The Strange Thing Hotels Do To Keep Customers
The Strange Thing Hotels Do To Keep Customers
By chris danilo on Jan 03, 2019 05:00 am
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For the past two years, I’ve traveled for about 100-150 days per year.
This means I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels.
There’s this one thing that I’ve noticed about nearly all hotels:
It’s the indoor pool.
Here’s what’s weird about it:
Almost no one uses it.
It’s smelly, loud, and there’s always a risk of someone else getting into that tiny hot tub with you, too.
So why does this still exist?
It’s a serious cost for hotels to install and maintain.
Yet, basically, all hotels continue to offer this as a feature.
The feature isn’t the pool. It’s the feeling you get when you know you could use the pool. It feels like a luxury to have access to a pool with fresh towels.
How is an indoor pool related to anything?
Whether you’re building software, teaching students, taking care of patients, or growing an audience, you are developing and revising your “features.”
As you look at user behavior, you have to decide what features to keep, which ones to remove, and which ones to build from scratch.
I’m not saying the indoor pool is a great idea.
What I’m saying is that you have to find out what’s really valuable about what you’re doing and make sure you’re focused on that.
It’s up to you to decide whether the ends justify the means.
Just think what would happen if the hotel removed the pool. Pools are so ubiquitous that customers could look at this and feel that they’re being ripped off of a standard feature!
By having the pool, you’re now on par with the guest’s expectations for what features a hotel should have. You’re not adding anything. You’re just keeping up.
This is just the unique context that will help inform decisions.
And honestly, that’s the easy part.
The hard part is identifying that it’s not the pool that’s valuable, it’s the feeling of having access to a luxury that’s valuable.
2 Minute Action
What’s something you do that is valuable?
It can be as small as the holiday card you send to clients or the tissue box you put in the grieving room for the families of patients.
Now ask: how do you know what’s valuable about that?
Don’t make this hard. You only have 2 minutes.
Just ask the user. Write an email asking for feedback. Monitor website clicks to see behavior.
Your action can be small and still have a big impact.
The post The Strange Thing Hotels Do To Keep Customers appeared first on Chris Danilo.
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