Design Research Study
The Future of Luxury Hotels : How to survive in COVID19 Crisis and Beyond
As hotel industry is emerge from the recent economic downturn due to the pandemic, it is vital to scan ahead and understand what are the challenges and emerging opportunities that could be the innovative approach to the agenda for the hoteliers, especially luxury hotel sector.
Role: Service Designer
Services: UX Research, Qualitative Interview, Customer Journey Mapping, Data Analysis
Synthesis Wall - Themes
Design Challenge
In 2020, the travel and hospitality industry received a big hit due to the unprecedented pandemic - COVID-19. It is not uncommon to see news around hotel shut down or extremely low occupancy rate.
This triggers my interest in the future of the hotel industry in the post-COVID19 era. When this paper is started, the hotel industry seems started to accept the new normal Hence, this paper is to study the future challenges and opportunities of the hotel industry.
Using strategic design thinking and empirical users research, this paper hopes to give the industry practitioner mainly but limited to luxury hotels, some real world insights and opportunities from the customer point of view to cope with the future business challenges.
Methodology & Approach
This paper is following the core principle of convergence and divergence (which is known as double diamond) to explore the opportunity lies ahead. A modification is made to carter the limit of this paper, the processes are Discover, Analyze and Create.
Discover phase, primary user research and secondary market research are conducted to understand what are the current and future challenges. The research target focuses on Millennials as they are the main economic drivers in the future.
Analyze phase, from understanding to distil the insight from the research so as to define different themes into different personas.
Create phase, by marrying the insight and personas to create some concept and overall strategic roadmap to overcome the challenges.
Different opportunities present different mix of options
Depending on the battle the luxury hotels would like to choose, hotels can design their services and direction in a strategic way via different combinations.
Customer Caretaker
To respond the COVID19, luxury hotels can have a better brand communication and trust to build up existing customer base and brand stickyness in midst and post COVID-19 crisis period.
Community Curator
To respond to the upcoming trend of biz-leisure travel pattern, luxury hotels need to reallocate their resources swiftly and precisely to capture the revenue.
Experiential Luxury
To respond to the increasing service expectation, luxury hotels can personalize their service to make their guest feel special.
In short
After making the strategic choices based on its own situation, it is where the real challenges start.
The strategic choice is more of a overall direction of how can the luxury hotels respond to the challenges. The path to excel the personalization services lies at how the data is being collected and inform the next decision.
A evidence-based experience design will plot out a clearheaded approach to develop a better customer experience and a truly personal experience to every customer.