Posts tagged “hotel”

Search is broken, yes?

For all the credit we give Yahoo and Google for fighting off Search Engine Optimization (SEO) how long has it been since looking up a hotel in either search engine worked? Years, I think. If you want to search for a hotel by name, you’re going to get dozens of hits that are from hotel reservation sites (often the same site under a variety of URLs) and have to look hard to find the actual Ramada page, or the actual Hyatt page. Sure, it varies by hotel, city, chain, etc. but for the most part, the promise of those search engines to bring you what you are looking for – in this particular category of highly consistent search – is totally broken

A brand journey at the 5hotel in Calgary

Last month we stayed in Calgary for a few days to attend the Calgary International Film Festival. We stayed at the 5, a newly remodeled hotel that used to be the Hawthorn. Most info about hotels in downtown Calgary referenced the Hawthorn, and we found the website through a redirect. The website seemed pretty nice.
5 Five Calgary Downtown Suites Hotel, Alberta, Canada - Inside 5 10 21 2005 12 52 30 PM1.jpg
Kinda cool design, palette, nifty logo. Seemed like they were doing the JetBlue/IKEA thing of taking a commodity and adding design and more thoughtfulness to the overall experience, and finding a way to charge less for it. There were photos of the rooms (not currently available on the updated website), descriptions of all the amenities (free WiFi, breakfast), and the price was good. We decided to stay there.

When we booked our shuttle from the Calgary airport, the woman behind the counter growled in an intense Scottish brogue “Yeah, that used to the Hawthorn, and before that the Prince Rupert. I was finally getting used to calling it the Hawthorn and they changed the name. What a stupid name!”

The shuttle drops us off around the corner from the front door (which is not exactly door-to-door service that we paid for, but that’s a complaint for elsewhere). It doesn’t look like it’s the Five.
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It looks like the Hawthorn.

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The front door, at least, is a little more clear what hotel we’re at.

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Unless you happen to look up. Serious naming/branding confusion!

A few days later I find a card in the lobby. The card has the new brand scheme and reads, in part “Over the coming months, Hawthorn Hotel & Suites will transform into 5 Calgary Downtown Suites.” Okay, so this is an ongoing project. But the entire experience is confusing; it doesn’t suggest transition, it is just a mishmash of radically different brands. This card was sorta hidden; one had to be poking around to stumble across it. It’s the only place they acknowledge the transition; the rest of the time the hotel presents all this as if it’s normal. But really, it was just odd.

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The room number says we’re at the Hawthorn.

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But the apples say we’re at the five. Apples? They took the trouble to order brand stickers for apples, but they couldn’t change the door numbers? I was really surprised.

Finally, I was a total sucker for the website branding, like I said, expecting JetBlue. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was like when we’d visit a distant great aunt in an apartment building in Winnipeg in the 70s. It was seriously dated, and not well-kept.

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The kitchen featured a stove from the Mesozoic era.

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And really cheesy cupboards.

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An access panel in the bathroom was old, dirty, and loose.

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Not to mention this disgusting vent in the bathroom.

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The living room was typical of the “suite” – outdated, poorly maintained. I think we found some remnants of painter’s tape from whatever remodeling they had done. Who knows how long it had been there.

Anyway, it worked out fine (although their free breakfast was disgusting and they never had enough staff or food to handle the traffic flow even on a weekday), but I was struck by how different the hotel experience was from what the branding had led me to believe – or what I had let myself believe based on that.

Poor interoperability is a major challenge to good user experience design.

This type of thing seems disturbingly common nowadays: I am preparing to book a hotel for an upcoming conference. The hotel is part of a chain I’ve never stayed at before, so I decide to see if they’ve got some sort of affiliate program or bonus/loyalty/mileage thing, before I book.

I sign up for the program and get my number about 12 hours later. I tried to book online but because I was looking for a conference rate (without a code) I gave up and ended up calling.

And they don’t show my loyalty number.

I’m looking at the auto-generated email, with the number in bold text. And we try several times. They try my name, everything. And give up. Even though I have the “receipt” on hand. No dice.

So the convenience factor – not having to read out every single piece of contact info I’ve already entered, not having to specify room preferences that I’ve already entered, all gone.

They pointed me to the service number for the loyalty program, and the person I speak with explains it may take 7 to 10 days for a newly issued number to be available to the rest of the hotel systems (such as reservations). He was able to quickly put the number into my reservation for credit, and both people I spoke to were incredibly helpful and genuine (besides being forced to read some clunky scripts), so this isn’t really a complaint about bad service, but really an eyebrow-raised in amazement over bad design.

Shouldn’t a requirement of the system they design to create and issue the loyalty numbers be rapid integration with the reservation system? Isn’t a likely use scenario going to be booking of a reservation very quickly after creating a new account? IT systems in silos is scary for what it prevents.

I guess the band-aid would have been to explain this limitation in their “welcome” email but that might have been too big a peek behind the curtain. They did inform me it would take 48 hours to issue the new account at the beginning of all this (although that also seems silly, what are they doing, checking my references?)…

In general, poor interoperability is a major challenge to creating a good user experience. And this example seems highly typical.

