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Inspiration
Optimizing for the end of your resort guests’ experiences.

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GREGG
BLANCHARD
   

There’s a fascinating type of experiment that is built around the idea of people experiencing something uncomfortable. Perhaps painful. The setup is that you have each person in the experiment feel this discomfort twice for the same amount of time.

The rub is that one of those times instead of stopping the discomfort at the end of that timeframe, you lessen the discomfort slightly but you extend the time.

In other words, they actually feel discomfort longer but the ending is less unpleasant.

What’s wild is that if you then ask those people which version they would want to do again, the majority of people will choose the longer version with the better ending.

The lesson is simple but profound:

How an experience ends plays a huge role in the overall perception and memory of the experience.

In that video above from one of my favorite YouTubers, Veritasium, Derek explains all of the fascinating implications of this including, as you guessed it, travel.

There are a lot of things we do to help our guests have a great time. Many of things are front-loaded – a pre-arrival email, for example, that helps ensure their trip starts well – but I want you to take a few minutes today to ponder on what you can do to optimize for the ending of someone’s trip. The last day or hours or moments when they’re at your resort.

Maybe they had a pretty good time, but the snow wasn’t great. Maybe the had all sorts of delays during their travels to the mountain. Maybe the lift lines were terrible.

The idea that if you give them a little something in the middle of that experience, it may have a much smaller effect on the perception of their overall experience that if they get that something at the end? That you can overcome at least a portion of a poor experience by putting a little extra effort and attention onto the way each guests wraps up their day or week at your resort?

That’s a fascinating idea to ponder on.

And that’s all I’m suggesting you do today. Add this idea to your brain, let it simmer, see what dots connect, and, whether it’s next week or next year, maybe it’ll spark some interesting ideas.


About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.

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