Are you a trend-led early adopter, fastidious planner, or carefree wanderer? Discover what your travel choices say about you and find new corners of the globe to seek out. Regardless of who you are, the new Marriott Travel Personality Quiz delivers a fitting experience for you!
Marriott has moved further into personalizing Travel Search with its new quiz that asks: what is your travel personality? It starts by asking guests to “choose a morning pick-me-up” and offers three pictures.
The pictures show:
1. First, a Croissant and regular coffee labeled ‘Continental Breakfast’;
2. Second, a Cappuccino labeled ‘Flat White’;
3. Third, a health fix with images of jars of raw juices and green vegetables.
For me, it was a toss-up between a Cappa and the raw juice – actually, I often have both but I chose the Cappa in this case.
There are 10 questions like this, each gleaning insights into the personality preferences of the user. The second question establishes what landscapes you prefer. Of course, the choices say much more that meets the eye. They are designed to probe and reveal a travel personality that can be matched with the right holiday experience.
Whether you choose a country idyll, an other-worldly gem or wide-open spaces you are declaring something much more about yourself than your image preference. I chose wide-open spaces and that implies a scene of freedom, perhaps a need to get away from crowds and someone looking for an experience off the beaten path.
The 10 questions are fun and easy to complete and at the end they show you who they think you are – and offer a suitable holiday experience. I chose based on what I like to do and was dubbed “the cool hunter”.
The Cool Hunter
“You’ve always gone your own way and trusting your instincts seems to pay off. Despite not being slavish to trends, your holidays tend to be the subject of envy among your circle. Friends admire your spontaneous streak, which stems from your innate individualism.”
The report was a full page of images and description. Not bad – you do say a lot by the choosing the images that appeal to you.
It told me what my perfect break was: “Dramatic landscapes and areas of outstanding natural beauty feed your imagination – just make sure there’s some life and soul nearby. A city break could also work for a nature lover like you, as long as you have access to green spaces, or you’re located on the coast.”
And suggested 3 option:
Moscow Marriott Royal Aurora Hotel, Russia
Courtyard Boston Downtown, US
The Lexington New York City, Autograph Collection, US
Travel is About the Experience
The whole point of this exercise is to try to make travel planning more experiential. It is a specialized implementation that works well for Marriott properties. Clearly, Marriott has shown that personality matters and experiences are what people are looking for. Something more general is needed for destination marketing organizations and other chains, as well as booking engines.
Conventional Travel Search is Seldom About the Experience
The conventional way of searching for holiday options and hotels is to search by location, price and amenities. This is a commodity search, as you might expect for a supermarket shopping cart. But amenities, price and location do not capture or describe the experience. Personality does and today we have expert systems that can predict personality from travelers’ choices and preferences. Not every traveler will want to go through a quiz but there are many ways we can discern who they are using the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.
The new systems like the PersonaHolidays app is fascinating travelers with its uncanny ability to match them up with hotels that complement their character and offer the sort of experience that is meaningful to them personally.
Create Personality Matching Experiences for YOUR Guests
PersonaHolidays has pioneered in this area and is now licensing its Personality Matching Technology to destination marketing organizations, chain hotels, hotel associations and hotel and tourism marketers. You can see more about it athttp://technology.fascinatingtravelers.com
Destination Marketers now have a new application that can literally transform travel planning and bookings. It’s the latest application by PersonaHolidays, which is used by the Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia and their Destination Marketing website. The app helps hotels groups and destination management organizations provide a better service to travelers using Personality Matching New Age Destination Marketing.
In this video of the Barbados East Coast eclectic hotels, we see a number of resorts that appeal to connoisseur travelers – those who like elegance with a bit of twist. It’s a rugged place on the Atlantic Ocean. Here waves roll in across a sea that stretches 4000 miles straight out to England with nothing in between. The waves can be massive at time and the place vibrates with the energy of the sea and the constant wind. You can get a sense of this in the video here:
Nuances of Character Connect Emotionally
What is most intriguing about this are the nuances of which spots are best suited for the different traveler personalities who enjoy rustic chic. They are a varied lot and the new personality matching app, which you can see live on the Barbados PersonaHolidays personality matching page, dishes up the very best option for each of the many personalities. Check it out to see and also look at the article which gives a general description of how it works.