Recently nytimes.com rolled out an integration of their home delivery accounts and web-content accounts (I think to help sell their premium access service), but they did it in a terribly clumsy and confusing way, leading to service calls to agents who had no information (I was told, after a lot of vague language like “when you go out of the system you have to come back and and when it asks for your account you enter your number” to wait 24 hours and try again) and no interest in helping (“this is all the information we have. We can only read this out to you; that’s all we can do.”)…a disaster, as far as I am concerned. Maybe it’ll be better now, but the NYT hurt their brand pretty badly, at least in my case.

Check-out, opt-out, crap-out


You’ll probably need to click on this picture to make it large enough to read it. It’s a detail of the invoice from my recent stay at a Hilton. As usual, they encourage the rapid check-out where you leave the keys in the room, take this document with you, and don’t even bother to stop at the front desk.
In this case, however, they’ve added a “violator” – a gold sticker with a bunch of extra info. Looks like they are planning to send out mail surveys, and it’s opt-out, not opt-in. To opt-out, I’d have to stop by the front desk on my way out, exactly what the Zip-Out Check-Out (R) is designed to avoid.
I did not bother, and I guess maybe I’ll actually complete the survey since that will be my chance to tell them i) how crappy the room was (the desk lamp was broken – I mean badly broken, with the bulb-assembly bent over at 90 degrees, the power plug didn’t work)
ii) how crappy the food was (my chicken wrap was made with chicken that was grilled, then frozen, then thawed to assemble the sandwhich – partially thawed – nothing like chicken icicles in your dinner
iii) how crappy the service was (what kind of business hotel – and this place was in an office park, business accomodation is the only reason is exists – doesn’t offer a breakfast-room-service-hang-tag deal where you can order your breakfast before you go to bed and it’ll arrive at the time you specify)

As far as i) I guess I get some lame points myself for not telling them about it, so the next visitor will have the same discovery. When you arrive at 9:15 pm and you have to eat and get work done, it’s not like you want to be dealing with workers in your work or the frustration of the whole repair/request process. Clearly they don’t check out stuff that is broken that badly and they (ineffectively) rely on the guests to take care of the notification.

Magazines Find Ways to Include Unconventional Elements in Deals With Marketers

The New York Times reports on the results of a project I was involved in last year.

And Rodale has signed a deal with the Westin lodging chain with a lengthy list of unconventional elements.

For example, editors of a Rodale magazine, Runner’s World, are training employees of Westin hotels to be ‘running concierges,’ helping guests navigate local streets or parks with customized maps bearing the Westin and Runner’s World brands.

Westin will become the sponsor of Runner’s World races around the world.

Also, Westin guests will find in their rooms free copies of Rodale magazines and copies of Rodale books available for purchase like bathrobes.

Also in the rooms will be offers for discounts on Rodale books like ‘Lance Armstrong: Images of a Champion’ and ‘Eat Smart, Play Hard,’ as well as discount offers for subscriptions to Rodale magazines like Best Life, Bicycling, Men’s Health and Women’s Health along with Runner’s World. (Rodale employees are also being offered discounts on rooms at Westin hotels.)

Interestingly, the client was neither of these companies; the client was an technology firm looking to help Starwood (the parent of Westin) improve the gym experience for their guests. As part of their offering to Starwood, this IT company brought in a user-centered/innovation/design-y/ethnographic (etc.) methodology that led to a number of recomendations, not all of which would make use of the IT that the client wanted to develop/sell. The focus was on the overall experience.

As so often happens, since my consulting work takes place in the very early stages, it’s hard to find out what happened with a project, and here I happened to stumble upon this story in the newspaper.

How do the spammers know I’ve always wanted to travel to Turkey?

From: “Hotel Asena Beach”
To: steve
Subject: sales dep.
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 02:33:16 +0200

Dear Sir/Madam,
We are hotelier in Turkey / Fethiye
our hotel is by the Oludeniz which is the best beach choise in Turkey.
We woul like to work with your company for summer 2002.
For more information please contact us.Here are our room rates for your company

PERÔø?YOD DBL.PP.HB SING.SUPP. EXTRA BED CHD 7-12
APRIL 10 EURO FREE %50 FREE
MAY 18 EURO %50 %50 %50
JUNE 25 EURO %50 %50 %50
JULY 37 EURO %50 %50 %50
AUGUST 37 EURO %50 %50 %50
SEPTEM 27 EURO %50 %50 %50
OCTOBER 18 EURO %50 %50 %50

PS:PLEASE REPLY TO FAX:+90 252 617 0487

With Sincere Best Wishes
Suleyman BUYRUK
Reservation Supervisor

HOTEL ASENA BEACH
Belcekiz mevkii
Oludeniz/Fethiye
48340 Mugla/Turkiye

TEL :+90 252 617 0154
FAX :+90 252 617 0487
GSM :+90 533 650 0239
http://www.asenabeach.com
e-mail :info@asenabeach.com

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