“Experience rules”: a scenario for the hospitality and leisure industry circa 2010 envisions transformation

During the next decade and beyond, hospitality and leisure companies will embrace business models that focus on mass customizing travel experiences. As a result, in 2010, travel will be about engaging in powerful, seamless personal experiences that are carefully tailored to learning and catering to the tastes and demands of individual travelers. Two key forces are driving this trend on both the demand side and the supply side: globalization that allows more people to go more places, and technological advancements that will fuel economic growth and enable companies to provide experiences on demand. Most travel and leisure companies will need to make significant changes to be successful participants in this new experience marketplace. Travel companies that wish to offer differentiated experiences must do the following between now and 2010: promote customer‐experience centricity; brandish the brands: aggressively launch measures to re‐affirm the brand positioning; personalize with precision; focus on the fundamentals: guest service, revenue management, and brand building to offer a better quality product and more customized guest service with a lower cost structure; shift focus of personal: use technology for transactional tasks; refocus employees on value‐added guest services; reinvent sales and distribution using an integrated direct connect mechanism (IDCM); leverage technology advances in numerous aspects of the operations.