Frog. The future guest at the hotel environment.

2. a new brand
bargain:
their own data in exchange
for their own Experience

3. YOUR FUTURE GUEST
are you ready? They are standing at your front desk posting pics
of your very long line. They are sitting at a café across the street
pinching photos of your bathrooms while texting reviews of
their latest favorite cortado, made from beans with names. Their
phones are navigating them to their preferred hotels with their
special diet room service where they are forming passionate
opinions they will share with thousands of friends
some 3,000 miles away who look, in real time, at
myBreakfast! #yourhotelname.
future guests
are a network of
rogue researchers
Your future guests have already arrived, but
to what? On one hand, many hotels still
charge for WIFI in a world of free access,
still infuriate with hidden fees in a world
of radical transparency, and in a landscape
of unprecedented convenience, still place
inoperable alarm clocks on nightstands
that obstruct the room’s only outlet. On the
other, some hotels have begun to meet the hard
question head on: what happens when everyone
is always watching? They mine social networks to try
to predict how to improve their service. They know their
guests better and they know the guests already know all about
them. They know the guest has seen the real pics, has heard
the real stories, has read the complaints and the raves. They
acknowledge the unnerving fact: future guests are a network of
rogue researchers who pack an exploding sense of entitlement.
Some hotels are beginning to realize that disparate, individually
designed moments add up to something bigger—for both the
guest and the market.
These changes represent much more than free WIFI, more
outlets in the rooms and an app for that. Your future guests
are arriving on a tidal wave of data. The same data
that has powered a radically different experience
online and is transforming retail. Your future
guests bring to your doorsteps expectations
of an endless stream of features and radical
personalization. While all this information
may seem just increased complexity, an
entirely new dimension begins to develop
when you bring intimate data into the
interaction space between your guest and
your brand. How your brand addresses
trust, transparency, control and value will
determine the nature of the relationship. When
deeply personal information swirls into remote
databases everywhere, your future guest strikes a
who pack an exploding
sense of entitlement.
new brand bargain: their own data in exchange for their
own Experience. Your response to this request will make the
difference in the market.
Your future guests have already arrived,

4. Your guests choose the brand willing to
differentiate, to win them over, and to help
them build their own social capital. The
bargain made overt: “I know you know the
stores I shop, the food I eat and where I eat
it, even my current health. Show me you
can make up for my tough trip. Customize
my experience and personalize my room.
Deliver things I didn’t even know about
myself.” Customers will expect the ability to
participate in designing a unique experience
with a hospitality partner. They will assume
you have gathered information about how
to improve your product. They will offer
explicit information and feedback to help
you take the customization further. Your
guests will not only expect increasing
relevance, but experience dissatisfaction
and frustration with the less relevant. As
irrational as it may sound, they take it
personally. They express their personal
values in the brands they choose, and the
experiences they co-design.
As your product extends beyond the
bookends of check-in and check-out, even
beyond the planning and unpacking, the
moments you need to design multiply. You
now have a constellation of touchpoints to
design. This new guest path must expand
what you currently think of as your product.
You must find the flexibility to deliver
very different experiences. The previous
model accommodates episodic, linear
change, not the exploding, splintering new
expectations—not useful in predicting
future expectations. You will need a new
framework to organize and activate the bits
& pieces of interactions and outputs that
make up your guest’s experience with your
brand. You must architect the sum total
of all that enables your brand and service
vision--all of the people, tools, technologies,
and processes in a moment-to-moment
execution. The platform will allow the move
from responsive through interactive to
predictive. It is an evolution into a new breed
of product-customer intimacy. And the
resulting experiences will create a sustainable
differentiation for your guests, already
checked in and unpacked, and appearing on
screens to sing lullabies to their children,
who are your future guests, waking to a new
and improved set of features and their own
set of expectations.
Customize my experience and personalize my room.
Deliver things I didn’t even know about myself.

5. You will need a
new framework
to organize and activate the
bits & pieces of interactions and
outputs that make up your guest’s
experience with your brand.

6. frog works with the world’s leading companies, helping them to design, engineer,
and bring to market meaningful products and services. With an interdisciplinary
team of more than 600 designers, strategists, and software engineers, frog
delivers connected experiences that span multiple technologies, platforms, and
media. frog works across a broad spectrum of industries, including consumer
electronics, telecommunications, healthcare, energy, automotive, media,
entertainment, education, finance, retail, and fashion. Clients include Disney,
GE, HP, Intel, Microsoft, MTV, Qualcomm, Siemens, and many other Fortune
500 brands. Founded in 1969, frog is headquartered in San Francisco, with
locations in Amsterdam, Austin, Boston, Milan, Munich, New York, Seattle,
and Shanghai. frog is a company of the Aricent Group, a global innovation and
technology services firm.
www.frogdesign.com
© 2013 Aricent Group All rights reserved. All Aricent brand and product names are service marks,
trademarks, or registered marks of Aricent Inc. in the United States and other countries.