Musings IV - Welcome to Batmaina.
Rants and Opinions that deserve more than a 140 character response and deeper reflection.
New Pilote Podcast Live…
The one where Cory Smith and I talk about the vagaries of the US political system, the fate of Twitter and my trip to Melbourne.
Did you know… that Melbourne Australia was once called ‘Batmania’? Long before the DC Comics creation, there was a white colonist called John Batman who was one of the first settlers. IA, meaning ‘belonging to’ was added to the end of places like Tasmania and Columbia and Virginia.
Listen to the whole story on the podcast…
A Not-so Warm Welcome to Melbourne
I want you to imagine… travelling for 23 hours on a plane from Europe to Australia. Two flights plus a 5 hour stopover. Then a bus ride. Arriving at your hotel for the night at 11:30 PM and looking forward to sleeping.
Imagine the guest experience as you check in and then being asked for a deposit. A bond, to the value of the room night. This is not a 5-start resort with a mini-bar and the ability to rack up thousands of dollars of extras. This is a bond that assumes the guest will cause damage or steal something.
It’s buried in the fine print in the terms and conditions. Something that the guest experience guys at check-in were sure to remind me in a sort of patronising way. And then the other fallback for bad service - “everybody does it”.
Upstairs, inside the room, the only thing of value was a $7 clock radio.
This is a great study in (the lack of) total experience. Somewhere, some non-guest facing person made a decision to ‘de-risk’ the guest stay from a company point of view. By charging a deposit, the guest is dissuaded from doing anything that will cost the company money.
But this policy assumes that all guests are ‘bad actors’ and treats them with suspicion. It’s not exactly welcoming.
This ‘one size fits all’ approach shows a lack of guest experience thinking on behalf of the brand. There are other ways. Imagine….
Case 1 - Someone walks in off the street and wants a room. They are unknown. In this case, a bond or deposit could be justified.
Case 2 - A known customer, with a good guest rating on a platform like Booking.com buys and pays for the room in advance with a card. They use local ID at check-in. With a little bit of AI, the risk assessment could be done in real-time and the deposit could be waived. This would make the guest feel welcome.
Apart from the distrustful nature of the check-in policy, the rest of the guest experience at the Best Western Melbourne was as expected.
Actually, I quite liked the tongue-in-cheek marketing of the rooms. The one I booked was called a ‘matchbox’ room and the one larger than that a ‘shoebox’. I was all ready to give props to the branding team, but then it was all ruined by an unnecessary policy that creates friction and distrust.
Will Apple’s Reality Become the New Norm?
As I write this, Apple has just announced a new extended reality (XR) headset. For a hefty $3500+ this could be an ‘iphone’ moment for the XR space.
While some pundits and Apple fanboys are jumping up and down and celebrating this launch as some genius insight, the signs have been there for a while.
XR was always going to be bigger than VR - for now. And Apple was always going to create an ecosystem of apps and tools that would make the new headset useful. At least one brand is still thinking about utility in the product design process.
This product seems to be launched for a B2B market. The price point is too high to trigger mass-market consumer adoption. It’s also not the kind of thing you’re going to be walking down the street wearing.
But… Apple has actually thought about the customer user cases for XR and developed a product that could be useful. Cue the fanboys and pundits and mute the word XR on Linkedin for a couple of days.