Differentiating emotional hotel experiences (EuroCHRIE 2009)
I’m finally back home after attending the EuroCHRIE 2009 conference in Helsinki for a few days, and I have to say that it was quite an interesting experience for me, since it was not really in my professional field as a designer, but it did have to do with what I’ve been working on for the past few months first as part of my MSc. graduation project and now as an interaction designer/researcher for SusaGroup.
The conference dealt with experiences in the hospitality and tourism industry and I was actually there presenting a working paper which came from a small exploratory study I conducted at the early stages of my graduation project with the aim to identify what type of emotions people felt the most in a hotel environment and towards what exactly.
Online survey used to collect information from hotel guests
Back then, I set up an online survey in which I would ask people to use one of 14 caricatured emotions (using the PrEmo emotions set) to communicate what they’ve felt in the past while being in a hotel. If none of the pictured emotions was deemed representative for what they had felt, the respondents also had the possibility to input their own emotion as a text. They were also asked to briefly describe why or what made them feel this way.
The results obtained from this brief study, in which over a 100 people from all over the world took part, were later used as the basis for the scientific paper presented in Helsinki and as a pivotal part of my graduation project.
Below, you can find a copy of the paper and the presentation I gave. If you are interested in the field of emotions in hotels, or the importance and relevance of emotions in a service environment it could be quite an interesting read, and of course if you are interested in more information regarding it or the emotion measuring tools that we are working on together with SusaGroup, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
