Worrying about the Future of Travel? Try Shakespeare.

Getting the act together and cutting out the dull bits. Instead of silently watching the market going irreversibly online, the travel agencies will have to establish themselves as experts in areas that aren’t as easily taken over by online media as logistics. One of them is the creation, framing and arrangement of deep emotional experiences.

Dramaturgy is about setting the frame for such experiences

Travelling is about building experiences. One core principle of Kuoni vows to make all of our efforts absolutely centeredcentred on the customer experience. The Customer Experience Design Project is exclusively dedicated to this. Taking dramaturgical ideas from movie and theatre, we set out to orchestrate a waterproof and coherent arc of travelling. Our thesis: We don’t sell holiday trips, we supply experiences.

What does the Dramaturgy Project do?

The future of the travel industry will depend on the fact whether it will be able to play an active role in the travelling experience of the customer. Traditionally, customers have been left alone doing the “experience work”. Why not perfecting the frame for it? It comes down to questions such as these: Did someone try to get the traveller excited about his trip? How? Does this someone know what kind of climactic emotions there are at hand? Did they consider that there are three basic steps to each experience?

If you affirm one of these questions even with a tint of diffidence, you’re only halfway there.

But why?

The one industry whose business has always been to produce and distribute experiences – and nothing but experiences – are theatre and the movies. Both set out from the start to a) get and keep your attention, b) take you to the climax and c) round the whole thing off smoothly. When cinema is described as a “joyride”, this of course goes for travelling in a much more literal sense.

Well then. How does it work?

Experiences are nothing isolated. They have the nice trait of being four-dimensional, stretching out through time. There are three basic steps: anticipation, the moment of “experiencing” and, last but certainly not least, reflecting on it. The middle part is what is colloquially referred to as “experience”. But just as movies slowly build up tension, enjoyably culminating in the climax, experiences are to be rolled out step by step for the greatest effect. Think about it: When a gift is wrapped in shiny paper, it is more exciting to open it. When you’ve seen the trailer of a film, you’ll be more eager to watch the movie and put the pieces together. These might be simple examples. But their banality only makes it all the more obvious just how much such details contribute to your actual experience. Shakespeare structured his plays this way, and still being the most played stage author the chap must have known what he was doing.

Travelling works much the same way

That is why experiences should be neatly constructed. They’re built step by step, one knot tightly connected to the next. The trick is finding out how to do this. The experience design concerns the whole of the travelling trip – starting earlier than booking and ending not before the last memories of the vacation have been stored as stories. This is what remains with the customer.

These memories form our actual enduring product

We consider every single phase of the trip an important step of the experience. It is noticeable that customers have been left to themselves by tour operators throughout many of the different phases until now. Why? On every single phase, there’s something more we can do for our customers. We aim to change precisely this. We pay close attention to the way people would like to move about in our franchise shops. We think about orientating them at arrival. We adapt our customer communication with a focus on emotional involvement. In the post-modern age, people are used to assemble and work with bits and pieces of information, gleaning them from here and there, slowly creating their own picture of things in the process. As a travel agency it is part of our responsibility not only to make things work on a logistic level, but also to pre-select, arrange and glue these pieces together in a way that makes sense to the customer. And you’ll have to present them to him in an appealing manner, or else why should he bother? You will have to think about where to distribute the information, and how to make it appealing enough to be worthy picking up. You will have to think whether (or not) to stay in touch more closely during the vacation (and how). You’ll have to come up with ideas just what it is that you could do after booking to help add that extra bit of excitement for your customer, and how to keep that engagement throughout the trip, carrying it all the way to the post-trip phase.

They fortunately can’t be forced upon a person. All we can do is give the best possible frame for an integral experience. We might be the expert of tour operating, but when it comes to experience, everybody is their own guru.