Visualizing Experience Design in Hospitality-Big ROI

In 1999, Wingate Inns came to IBM for some help with their then-new technology infrastructure. Remember, this was Y2K time and the Internet was just starting to generate some heat. IBM’s response to Wingate’s request for information was, well, kind of technical. The leadership team wasn’t responding well to the notion of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to generate a thick report they didn’t understand. How was ‘that report’ going to get them where they wanted to go?

Some of the IBM team saw the opportunity to show Wingate the outcomes ‘that report’ would lead them to. We created a video dramatization (just like the ones on the news-recreation-reality shows, but without the overdone drama). It made the “experience-of-the-future” technology recommendations tangible in a relevant, real world way, that the Wingate team could understand both the concepts IBM was proposing and their implementation. The video also enabled Wingate to evaluate, test and develop the business operations requirements to actually implement it.

Here’s the video. It took less than two weeks to produce. Remember, the technologies you’ll see were quite new back in 1999.

The project was so successful it generated significant media attention at the Hotel Technologies Show the following week. It was also the driving force behind franchisees readily agreeing to invest an extra $1 million to pay for the technology, design and implementation. And, it saved corporate $1 million, while reducing time-to-market by nine months.