Talk to me in terms of guest and employee experience and what you've seen the biggest changes have been pre-pandemic and now where we are today. In the new world, in the post-pandemic world where trips like I'm taking right now might happen once a month or once a quarter, I'm no longer driven by what I like to refer to as the subsidized loyalty, right? My company was paying for me to be on the road every week and therefore I was willing to accept some challenges in my stay that maybe I won't accept in the future. So making sure that the employee is aware of that factor and that loyalty needs to be re-earned and that arming them with a set of tools that allows them to deliver on that loyalty promise or to remind guests why they've chosen your brand is really important.
Why is it that you should think about guest and employee together holistically? It's the only way to deliver on the expectations. One of the best product managers I've ever worked with likes to say happiness is reality minus expectations. And the way you deliver on high quality expectations that you've made in let's say the front end of your digital booking process is to enable the people on site to do that as well. And we get real hung up on the idea that personalization is the path to that, right? We want to be able to predict your needs. We want to be able to get you the right type of bathrobe in a hotel or the right type of seat on an airline. But what's just as important is that you deliver on the little things around the experience that you may have set an expectation on early on but isn't necessarily part of your huge brand promise that may cost you loyalty in the future. If I'm a regular airline passenger for a particular major air carrier and all of the sudden you miss on one of the small things, then the next time I go to reconsider my booking and I know that my points aren't going to be as powerful in the future, if that employee wasn't enabled or empowered to deliver on an exceptional experience, I might not come back in the future. And that's not personalization. That's delivering against expectations.
How do you go about designing a journey that looks across digital and physical and kind of meshes the two together? Yeah. I mean, years ago we probably would have said understand your personas and your journeys, right? But that might be a little cliche at this point. If you think about it as a journey and you understand that the beginning of a journey might be out of your control and the end of the journey might be out of your control because if you're a hotel company, you really only control the stay, right? Recognize that the handoffs between those touch points, let's say from booking airline to getting to the hotel to then staying, if you can simplify and deliver on an experience that links those two together, that's really powerful. That's one part. I think the next part is, without sounding too cliche, is then you have to think about the modes inside the stay, right? While you're in a stay or while you're on a plane, you're not just on the flight journey or in the hotel journey. You're actually having these micro experiences along the way that are moments for our brands to surprise and delight someone, right? And if you've empowered someone with technology, an employee, to deliver an exciting or compelling moment to a guest, you may have taken that small step to earning real loyalty, right? Loyalty to a brand because you feel like they're going to deliver something to you that may be an equivalently priced competitor and may not. So it's really important to think about not just the journey, but then maybe the micro journeys or the modalities that you're in in between.