For most of us, vacations are some of our most intense and memorable experiences, and Andy spent a lot time discussing some of the techniques that luxury hotels use to brand your experience with good feelings. In Andy’s view, the most crucial times for setting these good vibes are the very beginning of your experience: when you’re asking yourself “Will this be a nice place?”, and as you leave, when you’re asking “Was this a nice place?”
Hotels tackle this challenge by putting their most experienced and savvy staff — managers, doormen, porters and receptionists — at these most sensitive places in the “experience chain.” They’ve figured out that if the hotel can nail the start and finish, it will take a major disaster in between those two times to wreck the customer’s experience.
This also explains the immense time, money and effort poured into hotel lobbies, from Vegas to Paris to Moscow. Most of us have a hard time shaking the feeling of starry-eyed wonder we get as we pull up to a cavernous, lush lobby fizzing with smartly-dressed people being unusually nice to us. Years later, that memory is often still one of the strongest we have.