There are several hotels that have been psychologically profiled using the PersonaHolidays Personality Brand Assessment. The assessment, which used Sally Hogshead Fascination Advantage Archetypes, gives a pretty good summary of the brand’s emotional appeal. That tells the system what sort of people the brand most appeals to.
Hotel Brands have Different Emotional Appeals
Atlantis Hotel, they say, is for the Avant Garde. That’s because it scored high on prestige and innovation. This implies that it appeals to connoisseurs who like a bit of a twist. The test rates personalty on twenty eight points. Hotel brands score very differently based on their ‘why’ and who they are.
In another case, described in the Barbados blog, we discover that the Sea-U Guest House appeals more to the Artisan connoisseur.
As they say “The Sea-U Guest House is decidedly the Artisan personality.”
“It is a small wooded main house and cottages in the Chattel-house style. It is tastefully decorated with mahogany and rustic art among locally hand-crafted clay lamps, batik and rattan chairs. It is cozy and artisan, open and breezy on a cliff by the ocean.”
The choice of decor and style of building is as decidedly artisan as the Owner/Manager who built it and keeps it true to its course.
Artisans, according to the Fascination Advantage assessments, are innovative and loyal. They are deliberate, thoughtful and flexible and score high on trust.
There are other variants – one hotel is the Soulful Connoisseur, another more rustic and frugal. It’s fascinating that in this tiny place, with just a few accommodation types and a very distinct ambience, we find many different personalities, who appreciate different aspects of what each resort offers.
Software Matching Hotel & Travelers by Personality
The PersonaHolidays app created for Destination Marketing organizations has substantially improved travelers’ experience and enjoyment of the holiday planning process; from searching for the right hotel to booking it. In the case of Barbados.org Destination Marketing, it has significantly improved engagement and booking conversion.
Its is a predictive and behavior analysis expert system that operates without intruding. While the hotels are assigned a set of personas, travelers do not have to take any test. The system tracks their behavior and predicts their interest and personal likes. The hotel matchmaker works silently in the background learning with every click. For a detailed description of personality hotel matching using ideas from HowToFacinate see our blog on Fascinating Travelers.com
More Info & Contacts
Personality Matching New Age Destination Marketing
In Fascinating Travelers with PersonaHolidays we examine How to Fascinate Travelers. The article looks at how PersonaHolidays uses the Sally Hogshead’s Fascination Advantage® and learn how it applies to personality matching in hospitality and destination marketing.
Your Difference is Your Strongest Asset
Sally Hogshead of HowtoFascinate.com tells it like it is when she says “Don’t try to change who you are, be more of who you are”. She is an advocate of knowing your difference, which she says is often more important than knowing your strengths. “Instead of focusing on strengths, highlight your differences”. She also adds: “The greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself”.
Sally is the creator of the Fascination Personality Test – the world’s first personality assessment that measures what makes someone fascinating. Unlike the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the StrengthsFinder™ Test, this assessment is not about how you see the world. It’s about knowing what makes you different and focusing on being true to who you are.
How You React Reveals a Distinct Personality Archetype
The test explores how people think and react to different questions. For a hotel brand, we delve a bit deeper into the hotel persona – its certification, awards, how staff and management reaction to situations, how they follow up on TripAdvisor and whether or not they participate on social media. A hotel’s decor, their website design, colors and content reveal and confirm personality. The hotel owners/managers are also invited to do the personal assessment to see how they are motivated.
The essential idea is to see how we are motivated. Sally has observed that there 7 prime ways we communicate that we all share: These are innovation, passion, power, prestige, trust, mystique and alert. The tests are a set of questions that she has developed and perfected over years. It is very concise and frankly amazingly accurate. Check it out here – it’s FREE.
How to Build a Brand That Fascinates Travelers
Sally believes we should “stand out, or don’t bother”. Hoteliers tend to think of themselves in terms of market niche “We are a family hotel, we specialize in romance; Escape to Paradise”.
The problem is that these are not differentiations and they have to a large extent become platitudes. Diego Rodriguez, founder of the Power Marketing Consultants Association, says platitudes are the killer in marketing. As he says: ” A platitude is defined as “words or phrases that are drearily commonplace and predictable, that lack power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition, that nevertheless are stated as though they were original or significant.”
