3 steps, your hotel can be a heaven to the high-spending Chinese tourists
Brand-oriented service optimisation helps create unique satisfaction and sense of privilege that Chinese enjoy
China is now the biggest tourist outbound country in Asia. Research indicates 120 million Chinese travelled overseas in 2015. The China National Tourism Administration projects the number will grow to 200 million annually by 2020.
According to the report of VisitBritain, more than 200,000 Chinese holiday makers visited in first nine months of 2015 and £2,700 spend per head is among highest. More and more local businesses are now targeting on the high-spending tourists from China. Are you one of them?
However, hosting the guests from the far-eastern country, doesn’t it sound complicated? Well, it does. Cultural difference is just one aspect of the difficulties, the language problem, furthermore, blocked the effective communication.
Another fact is: tourists from Asia spend more financial and physical effort than those who from the Middle East and European continent to visit the UK so that they suppose to have a higher expectation of the experience.

So what are the Chinese guests expecting and what should the local hospitality do? Let’s explore the answer with our experience at a local hotel in Scotland.
Three months ago, we received an invitation from a client who is interested in attracting more Chinese guests to have a stay in their hotel.
As a Chinese professional, I represented our team to visit the hotel with double identities: A designer and a Chinese guest. Therefore I kept my eyes on various service details that may fail the hotel to please the guests from China.
1 Room booking
After receiving the invitation, I went online and checked if it is easy to find out more information about the hotel and book a room if I am an individual traveller from China.
I visited the hotel’s website and happily discovered that there’s a 中文(Chinese)button. I clicked on and felt slightly disappointed. Apparently, they used Google translator so that the content looks rather weird, though I can still understand the meaning.
Unfortunately, the room booking system has no Chinese support. Therefore, it cannot be used by a non-English Speaker at all.
Luckily, Chinese guests can quickly search them out on Baidu where they can connect to various Chinese tourism e-commerce like C-trip with the information about the hotel.
Can be searched out on Baidu is very crucial that to build up your credibility as that is the primary searching engine in China that customers do their research.

2 Reception/ Arrival Service
The hotel’s lobby feels beautiful and classic. The reception staff were very kind and friendly though I found no Chinese information around when I was checking in. However, I believe it will be good to show special welcome for those who flew from thousands of miles away and paid expensive tickets.
Welcoming information, either on paper or a sign, can provide the guests with a quick overview of the essential information that they need/want to know to start a satisfied stay.
Furthermore, it is an efficient way to help them relax in a new environment with simple elements that they are familiar and to build up the sense of privilege.

3 Guest Room Amenities
The room assigned to me look beautiful. The colours of the furniture and other decorations in it perfectly matched. It made me feel delighted despite I got a room number with ‘4’ which is not lucky in China.
There is a kettle for hot water with wide range selection of tea and coffee. Also, I happily found a welcoming fruit plate. However, as expected, I did not find a pair of slipper that essential for every Chinese guest when they home.

4 Internet (Wi-Fi)Support
When I sit down and have a rest on the couch, I started to play with my phone. Of course, I tried to connect Wi-Fi firstly.
The Wi-Fi connection is a very complicated process. It demands to fill in series of information all in English. Therefore, for those Chinese guests know nothing about English, it is impossible to get access at all.
Sharing online is a significant ‘ritual’ of Chinese tourists! They enjoy sharing their experience and images of the places that they travelled on social media once they get the Wi-Fi. Therefore Free Wi-Fi access is vital to satisfaction.
According to the research held by Hotel.com in 2016, 73% of the 3000 Chinese interviewees tended to used Wi-Fi service in hotel or public place to keep in touch with others.

5 Lunch/Dinner Experience
I had my lunch and dinner in the same restaurant in the hotel where the staff were again helpful and friendly. There was so much choice of food and even special offer for lunch on the menu, which is very nice.
However, as a classic menu in the UK, there are no pictures and, of course, no Chinese. So it is impossible for those who do not speak and read English to get themselves foods at all.
Ordering food is always a challenging moment even for myself since I lived in the UK. Firstly as the menu usually will not contain pictures as those in China and secondly, they are very wordy, and I have to spend much time to read through. I always feel that will be great to have more chef recommendations and I can pick up directly.

6 Breakfast Experience
The breakfast was a buffet held in the big dining hall. No surprising, typical local foods served like anywhere else.
It is nice to have the traditional foods for one or two days. Nevertheless, for those who travel in the country for a week, the overall food repentance in the local hotels makes the morning boring.
Breakfast is a critical part for the customer’s satisfaction, firstly, as it usually is the only meal tourists will have in the hotel and , secondly, as eating matters a lot in the Chinese culture.

