Going Long for Hotel Longevity Part V: Loyalty Escape Velocity
With the rise of wellness, antiaging and longevity, one of the top outcomes for any individual traveler is to extend one’s active years on this planet (healthspan) in order to have time to enjoy the many places, cultures, cities, foods, arts and hotels that are on offer. Otherwise, what’s the point? And if everyone is living healthily into their geriatric years (or later), then this has profound and highly lucrative prospects for your loyalty program.
Longevity Puts More Value into Loyalty
The term ‘escape velocity’ was popularized in physics and astronautical parlance to denote the force required to drive a rocket beyond the punitive pull of Earth’s gravity, which would ‘free’ the object from crashing back down into the ocean somewhere. More recently, the renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil used the term ‘longevity escape velocity’ to denote the point at which medical technology allows humans to be freed from the inevitability of aging and death.
While immortality is still very much in the realm of sci-fi and not sci-fact, we are making abundant strides to say without any doubt that average lifespans are getting longer (COVID-19 statistical skewing notwithstanding), particularly in highly developed nations and amongst affluent communities. Knowing with certainty that you have many more years of adventure ahead of you before your joints become rickety, your immune dips to a point of abject vulnerability and travel insurance becomes an expensive obstacle alters the very core of how you select your destination as well as your lodgings.
Where this ‘longevity escape velocity’ affects hotels is in the brand advocacy efforts that we undertake to make ‘customers for life’. It’s a costly gambit to deliver exceptional service for a 75-year-old guest when the average mortality is around 82. That actuarial equation tips when average mortality goes up by a decade or two.
In such a scenario, the work you put in towards winning that septuagenarian and have them sing your praises via word of mouth, word of mouse ore return visits can deliver exponentially more ROI because said customers’ lives are lasting that much longer and they thus have more time to support your brand. Moreover, we’re talking healthspan here and not just lifespan, which means that those newfound years of advocacy aren’t necessarily mired by dementia; your guests remember your hotel with clarity and can cognitively regale their respective social circles on the merits of staying at one of your properties.
In Silicon Valley, the apt term for this would be ‘customer lifetime value’ (CLV), with the formula attempted to calculate how much revenue based upon average sales value, number of transactions and retention timeframe. As longevity takes hold, it would be as if that third input doubles or triples, which in turn delivers a multiple on CLV.
Customer sentiment is a double-edged sword, though, and the negative end also grows a fat tail as longevity gains traction. That is, when lifespans increase, so too is the time that a slighted guest has to besmirch your name. Hence, in a world where antiaging becomes the norm, even more extensive efforts must be taken to protect your brand from the consequences of bad reviews and word of mouth.
Planning for Today
This brings us to the present. What can you do in 2022?
First, know that the relentless march of scientific progress will most likely lead to numerous antiaging breakthroughs in the coming years and decades, and this will more significantly benefit the members of the current millennial and centennial generations as the recipients of this cumulative knowledge. We already see this taking effect insofar as the increasing number of young people who are vegan, vegetarian, don’t smoke cigarettes, drink less, regularly exercise, take longevity supplements, or engage in other life-extension activities. Efforts to win over these cohorts now could pay dividends for far longer than what the current mortality figures would suggest.
This isn’t to exclude the boomers and Gen Xers from the discussion. They also have access to the same medical treatments, supplements, and instruction as their more youthful counterparts, in addition to a treasure chest of disposable income to throw at a well-marketed wellness resort, spa or any other longevity products you attempt to cross-sell.
Your Action Plan
So, what you can do in the here and now is to outline the entirety of the guest value chain then look for ways to enhance personalization, loyalty growth and vehicles for promoting your wellness vertical. Technology is a necessity for your teams to automate repetitive tasks to free up their time for better service delivery as well as to start imbuing predictive analytics to the total customer experience.
With the guest value chain mapped out, you can start looking at all the touchpoints to see where real-time software platforms can either enhance the relationship or at least give you more data to know your guests better for future interactions. Fill in or upgrade the gaps one by one or look for ways to consolidate your tech stack and data, both of which make it easier for future enhancements.
Above all, we stress with the concept of loyalty escape velocity that with the prospects of slower aging comes more travel options. It’s not exactly a direct relationship between augmenting average mortality and increases in CLV. Guests will be harder to impress because of their prolonged youthful attitudes, and you’re going to need to step up the level of service and relationship-building to stand apart as a memorable brand. And the time to start is now because, well, we aren’t getting any younger.
