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Creating Storied Experiences

by Samantha Hardcastle

Ready to elevate your hospitality, travel, or leisure experience? Get weekly insights on the experience economy, traveler behavior, and how you can create immersive & enriching experiences that attract high-value guests.

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Featured Post

Spicing up your experience 🌶️

If I challenged you to make a moment more immersive, what would you do? Would you know which levers to pull? How many immersion strategies would you know to implement? Experience design isn't always instinctual, it's part science. Even story has formulas - a string of occurrences doesn’t make something a story. (THIS does.) If you’re responsible for the guest journey in your business, you should be able to take any basic activity or moment and add layers to it to make it more dynamic and...

over 1 year ago • 1 min read

"Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives…” – Clarissa Pinkola Estes The deeper into the world of story I go, the...

over 1 year ago • 2 min read

“They're not looking for a story that tells them who they are - they already know who they are. They're here because they want a glimpse of who they could be.” - Dr. Robert Ford I scribbled this quote down when watching Westworld many years ago, and just stumbled upon it again as I was cleaning out my notes. Pretty wise for a fictional character, right? Travel brings out old & new sides to us. Sides we’ve only had glimpses of. Hidden, never-before-seen sides. Sides we’ve rejected &...

over 1 year ago • 1 min read

If you've been following me for a while, you know that stories are not solely for entertainment, but for, more importantly, sending a message. I was reminded of this as I breezed through my beach read last week, an enjoyable story of Circe, greek goddess and daughter of Helio. As I reflected on the core message of the book, I felt perhaps the most compelling was that "true happiness does not come from power". This got me intrigued by the theme of power and my relation to it - after all, this...

over 1 year ago • 3 min read

I was reminded recently that not everyone is wired for creativity like I am. And can you blame them? We live in a society that values logic over emotion, technology over art, and the tangible (what we can see) over the intangible (what we can feel). Men are especially at risk of under developing their creative and EQ skills due to social conditioning, gender roles, and an often global association of creativity with femininity and logic with masculinity. On top of this, if we don’t identify as...

over 1 year ago • 2 min read

You’ve probably seen these sort of posts on Instagram: “This is not Iceland. This is not Switzerland. This is Kazakhstan!” Content creators are capturing stunning vistas and scenes around the world and waking travelers up to the fact that they can find beauty EVERYWHERE. So what does this mean for you? Maybe that natural beauty shouldn’t be your only selling point. When I first saw photos of Slovenia, I was blown away by its emerald green mountains and turquoise waters. But I could have gone...

over 1 year ago • 2 min read

It’s a new year, new look! A little playful, a lot fun, I hope it inspires you to embrace your own unique personality in your business this year. Big shoutout to our brand design partners Stina + George for the fab refresh and go check out TheStoriedExperience.com for the full effect! Speaking of playfulness, Skift just put out a new report on the power of play in tourism. 86% of travelers agreed that participating in play activities is important to an overall sense of happiness and...

almost 2 years ago • 1 min read

Creativity thrives on specificity. Generalization kills creativity. Today, I want to talk about the idea of “tightness of fit”. Oftentimes when I hear hosts talk about their vision or purpose, it’s fairly general. “We want to help people relax” or “we want to help people connect with nature” or “we want to educate people about our culture”. All well-intentioned, but void of magic. Let’s dive into an example. Instead of the generic ‘connect people with nature’ mentality, what could one create...

almost 2 years ago • 1 min read

Temps are dropping in the Catskills and we just got a foot of snow, so I recently started planning a winter getaway to Oaxaca & Tulum. While I was evaluating what felt like thousands of experiences and hotels, I found myself consciously & semi-unconsciously ping-ponging around a series of questions, an invisible checklist in my mind. Today I am sharing those with you. I once read that people decide about whether to stay on a website within milliseconds based on visual cues and aesthetics. And...

almost 2 years ago • 2 min read

I want you to think of your favorite story. Pull it up in your mind right now. Maybe it’s a book, a movie, a play, a TV show… okay, now what I want you to do is REMOVE the conflict from this story. Remove all the obstacles, remove all the tension, remove all the drama. Not very exciting anymore, is it? In fact, according to the majority of storytellers, when you remove these things, it’s no longer a story. So then whyyy do we call romanticized marketing messages that are void of conflict...

almost 2 years ago • 4 min read