We all know it. But look carefully at your marketing and chances are you will notice you are using platitudes. We all do. Like Diego, Sally urges us to drop the platitudes and niche market obsession and to think instead of Personality. This is the real differentiation. It is exactly what the Fascination Advantage Assessment helps us develop for hotel brands. The archetypes are a large part of differentiation and what happens next enhances that with match-words related to travel.
Live Case Study
In another story, we explained how Persona Holidays matched travelers with hotels based on personality. In summary, every PersonaHolidays hotel has a personality archetype. Using our own travel version of the HowtoFascinate Test, we create a brand archetype identity for each property and relate it to travel personas using travel-related keywords which we call ‘persona matchwords’. These words are the key to hotel-traveler matchmaking based on a personality archetype.
In the example, travelers who are looking for a different ‘off the beaten track holiday escape’ often chose the windswept, wild and rugged Barbados East Coast. They will visit the “Escape to the East in Barbados” page and find hotel characters like the Avant Garde or the Artisan. These are not just words but archetypes which the PersonaHolidays app pairs with travel personas. See the Barbados blog about Personality in Travel for details. Using sally Brand strategies we believe hotels, destination marketers and tourism operators can start Fascinating Travelers by understanding their individual needs and matching them with holiday options that are truly personal.
Brand Personalities
It may seem strange that brands have personalities but, in fact, HowToFacinate (HTF) began as a study of brand and product marketing. That started in 2006 when Sally, who had won many awards as an advertising copywriter working with brands such as MINI Cooper, BMW, Nike, Godiva and Coca-Cola, began studying why some messages got people’s attention while others got ignored.
“Our interdisciplinary study gave us a well-rounded perspective on the science of fascination. It revealed patterns of communication we hadn’t seen before.” From this Sally published Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation. This book became an instant hit with marketers. As she says: ” We began by studying what makes brands and products fascinating. Then we discovered how to take the same system and apply it to people like you.” (Source: HowToFascinate)
Travel Personas are Different
In PersonaHolidays, we do not subject travelers to a test. We do however assess all hotels. We discovered that there is not a consistent correlation between the hotel archetype and the travel persona. An Artisan can be a Connoisseur and a Connoisseur can have many interests: They may be Avant Garde, Artisans, Blue-Chip, Traditional, Conservative, Trendsetters, Outlandish or Soulful. In fact, they may be any one of the 49 archetypes. That is why the ‘persona matchwords’ are an essential part of the holiday and hotel matching process.
The Persona approach is to use the archetype to help us match travelers based on our behavior predictive systems. Hotel archetypes help us create a set of keywords (hotel matchwords) that we match to travel personas we create from a traveler’s search, behavior and nuanced preferences. The result is a personal holiday planning and booking system that is fascinating travelers.
Get Ready to be Fascinated
The first Destination Marketing Organization to license the PersonaHolidays technology is the Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia for its holiday planning and bookings website Holidays.Barbados.org/stay – The installation has been very popular with travelers and bookings has increased significantly. On that site Barbados invites users to “Get ready to be Fascinated” with an “amazing hotel matchmaker that fits your personality”.
Travel Personas are in vogue as this thought-provoking interview reveals. Marriott & Starwood Luxury Brands Travel Personas include three (3) main Personality types of the Luxury Traveler. They match up well with the latest from PersonaHolidays, which we wrote about recently, as it implemented its personal vacation planner across the Barbados Tourism Encyclopedic website, Barbados.org. See this at Barbados Gets Personal.
The travel personas for Marriott/Starwood noted by Tina Edmundson, Marriott’s global brand officer, in her interview with Bloomberg can be compared to the pioneering work done by PersonaHolidays, which has created a personalized travel planning and recommendation engine that can be used by hotel marketers. According to Tina Edmundson, Marriott/Starwood luxury brands include “The Ritz-Carlton, Ritz-Carlton Reserve, Bvlgari, St. Regis, Edition, the Luxury Collection, JW Marriott and W”. She says the collection was designed to represent all luxury customers and adds that Marriott & Starwood Luxury Brands Travel Personas cover all these travelers, no matter their mood or preference.
