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Why are they here? Revealing guest motivations đź§
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“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 & suppressed. Sides we have been longing to embrace. The beauty of experience design is that you can coax different sides out of people with the right intentional moments and environments! The best way to do this is to work backwards and ask yourself: how do we want our guests to leave feeling? Thinking? Being? You know how much I love to explore and tap into play in my creative process – this exploration of self is essentially role play. In a low stakes, new environment, it becomes easier to explore our innate potential. Can you think of an experience that brought the best version of you out? What qualities did this experience have? What do you think were the aspects of the experience that helped you step out of your usual M.O. and embrace a different way of being? And better yet - what are qualities of experiences that keep you stuck in your usual M.O.? Everyone has an aspirational, ideal version of self that they are constantly striving towards. Your experience can bring them closer or further away from it. Will it? P.S. – check out my latest article on The State of Experiential Hospitality in 2025! |
Creating Storied Experiences
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.
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...
"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...
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...