Applying A Sense Of Place To The Customer Experience: A Hospitality Exploration

By Micah Solomon (that’s me). Originally published in Forbes.com. The author is a consultant, influencer, keynote speaker, and trainer in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, and hospitality. (Here are three ways to reach Micah:email, chat, web).

Local relevance and a sense of place are among the most important themes in the customer experience today. Everywhere a consumer may go today, from retail to hotels to restaurants, they’ll encounter companies and brands that are striving to tie themselves as closely to the locale as they can, closer to what can be called “localization” or “terroir.” This latter term is the French word for the convergence of factors—geography, climate, and so forth—that go into making a local wine, but the concept works well when extended to nearly all aspects of the customer experience.

The companies making these localization attempts are particularly interested in how these changes resonate, or don’t, with younger guests, including the trendsetting and financially important millennial generation of travelers. This being thematically important to a book that Micah, a customer experience consultant and author, is currently working on, and having such a traveler on hand (hi, that's me–Lila, Micah's daughter, age 17), we had a thought: Why not make the most of that inherent millennial point of view to help answer these questions, while managing to have a sunny good time in the process? We found three properties close to each other in Waikiki at varying star levels with what we expected would be diverse atmospheres and hospitality styles and allocated our week of vacation among them, allowing us to experience how hotels of different stripes engage their guests with what is locally unique.

A note to entrepreneurial readers: At the bottom of this article is a "pointers" section detailing how to apply the concept of localization or terroir to your own business as well. 

Our first glimpse of the extent to which the hospitality industry will go to involve their guests in local culture and history was a monumental 30-foot by 60-foot carved wooden sculpture in the sprawling lobby of the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort & Spa. According to the hotel’s historian (the fact that the Marriott has its own local historian shows how strongly they’ve embraced this hospitality trend) Waianu Ahquin, the sculpture was carved by Native Hawaiian artist Kaiwi Nui Yoon in homage to Queen Liliuokalani, who was the last monarch (and only queen) of the Kingdom of Hawaii.

The hotel, says Ahquin, who holds court in the lobby, sharing information and spinning yarns for guests, was built on the site of the queen’s summer home, where her passion for hospitality was often on display. She was particularly known for greeting her houseguests with original music she had composed, which she sang and played on the ukulele, including her composition, “Aloha ’Oe,” (Farewell to Thee), which is still well-known today thanks to recordings from dozens of artists, from Elvis Presley to Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwoole.

The late queen's long-departed home also served as base camp for an excursion to visit the giant green turtles that grace the local waters, a voyage arranged for us by the Marriott Rewards Moments program. This is a program for Rewards members with a variety of offerings that often explicitly embrace the concept of terroir, connecting guests with local experiences, from chef-led food tours in locales from Brooklyn to Hong Kong to visits to the Gion (Geisha) district in Kyoto with a bilingual guide to, well, swimming with the giant turtles, an opportunity that literally immersed us in something unique about the locale in a way that couldn’t be achieved within the confines of a hotel.

That immersion came after a half-hour’s catamaran cruise toward the reef, where Lila, with her young eyes, was the first of our 15-person group to spot the massive but well-camouflaged turtles. These lovely creatures seemed entirely unafraid of people, repeatedly surfacing within just a few feet of us, although we were warned by the skipper not to touch them or get too close (as has become a local issue of late and grounds for a hefty fine).

A sense of locale and local history was literally growing on the grounds of the second hotel we visited, the Westin Moana Surfrider. A statuesque, multi-trunked banyan tree, older than the hotel and too big to squeeze into a photo even with the widest camera lens we’d brought, holds center stage in the hotel’s open courtyard, right in the middle of what is now the Beach House Restaurant. The tree’s name is “Deva,” we learned in the mini-museum the hotel maintains upstairs, which documents Deva through archival photography of her in her youth.

The museum also houses the hotel’s “transient record,” a momentous-looking tome, larger than a wizard’s spellbook, within which cursive handwriting dating back a hundred years records the comings and goings of visitors to the locally and historically important Surfrider. (Although younger than Deva, the Moana Surfrider is the oldest hotel in Waikiki by a wide margin. Its architecture, dating to 1901, seems straight out of a James Bond scene when elegance still reigns–right up until the villainy and chaos erupt.)

Just inside the front door of the Moana Surfrider is a bullpen of concierges, each of whom is just itching to help any guest who wanders by. One of them, Carolyn, has an irrepressible comedic sensibility. When asked about the location of the hotel gift shop, she deadpanned, “I have no idea,” then relaxed her poker face to confess that it was just feet away from where we were standing. So it was Carolyn we consulted when we were in need of guidance for local afternoon activities.

Taking one look at the two of us–millennial daughter and boomer dad–she suggested, “Do you mind splitting up?” and sent Lila off in search of the most local food the city had to offer, a mission Lila cheerfully took on–armed with not only the concierge’s recommendations but with her apps and a millennial’s unerring instinct for finding the hidden places and dishes (such as, she would later report, poi–a taro root pudding that’s “a bit of an acquired taste”) that embody the heart of a locale.