Tina Edmundson, Marriott’s global brand officer, gives Bloomberg a revealing first look at her vision of the Starwood/Marriot merger. Source: Marriott and Starwood Reveal Future of Their Luxury Brands – Bloomberg
Main Personas Represented by Marriott
Marriott has identified two main luxury travel personas. It has characterized the Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, and JW Marriott as “classic luxury”, while the other five brands are considered purveyors of “distinctive luxury”. “This is largely an indication of style: traditional and business travel-friendly (“classic”) vs. modern and boutique-y.”
Tina adds that their are really more like the “Autograph Collection” which is not accounted for in the above luxury groups. Properties like (Pier One Sydney Harbour; Atlantis Paradise Island) are being considered part of the “distinct premium” portfolio, alongside Le Meridien and Westin. She agreed that there are “some instances where a hotel that’s part of Autograph Collection could be a better fit for the Luxury Collection, and vice versa,” but said the company has “no plans to make any changes.”
Luxury Personas: Classical, Distinctive and Autograph
Tina clarifies as follows: “With Ritz-Carlton, this consumer is really leaning toward discovery. And for St. Regis, it’s really about status and connoisseurship.” Each brand caters to these mindsets—”and those can be blown up to help articulate the differences more clearly.”
Ritz-Carlton, she says, is “for facilitation” and those personas like “to explore a new place”. Ritz, she says, connects people to places, while St. Regis is the place where people want to see and be seen. “The St. Regis customer is looking for the hotel to serve up performances by jazz legends or signature rituals like midnight supper and St. Regis bloody marys.”
PersonaHolidays Comparison
Using aspects of Sally Hogshead’s “HowToFascinate”, PersonaHolidays would see these Marriott types as The Connoisseur (Classical-Ritz) and Avant-Guard (Regis Distinctive) and the Architect (Autograph Collection). The Brand’s Autograph Collection with its Atlantis Paradise Island is tending toward the “mystique” in personality as defined by HowtoFacinate. In all there are 49 HowToFacinate Archetypes which are not travel personas but with the PersonaHolidays engine are converted into personas related to holiday preferences.
In HowToFacinate terms, Brands Archetype are defined by the two main characteristics of how people express themselves and conversely, what determines what they like and need in a holiday experience. They may have one of 7 attributes as the primary attribute – that is, they are primarily power-driven, or motivated by passion, innovation, mystique, trust and mindfulness (alert).
The Connoisseur is Prestige and Passion. Avant-Guard is Prestige and Innovation. The Archictect is Prestige and Mystique. Missing in the Prestige coupling is Power (the Victor), Trust (Blue Chip) and Alert (Scholar) – All have slightly different appeals that PersonaHolidays predicts and matches. You can see this in action on the world’s first implementation of the PersonaHoliday personal vacation planning at holidays.barbados.org/stay
Naturally, archetypes by themselves are not as restrictive as this might imply. For illustration purposes we show how Prestige is a determinant for many travelers looking for a luxury vacation.
Presige is a driving force for most who have high expectation and love elegance and luxury. But it need not be the primary determinant. The travelers who is say more innovative may have prestige as a second or third attribute. If they score higher on both innovation (first) and Prestige (second) that suggest they are something of a Trendsetter – the twin to Connoisseur. This has differences in predicting likes and preferences. Prestige may also not be a key determinant for travelers looking for a luxury holiday, but it often is. Typically is someone is seeking elegance and luxury you will find prestige ranking high in their attributes.
Predicting Travel Personas
The job of the PersonaHolidays Matchwords engine is to predict what hotels best suit the visitor, a job that it learns and perfects with every visitor. For example, the archetype defined by passion and innovation is the Catalyst and her twin is the Rockstar.
There are many travelers like Catalysts and Rockstars who like luxury and for them prestige is not their top characteristics. But if it is a significant parameter in their makeup we would predict that luxury and elegance may well appeal, though it may be tinged with their primary drivers. The personality who score high in Mystique and has a high sore in prestige (Royal-Guard) likes elegance, but typically are more understated, sort of like an understated Connoisseur.
Every personal recommendation engine has to account for these variables in human behavior and personality. That’s the work that the Persona Holidays Match words engine is perfecting with every travel click.