7 Payment
Union Pay, WeChat pay or Alipay, three the most popular payment tools, are not available at that moment. Guests can only pay with either Visa card, Mastercard or cash.
Currency problem is a big one for overseas tourists. Let them pay for the standard payment tools they use daily is a good way to boost the satisfaction. Every thoughtful detail makes happiness.

Alright, those are all the comments I can have as a Chinese guest.
Feeling confused as there seem more than three steps?
As a designer, I will say — how many steps you will take depend on what method you use to look at problems and solve them for your guests.
You may do seven steps or more if you are thinking loosely and regularly which is making you the same as any body else.
However, following our three steps that will be making you like nobody else and will fix all those problems above beautifully as well.
Step one: compose a flowing story with theme for your guests but not just provide services
Imagine the experience in your hotel is a ‘movie’ directed by you and acted by your team that targeting on your guests. In a movie, the storyline, art direction, background music, actors and the composition of those can affect the comprehension and the mood of its audiences.
Whenever the guests arrive to start their journey of the stay, they walk in the ‘movie’. So every part of your service affects their comprehension and mood: arrival service, room amenities, food & drinks, menu, environment, wayfinding, entertainment, payment and the people’s behaviour in all of those areas.

Every movie has its core message. That is the most valuable part as it defines how the story goes, what art direction should it take, what content should it interpret, what kind of people should be considered and how they should act in the movie. It makes the movie unique and extraordinary. It usually can be concentrated to the sentence that you may use as your slogan or the motto your team may put in mind.
However, what is defining this core message of your ‘movie’? The answer is your mentality, belief, principle, goal and vision. When you involve these in all of your services, they get connected, they became emotional, humanised, memorable and unique.
The high-spending Chinese tourists are exceptionally looking for the sense of privilege and differentiation when they are spending money for leisure life.
Therefore, it is worthwhile to explore yourself deeply to craft the appropriate core message and create your own ‘movie’, with which to identify where you may need to put more effort with the right approach to facilitates the additional value generation and unique satisfaction delivery.
That is exactly the right way to form your brand properly on the market and in customers’ mind that let your service worth higher price and attract more fans.
Step two: before welcoming your guests into the ‘movie’, assemble your staff together and make sure they are confident enough to play their role.

As the key players in your ‘movie’, everyone on your team matters. Does everyone feel comfortable when facing Chinese guests? Does everyone know what the first reaction he/she can take to enhance the quality of the communication and satisfaction?
It is necessary to include your team to co-design your ‘movie’. Let everyone bring in the intelligence of his/her position to make the ‘moive’ flow over every corner in your hotel, to establish seamless satisfaction.
Imparting basic knowledge of China and even some Chinese expression to enhance the quality of the experience in your hotel is also considerable. It helps your team to be relaxed and more confident, as it informs your staff what to speak and what to do when facing those guests from the Far-East.
Step three: Tailor booking and payment-making experience to send the welcoming signal.
All the effort you put in to optimise your service obviously is along with the hope of more sale.
However, inconvenience can stop one from taking action. That is why a good booking and payment-making experience are vital!
Many of you may consider joining Chinese tourism e-commerce like C-trip to get closer to Chinese tourists. That is a good idea, and there are many other ways you may take into account to offer convenience to your Chinese guests while keeping the high consistency of quality and brand identiy out of you ‘movie.’
For example, you may translate the booking system on your website and promote your site with social media and local online community in China. However, don’t forget to enable mainstream payment options like Union Pay, WeChat Pay and Alipay.
On top of that, running a social commerce to help customers book room or service and make payment quickly on Wechat with WeChat pay is a new trend that many Chinese businesses in hospitality are doing now.
Introducing WeChat pay and Union pay in your hotel is a good way to show your attention to the Chinese guests and to boost the sense of privilege again.
This is service design thinking.
‘Design’ is about problems seeking and solving. ‘Design’ is making effectiveness. ‘Design’ is combining practical value and aesthetics. ‘Design’ is about bringing humanity and flexibility in the service to make it work for everyone. It starts with people and ends with people.
Service design is developing the interaction between people to the other people, between people and organisation and between organisations of different kinds. It is the key method we adopted to help our clients.

Service design is not a unilateral process. It invites everyone from stakeholders to staff and customers to involve in the process of design. It is not only about the people that use the service, but also about the people that deliver the service.
It starts with customers journey as a whole and focuses on studying and resolving the pain points on the journey to enhance overall satisfaction with diverse tools and technique in differernt disciplines
It creates not only visual delight like graphic design but also real satisfaction cross sensations.
If you have any further thinking or if you would like to know more about how we can help you to convert your hotel to a heaven for Chinese guests or visitors from other markets, feel free to drop me an emailthorranze@redunit.co or visit our website redunit.co. You could also go to our China-Easy page to get more infomation: redunit.co/china-easy

