A Plan to Flesh Out a Travel Products Web Service 2
Over the last 2 to 3 years, the number of “Hotelcation” (Hotel + vacation) travelers who go on vacation to a hotel has noticeably grown. As overseas and domestic travel industries are growing rapidly, what are the reasons these people head to hotels? According to them, the common opinion is that they can’t use up all their annual leave under the pressure of their bosses, so their actual vacation periods are short, and going somewhere during that short time is even more exhausting. Resting at home doesn’t quite feel like a vacation either, so they head to a downtown hotel, enjoy cultural activities, eat good food, and rest comfortably.
In response, hotels are offering services like indoor versions of outdoor sports, pools, and cultural experiences. These are clearly services fine-tuned to relaxation. Yet customers still want to feel the same joy of escaping the everyday that travel brings. Here, we’ll look at hotels that completely differentiate themselves from the conventional hotel service that simply offers rest and convenience.
Instead of advertising the standard clean, spacious comfort, king-of-the-customer friendliness, the best interior, and a restaurant cooked by the top chef, these hotels have “an entirely different purpose.” Based on a new frame of thinking that breaks the existing mold, they put forward a differentiated Core Identity. Against the “rest” that ordinary hotels emphasize, they offer fresh differentiation under the completely different concept of “liberation.” Through this, customers staying at an urban hotel get a kind of “sense of liberation” from the pressure of everyday life.
Log Out of Life — Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel
Last September, Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel introduced a special weekend package, “Zen and the Art of Detox,” offering guests the chance to briefly leave the online world and “log out.” Together with luxurious service, at check-in guests must hand over all electronic devices (laptops, cell phones, etc.). It lets you experience what real liberation feels like, if only for a day, away from the always-on life of phones and the Internet. To ease the unfamiliar dread modern people feel when separated from their phones, the hotel hands you a kayak or sport lesson voucher instead — a service unique to them.
In the past, travel was centered on the destination, with hotels, restaurants, transport, and various activities chosen as options that followed the destination. But today, the form of travel is changing: things that used to be add-on options — cruise trips (combining travel and transport), Surf Road Experience (a surfing trip in Spain), food tours, and so on — have become the main purpose of the trip itself. Hotels too have been gradually seeking change to keep up with this. The Hotelcation crowd mentioned above is one such example.
The Hotelcation crowd carries both desires: the desire to rest comfortably during their vacation, and the desire to feel a sense of liberation through that vacation. The fact that they’ve stepped out of their home to go on vacation means “liberation” is in the mix; and the fact that they choose a hotel for more comfortable rest means the “rest” desire is there as well. In practice, however, most hotels tend to overlook the keyword “liberation.” They focus solely on rest — agonizing over how to provide the most comfortable, top-tier service — and fail to satisfy the customer’s desire for liberation.
But the differentiated hotel service trends mentioned above show “liberation” as their Core Identity. Liberation from the stress of divorce proceedings, liberation from the Persona forced by overly formal etiquette, liberation from the pressure of “keep it tidy” — where, instead of neat arrangement, you can freely mess things up to your heart’s content. And the sense of liberation of briefly going off-line from the stress of having to live always-on with the phone glued to your side is in the same vein.
Rather than services derived from the “rest” angle everyone thinks of, this approaches from the entirely unanticipated angle of “liberation.” There are many hotels in the world, but they’re all the same, as if stamped out of a factory, offering the same look and the same service. It’s time for hotels, too, to transform. I hope more special hotels that offer fresh, unique services based on liberation rather than rest will emerge, and that these services will become an outlet for people who want liberation.
Source: [Trend Insight]
Additional reference:
http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/boltshauser_architekten_wins_basel_aquarium_competition_zaha_hadid_only_3rd/