Archetypes are not Travel Personas
Archetypes by themselves are not predictors of travel persons. They are however indicators of aspects or attributes that define a travel-persona. That is why Personholidays uses a lot of behaviors triggers to analyze the travel related attributes of a traveler using the service. Detail behaviors analysis digs deep into Big Data to glean insights, make relations and predict outcomes. Persona-matchwords are the travel related words that are derived from archetypes in conjunction with actual search terms and options.
more about matchwords
Matchwords are similar to words used in matchmaking. They describe the people, places and decor one likes, admires and connects with. It also takes into account interest and how the perceive themselves. Every Person Hotel is described with respect to these same matchwords and building the hosts archetype is a good start, especially for smaller resorts. For larger hotels Persona builds the Brand archetype and integrates that with a more specific questionnaire and interpretation.
As they say Persona is an expert system that analyzes behavior and delivers a product according to personality. It matches hotels with travelers based on compatibility of character using psychology and intelligent observation.
We have tried sales funnels that filter hotel rooms and resorts, by amenities and even travel themes like family holidays or adventure vacations, and keywords like romance. Inf act is been done to an extreme, so much so it has become almost a platitude, or at the very least so overdone it hardly defines a property, place or holiday as unique anymore.
So emotion, personality and personalized behavior responsive travel systems are looking at emotional appeals and one of the biggest events is the news expert systems developed by the folks at http://holiday.barbados.org.
The question, as far as we are concerned, is back to front: It really matters how travel can use more emotion, and the answer is in new forms of differentiation based on personality traits and expert system that include behavior responsive technology and profiling. This is all part of the move to building more intelligent travel planning systems.
According to the Wall Street Journal Apple acquired Emotient, for its artificial intelligence and the technology that “reads people’s emotions by analyzing their facial expressions. A spokesperson for Apple said that the company “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Emotient has patented a method of “collecting and labeling as many as 100,000 facial images per day. “The process allows computers to recognize different facial expressions better. So this technology is bit removed from the day to day travel planning and on line booking systems like the OTAs. In that respect it is a face to face or facial monitoring system that might have travel planning implications at the front desk for check-ins and check-outs and ticketing etc. Emotion can be expressed more discreetly also as in the behavior responsive travel planning and personalized tourism systems referred to above – see http://holidays.barbados.org
The trechnology is also cover in the Slideshare document of Travelers Insights Magazine article on the new travel planniung systems see below:
PSFK’s Founder and Editor-In-Chief, Piers Fawkes tells us that: “Travelers today are looking for an intuitive, rapid and personalized experience.” They understand the trail of contextual data that surrounds them and they expect the smartest travel brands to leverage those data to serve them appropriately.”
Travel companies have to build intelligence systems that understand behavior and anticipate needs offering recommendations that will entice conversion. At AXSES all cast Marketing we are working hard on embedding behavior responsive systems, matchmaking and other personalization techniques into our visual marketing technology. Expect a major announcement on leading technology soon.
Disruptive Trends for 2016- TravelMarket Report
At the same times as this PSFK report comes out, the TravelMarket Report shares thoughts on the disruptive travel marketing trends at aplay right now and extending into the new year.”Even at a time when hotel occupancy rates are soaring in many domestic markets, disruptive forces like the sharing economy, the emerging millennial market, and changing tastes in food and beverage are forcing hospitality industry leaders to rethink the way they do business.”
1. Sharing economy strengthens2.
3. Legacy hotel brands need to re-create themselves
4. Disruption has come to food and beverage, too
5. Disruption’s next stop: meetings
Hotel Brands have Different Emotional Appeals
“It is a small wooded main house and cottages in the Chattel-house style. It is tastefully decorated with mahogany and rustic art among locally hand-crafted clay lamps, batik and rattan chairs. It is cozy and artisan, open and breezy on a cliff by the ocean.”
It may seem strange that brands have personalities but, in fact, HowToFacinate (HTF) began as a study of brand and product marketing. That started in 2006 when Sally, who had won many awards as an advertising copywriter working with brands such as MINI Cooper, BMW, Nike, Godiva and Coca-Cola, began studying why some messages got people’s attention while others got ignored.
Twitter
The Marriott Travel Personality
Marriott has moved further into personalizing Travel Search with its new quiz that asks: what is your travel personality? It starts by asking guests to “choose a morning pick-me-up” and offers three pictures.
Recent Comments