Team Weevil Weekly Report
Week 13, 25-MAR to 2-APR
A week of travel! Last week the entire team attended the Design It; Build It conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, before heading to Glasgow to conduct our last service safari in the CitizenM outpost there. It’s been a cool (and surprisingly sunny!) week, full of industry-savvy talks and service insights.
Objectives
Until now, our hotel research has been focused on 1. Understanding the hotel servicescape in Madeira, and 2. Learning about how tech-forward hotels have added digital artifacts to their processes. Our trip to CitizenM allowed us to explore a slightly different spin on things, looking at a hotel that has re-envisioned both its business and service models to offer guests an excellent experience.
Actions
We were able to tour CitizenM with Paula, the manager, getting a glimpse into the meeting spaces, screening room, check-in system, canteen, and many social areas. We were able to see how the hotel uses technology (through their digital check-in system, room-card payment system, and iPad in-room controls), and how they create unique and comfortable spaces for their guests.
That said, we were most taken with the service and business models that CitizenM uses. They keep room sizes small, but provide ample and lovely public spaces for their guests to work, relax, and socialize. They also encourage intermingling between guests and locals by keeping their public spaces truly public with free and open wifi and a welcoming attitude toward non-guests using the shared spaces. They also allow companies to book their meeting spaces independently of their hotel rooms, which brings an exciting energy and a new stream of revenue into the hotel.
Next Steps
Next week we will be presenting our findings so far. While we’re still finalizing the presentation, we’re excited to go over the opportunity areas we’ve identified for hotel service innovation. In this presentation we will also discuss some of the areas of hotel tech innovation that our research indicated was less promising (like stand-alone apps), and some of the risks we’ve identified for hotel tech (poor maintainability, the difficulty of creating quality custom content, etc.)
Challenges
It’s been exciting to zero in on the areas that seem most promising in hospitality tech. Our biggest challenge in the coming weeks will be to decide which of these opportunity areas we should pursue and, after that, generating a suite of specific concepts for that opportunity area.
