The maiden voyage of the cruise ship Britannia made headlines when it launched earlier this yearas the largest cruise ship ever designed for the British holiday market. But the 3,600-passenger Britannia is remarkable for another reason, too: it’s the world’s first co-created cruise ship, writes Dr Nick Coates.
P&O, the company that created the Britannia, asked over 20,000 British travellers what they wanted in a cruise ship. However, P&O went far beyond surveys, working directly with customers, travel experts and staff ̶ from ship captains to deckhands ̶ to solicit ideas for everything from the ship’s design to the passenger experience. The collaboration even gave rise to the core brand ideas behind the Britannia of a “Classic British Mindset” and “Sophisticated Wows.”
From cruise ships, to hotels, to rental car companies, the travel and hospitality industries are increasingly focusing on and investing in customer experience to build loyalty and keep pace with the fast-changing market landscape. Competition from peer-to-peer start-ups such as FlightCar, Airbnb and others provides new ways to travel and experience their destination once they get there.
For travel and hospitality brands, the key to earning customer loyalty is not just to meet customers’ expectations, but to exceed them. Brands which succeed to earn loyalty through aiming for the best possible customer experience have moved away from a traditional transactional view of the customer. Instead of just building deep, ongoing relationships with customers, they opt for so-called conversation-driven innovation.
Moving beyond points-based loyalty programmes
Five million customers and more than US$1 billion in revenue. That’s what Global Hotel Alliance, a consortium of 26 luxury hotel brands across 63 countries, has generated from an idea that came directly from consumers. When GHA wanted to develop a new customer loyalty programme, it decided to collaborate with customers and staff through a combination of private online communities and live workshops.
Through this work, GHA spotted an opportunity – a chink in the armour of the big hotel’s traditional points-based loyalty schemes. Customers were loyal to these point-based schemes but in a very transactional way. It was purely about getting the best deal, not something more emotional, memorable or linked to the brand. So instead, GHA worked with its customers to create a loyalty programme that focused more on creating a more memorable customer experience. So was born GHA’s “Discovery” loyalty based programme. This bucked the trend of points-based loyalty and skipped straight to customer’s hearts – rewarding their loyalty with one-of-a-kind local experiences, something core to the idea of travel.
The effort is succeeding beyond expectations. The Discovery loyalty programme this year grew by 200 percent and customers who use it are five times more likely to come back and stay in one of GHA’s hotel brands. Without authentic relationships with its community of customers, GHA might never have “discovered” a way to disrupt the travel marketplace and build its brand.
Chris Hartley, GHA’s CEO, said hoteliers are often very good at understanding what customers like and value when staying in their hotels but less attuned to the reasons customers pick and switch hotels. The workshops and direct customer and staff feedback helped GHA overcome that by looking at the wider purchase journey.
“It was very helpful to understand that there was a new type of customer evolving ̶ one who had a different view of what would make them change their minds about where they would stay and which hotels they would choose,” Hartley said. “The co-creation is not just with customers. It’s with staff, too. If you actually collaborate, and take politics out of it, and thinking about what the customer really wants and then engage your customers and staff in the creation process, the results are pretty good!”
Other hospitality-industry players are jumping on board, too. As part of its 10,000-square-foot Innovation Lab, Marriott International created a collaboration space for hotel customers, employees, executives and designers to test and refine ideas and concepts for the co-created hotel of the future.
Other hotels including Swissôtel and Westin have created versions of Marriott’s Innovation Lab. For its part, Starwood Hotels and Resorts has created a private community of its own employees to gain first-person knowledge of what’s happening at its 1,200 properties and to come up with innovative ideas to improve the experience of guests.
Creating a better customer experience
The car rental industry is known for poor customer service. However, National Car Rental has made a positive name for itself in customer relations. For National, building an award-winning customer experience starts not with data but with collaborating with and listening to customers. Since 2010, National has partnered with a private, online community of 300 frequent business travellers who share ideas and stories and make recommendations to improve the customer experience. These community members are considered the eyes and ears of the National team, strategic and creative partners with a say in nearly every company decision. They even helped co-create a new mobile app that simplifies the car rental process for National customers.
“Many of the ideas and improvements in the experience that we deliver to our customers were ideas that came straight out of customer feedback,” said Carol Jones, Director of Insights & Intelligence for National Car Rental. “What these people have come to understand is the more they engage with us and the more they give us their ideas, the more we’re able to improve the experience. We’re collaborating with consumers 24-7, 365 days a year.”
The close attention to customer feedback and the resulting improvements has resulted in winning National a growing collection of customer experience accolades, and helped increase membership in its Emerald Club loyalty programme by 27 per cent in four years.
Jones said National’s community members are so involved, they often send images, videos or reports back from an airport if National staff members are unavailable. “They really are an extension of our department,” she said.
The notion of customers as “an extension of our team” is a theme that characterizes many successful co-creation efforts. For P&O, creators of the Britannia cruise ship, the extended team included customers as well as staff from every level of the business. The core creative team spent four weeks living on-board P&O cruise ships to immerse themselves in the passengers’ lives. This included observation, interviews, diary tasks, talking with staff behind the scenes, and having dinner with a different group of passengers every night. Real conversations led to a deeper understanding of the passenger’s on-board experience.
After the four week immersion, the team brought passengers, staff and company executives together in a daylong co-creative workshop dubbed “the Big Talk.” The workshop helped define the creative brief for the on-board experience, brand positioning and the partners P&O should choose to bring this vision to life. Traditionally, cruise ships are designed by ship specialists who make rational recommendations based on utilization of space. However, this is sometimes at the expense of customer experience. For example, you can end up with a kid’s play area located directly above an expensive restaurant. For Britannia, P&O bucked the trend and partnered with a luxury hotel architect, Richmond International, to design all of the public areas on-board.
Even before Britannia’s launch back in March the positive results of the co-creation effort were clear. Bookings for Britannia saw an 81 percent increase compared to all prior P&O launches, a new record for the company.
And finally…
In today’s travel market, consumers have so many choices that companies have no room for error. With a growing number of disruptive competitors snapping at their heels, established travel brands can no longer rest on their laurels. Deep consumer insight, understanding and collaboration can no longer be viewed as a nice to have and a cost to the business. It is now a source of competitive advantage and a critical investment in the company’s future and a strong bottom line.
Dr. Nick Coates is Consultancy Director CSpace
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