My property is located in North Kerala, India - the land of “Theyyams”.
My guests love to be in my traditional Kerala home, experience our culture and traditions and get a snapshot of what was the life of Malayalis centuries back.
As part of maintaining guest centricity, we have a process of going through reviews and feedback of my guest. Initially, we were also happy about their feedback. We really felt that we are simply awesome when it comes to the guest experience. But later, we realised that there is a “wow” and enthusiasm missing in their review. But there are no bad remarks too. We were perplexed and decided to closely observe and study guest experience.
Later, we discovered that local exotic Kerala cuisines does matter when it comes to superior experience tourism. For us, that was a big roadblock and became a reason for constant worry. Even though I knew people with culinary skills and they were ready to deliver the food on the event of an order, still there were a lot of missing links. One of my major concerns was ,
Which channel is easy for guests to place an order? Order taking via calls take away the experience part, because of the language problem. Rather than simply placing orders, guests love to know more about the dish, ingredients and what more. Apart from these, placing orders via calls may lead to guest grievances like unanswered calls, not meeting the guest relationship standards etc.
So, to sort all this problems, we are convinced that a simple and reliable technology solution that can add to customer experience is the way out . This takes away the additional burden of dispute management , training of personnels and reduces the expense as well .
Before scouting for solutions , we finalized our approach to adoption . It would be that of evolution .
We started with a QR code menu . We listed down all my culinary partner dishes , details of the dish and generated a QR code .
We printed the QR code on a ethnic Kerala style stands and placed on all my rooms and other amenities where guest hang out .
This QR code menu was later developed to a webpage and then intgrated to communication platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and We chat .
This helped guests to navigate through detail pages of dish , get an idea about dish , and place an order via whatsApp or Telegram . This was absolute delight as it was very simple and convenient for my guest and culinary partner as both parties already have a habit of checking their messaging application.
Finally, my guests are happy and giving us good ratings as they are getting a superior experience. I realise now that, guest experience cycle will be complete only if we include the rich taste of local cuisines. And the only way to do it even in our absence is to build a simple and reliable system, which can complement to the overall guest experience.