feel and do, before the trip, during vacation and after they return.

Understand decision making.

It will give you a holistic perspective in which you will be able to identify with the tourists and understand how they make decisions and how to influence them. You will also see the weak points where opportunities open for your growth. Let’s now go for a short imaginary journey.

Who are they?

First of all, we really need to know who the tourists are. If you run a big operation, order an ethnographic research. If you can’t afford it, look around and try to distinguish 4 ideal types that represent your most important customer segments. If you can’t do it, we will help you.

Hilde aus Wien

Let’s say, for example, Hilde is a situated mother of two, working half-time from home. She takes care of the homestead. As her husband is too busy, vacation is her department. Let’s now follow her as she chooses destination and prepares for the trip.

Easy like Air B’n’B

Hilde doesn’t like resorts which brings Croatia into consideration. She looks for websites offering homes to rent, and finds that most of them are nearly useless. You will always go where you can immediately get the information on price and vacancy. So she goes to Air B’n’B where the fee is higher, but overall experience is better. For website owners this should be alarming. They have valuable databases, but wrong interface design helps others skim their milk. Redesign your web.

Bedroom as it once was

Beautiful islands, nature, beaches - and houses… Croatia is much closer than Greece, but an average Greek home looks so much better. Hilde wants the best for her family and chooses more expensive Greece! For Croatian tourism, this is a blow.

IKEA, Baumax, banks - hear!

So, what if someone with a business instinct offered affordable packages and advice for furnishing and presenting rental homes? Just a little creativity and effort to refresh an old place brings huge and tangible benefits. Fortunatelly, Hilde eventually finds there are a few cool homes in Croatia, too.

Create psychological debt.

Fast forward: After an exhausting journey and traffic jams, Hilde’s family arrives at their destination. A lovely house with flowers is what they did expect, but home-made cookies and a cold bottle of local wine are a pleasant surprise. Hilde feels they got more than they paid for and a sense of debt is formed already.

Psychological debt curve

Arrival Departure

Once created, the psychological debt stays there for a while and good hosts know how to maintain it with little extras to make sure their guests come back and serve as ambassadors. Along the way, they almost certainly make the guest pay more because good service is irresistible.

Experience that can’t be refused

A few days into their vacation, Hilde is looking for something special to entertain her children. When you offer an early morning open sea fishing trip, she is delighted. The price is a bit steep, but the debt helps her accept it. After all, another debt is made by an extra grilled fish you prepare upon their return.

Create a value chain.

When you connect with providers of other services you can create joint offers and act as a touchpoint for mutual services. You can become more competitive while even pushing the price up, because you have generated added value. Wine, guides, excursions, restaurants, shopping… It’s better together.

Be digital-friendly.

Like most people, Hilde’s family is used to be online. If your Wi-Fi is patchy or missing and you still make a living out of tourism - congratulations. Stop reading. But for others, the good news is they don’t necessarily need to lure Pokemons. A perfectly offline but authentic artefact worth taking pictures and sharing is just fine. You only need to do what others do on social media to stay in touch and show their goods. Often enough.

Stay in touch.

Because when the summer’s gone, and Hilde gets your Christmas postcard or a post on her Facebook, she will be touched and perhaps feel obliged to reply. She may even recommend you to her friends. In spring, it will be then easier to prompt her to book the house in advance. Securing your guests earlier gives you a chance to prepare better, invest safer and cut costs.

Tourist experience journey

Short format made us skip many steps as we rushed through this customer journey, but you’ve got the idea how mapping the guest’s experience will help you to design it better. In return, a better designed experience makes customers happier and ready to pay more.

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POST-SERVICE PERIOD

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We are researchers, designers, writers and brand strategists and our job is to help you promise more and deliver what you promise.

Let’s see how we can assist your growth.

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