Lila also found her way to Waikiki’s most famous natural landmark, this one more Lyftable than walkable from the hotel: Diamond Head, the uniquely shaped extinct volcano that towers over the shoreline. The Diamond Head trail starts inside the volcano's crater, and the steep hike to the rim of the volcano–bring water and reef-safe sunscreen–offers panoramic views of the entire city of Honolulu, of which Waikiki is a beachfront neighborhood.

Having helped the millennial adventurer plot out her afternoon, Carolyn returned her attention to Micah, sending him directly to the famous row of rocking chairs on the historically significant wooden front porch of the Surfrider, for what she must have felt would be a restorative “adventure” for his jetlagged Boomer bones.

Just steps down the Waikiki beach from the Moana Surfrider is the Royal Hawaiian Resort, immediately recognizable from Mad Men and the movies, and the final stop of our visit. Dating from 1927, the grand, strikingly pink hotel (it’s likely the “pink hotel” in Joni Mitchell’s timeless “Big Yellow Taxi,” though we didn’t notice any unseemly parking lots) was planned and built by steamship company Matson Navigation for upper-crust passengers who sailed on their steamers. Legend has it that the original rooms in the hotel were built to face away from the ocean, the theory being that after weeks at sea guests would be eager for a change of scene. Happily, at some point in the course of the nine decades since, this questionable approach was remedied, and we were able to enjoy spectacular sea views from our balconies, uh, make that “lanais.”

In the early 1950s, in a prescient application of the now-raging hospitality trend for “terroir,” Matson Navigation commissioned Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron to develop a signature drink for their hotel, and the Mai Tai was born. Multiple variations of the juicy cocktail can still be found on the menu at the hotel’s beachfront Mai Tai bar. And when we say “beachfront,” we mean it literally: The Royal Hawaiian and the Moana Surfrider, being the two oldest hotels in Waikiki, are the only resorts here with their own private strips of beach. Guests can dip their toes directly into the sand upon leaving the libation station at the Mai Tai Bar (this doesn’t mean you, Lila!, says Micah) or Moana Surfrider’s Beach House Restaurant and Bar, and there’s no rule that once you refresh yourself in the water you can’t come back to the bar for more.

On our final evening, the Royal Hawaiian staff encouraged us to take part in another longstanding local tradition, their long-running beachfront luau, which the hotel has hosted for decades every Monday and Thursday evening. Most immediately affecting were traditional vocal island harmonies and “sacred steel” guitar, and, later in the evening, the authentic hula dancing (which was not, by the way, as tarted up as you’d expect from the Mad Men episode) and other traditional aspects of the show. And, in spite of Micah’s fears that there would be too many 64th-wedding anniversary announcements by the emcee and other hard-to-relate-to festivities for a millennial to fully enjoy the experience, Lila says she enjoyed the luau as well–or, at least, in her own, carefully hedged words, “it was considerably less cheesy than I expected.”

*****

Business Pointers for Readers: Applying the concept of terroir to your own company or brand

Customers today judge a business in part by the signifiers of authenticity that can be called “localization” or “terroir.” Here are four pointers for succeeding at this with your own business.

? Your physical plant’s design, finishes, and furnishings should embody the sensibility–including the quirks–of your locale.  To create commercial spaces that fit the current "terroir" zeitgeist, make use of materials that don’t look entirely polished but instead include rough-hewn elements where the “hand” of the artisan still shows in the work, ideally in ways that evoke the locale in which your business is located.

? Speak the local language. This is not to suggest that a business in Boston should necessarily refer to itself as “wicked good” (though a few Boston brands do), but look for opportunities to be in touch with the local dialect in subtler ways. For example, the Fairmont in Maui does well in referring to its babysitting option as its “club for keiki between the ages of 5 and 12,” “keiki” being the Hawaiian word for children, while other nationally-owned but Hawaii-located businesses misfire here by calling them “children” or “kids," in foolish consistency with the term they use at their other, mainland-based properties.

? Dress your employees the way the locals dress. Employees at Andaz Hotels, an innovative hospitality brand from Hyatt, select and purchase their own “uniforms,” which are actually clothing that was created for each individual hotel by a local designer who represents the vibe of the hotel’s surrounding community. Employees buy the clothes off the rack to fit their own shape and size. (Don't worry; they’re reimbursed.)

 Your service style should be locally appropriate. Different locales vary in how formal they are, on average, and a customer service style that is consonant with this will tend to make your business seem in touch and in tune. The concierge’s irreverent humor worked great in beachy, flip-floppish Waikiki–even within the lobby of her luxurious hotel–but it might have gone over poorly in the lobby of a similarly luxurious hotel in Milan or New York.

Micah Solomon is an author, consultant, influencer, thought leader, keynote speaker, trainer, and subject matter expert (SME) in customer service, customer experience, customer service culture, hospitality, innovation. (email, chat, web).