Guest Experience Model

Guest Experience Model The phenomenon ‘experience’ has increased enormously within the leisure and tourism sector.Businesses are increasing their efforts directed at creating the optimal guest experience. The customer experience starts playing a role in numerous industries. Organisations can no longer rely on just a strategy of product leadership or operational excellence.A model that is very useful in realizing an optimal guest experience is the Guest Experience Model by Van Wijngaarden (2006). This can be included in the formulation of the Value Proposition of the Business Model Canvas.

• The Guest Experience Model

The Guest Experience Model explains the manner in which the customer experience of a product or service originates and what resources a specific supplier has on hand to orchestrate the ultimate experience.The model is built up like a house, where the foundation is formed by the vision, mission, values and experience concept as envisioned by the organisation.The cornerstones the organisation has available are ‘people’, ‘setting’ and ‘process’. ‘People’ refers to all of the employees of the organisation that clients will be in direct contact with. Under the heading ‘setting’ are all of the physical and virtual locations where the client meets the organisation.‘Process’ stands for all of the supporting processes that the client must go through in order to acquire the central product or central service. These cornerstones contain all the possible touchpoints between the client and supplier. The combination of all these touchpoints create the final guest experience.The foundation of the house and the experience cornerstones are developed by a formal or informal leadership. It is also of critical importance that the employees within an organisation continuously inspire one another to exhibit behaviour that will realize the desired client experience.

• Vision, mission and values

To create insight to their goals on strategic level, organisation speak of their ‘vision’ and ‘mission’.The Guest Experience model acknowledges these as essential parts of the foundation. The definition by Geursen will be used for this model. He defines ‘vision’ as a bundle of subjective perception. A vision can be formulated on two levels. The first level is macro level, which refers to a perception over the entire world. The other level is meso-or micro level, which is the perception that is of the product or product category. Geursen considers the ‘vision’ as the basic philosophy of an organisation, formed by a subjective view of things. A vision does not contain goals, but a mission does. The mission is the legitimacy of the organisation; the reason to take action based on the vision.The mission is the ultimate task the organisation has set for themselves.Ideally, core values control the attitude and behaviour of the employees. They provide support for making choices on strategic, tactical and operational levels. It is best to limit the number of core values to three to five, in order to optimize the inspirational and directional power.An important condition for successful use of core values is a high degree of affinity of the individual employee with the concerned core values. At the same time, it is essential that space exists internally to discuss the core values and to define a supported process on a behavioural level.

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