Small Luxury Hotels
Reinventing the luxury traveler’s experience one text message at a time.
Small Luxury Hotels, one of the world’s premier collections of boutique luxury accommodations, needed a way to put themselves on the map amidst a sea of changing customer expectations. We reimagined what every step of a customer’s journey could look like through the lens of a text-message based, personalized concierge.
Mapping The Complex Luxury Traveler
The process began with extensive research into the changing landscape of luxury travel. Our core persona, Amy, emerged. We emphasized the complexity of Amy, what her needs were, and highlighted interesting contradictions. These contradictions fed an innovation workshop to reimagine how SLH would interact with their customers.
Customer Journey Mapping: SMS Style
Our resulting customer journey map centered around an SMS concierge. Every interaction across the journey tied back to the concierge in some way. We demonstrated where there were data-gathering and learning opportunities which ultimately fed back into the system and "trained" the concierge on each individual customer.
Experience Map: Show Don't Tell
An Experience Map is a customer journey elevated through design. For SLH it served as the complete view of the SMS concierge and how it enhanced our customers' journeys. The Experience Map covered phases from booking through to returning home, showing fully-realized UX touchpoints.
Outcomes: Innovation Pilot
The Experience Map rallied the SLH organization around the SMS concierge, which led to the green-light of a pilot test. For the first phase, the pilot was handled through human interaction. The guests thoroughly enjoyed the enhanced experience, and the project was to continue development. Unfortunately, the Covid 19 pandemic halted travel and stopped production of the SMS concierge.
