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”.

Start Fascinating Travelers Now

Step 1 – Understanding personality archetypes is the first step to understanding how brands can Fascinate.
Step 2 – Do the test with a qualified PersonaHolidays specialist and Get Listed.

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PersonaHolidays is the only app in the world that can deliver travelers who are a perfect match for your hotel travel persona.