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Why Journeys?

When creating an experience for a luxury brand, an uncomfortable tension is often ignored: the need to balance a brand’s desire for bold creativity and storytelling, with a business need for conversion and performance-oriented thinking.

To thrive, this balance is essential. But with so many moving parts, luxury brand experiences can often feel fragmented, alienating platforms or audiences in the race through the funnel. Too often, marques confuse what’s new with what’s next. Initiatives are enacted in siloes, journeys feel disjointed and the paradigm of value is broken.

In luxury, every single moment matters. Discerning audiences demand more. Intuitive designs, dynamic platforms, compelling journeys. Each distinctive in their own right, with enough story to make the brand sing. For brands, it’s innovate or face the flatline. Because what you design next can be the difference between longevity or stasis.

Traditionally, brand and experience have been seen as separate, with little overlap or mutuality. In reality, nearly 85% of consumers believe a brand’s ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX) is just as vital as the products it provides. This is especially pertinent in a time where markets are severely over-saturated. Despite this, too many brands are solely focused on their products. Rarely is it the case that a product is so original it possesses no competitor.

In a world of too much choice — so much that it can be paralysing for consumers at worst and fatiguing at best — it’s not product specs that drive purchases, engagement or loyalty.

"The human mind does not think in logical terms, it thinks in terms of stories—narratives—about what things mean.” – Daniel Kahneman, Behavioural Economist

Winning engagement and loyalty is about staying front of mind, and the best brands do that by meaningful and gradual end-to-end experiences imbued with meaning, not by racing people through the funnel.

All of that to say: the value of good experience can't be overstated.

And yet, our collective understanding comes up short. Severely misunderstood, oversimplified and underestimated, customer experience is often cast aside in favour of pesky performance metrics that aren’t at all representative of brand perception.

As brands, we might be forgiven for assuming our prospects are time-poor and optimisation is the key to higher conversion, but a rushed journey is a thoughtless one — in turn, fracturing brands’ paradigms of perceived value. We need to slow down. To think, to take stock, to innovate.

JOURNEYS isn’t another oversimplified CX explainer, primed for search engines or laced with jargon. Instead, it’s part-journal, part-manual, written and designed for those with the ambition to transform their guest experience, covering the complexities that come with crafting rich experiences and the nuances needed to execute them.

Designing The Guest Experience

In the fifteen years or so since our founding, hospitality has become a mainstay of the Matter Of Form retrospective year in, year out. One of the first in what has become a long line of brilliant brands and partners was Aman — a relationship that spanned almost a decade and whose scope included CX innovation before the discipline’s mass adoption among creative consultancies.

Since then, we’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best names in travel and hospitality, from Dorchester Collection to Accor via Fairmont, Sofitel and Pullman; Belmond and The Orient Express brand; Wilderness, Africa’s largest conservation-hospitality company; commercial space tourism pioneers Virgin Galactic; a bevy of NEOM stakeholders across various projects and many, many more. On reflection, ‘privilege’ might be an understatement.

For us, no matter the partner, brand and experience go hand in hand. It’s why we map our clients’ end-to-end CX as a way of sparking ideas, imbuing innovation and establishing a synergy between the two at every touchpoint.

The maps themselves are a key tool not just for playbacks but for a number of scenarios and strategies. In some cases the map captures a current customer journey, showing our teams where customer needs aren’t being met or which touchpoints are falling short, or alternatively, the map highlights moments of elevation where signature and stand-out elements can and should be leveraged more. It also enables our consultancy and creative teams to consolidate any and all learnings from desk research and stakeholder interviews, wider market trends and primary insights from first-hand digital audits in one place. Synthesised to establish a basis for innovation.

They can also be indicative foundations for new brands to align stakeholders and create more concrete grounds for ideation. In hospitality specifically, charting the journey from prospect to guest to fan means we can trace the highs and lows of the existing experience and gain a deeper understanding of the customer's perspective, emotions and needs at each stage. We can see where the brand is over-indexed versus lacking investment. We can easily spot any missed opportunities or cracks in the narrative. We find inspiration where moments could be; to tell a story, to charm, to surprise, to stand out.

Once the experience is outlined, it becomes a powerful device for onboarding and internal training, working to inspire hospitality teams at every level by bringing them along for the journey — empowering those on the front lines to have an impact on the brand-led guest experience.

Mapping The Stages

The guest experience can be compartmentalised into pre-stay, stay and post-stay. Obviously, 'stay' comprises the bulk of experience. It's likely why pre- and post- are actively avoided or naively overlooked. 'Stay' is often seen as the good bit as it’s the clearest opportunity for face-to-face, human connection. When in the mapping phase of a project, we tend to atomise stay visually, branching it out into categories covering the likes of dining, wellness, business, retail, discovery and so on. Such scope undoubtedly produces fertile ground for ideation, but pre- and post- are just as fruitful for innovative concepts and moments, if not more so, thanks to guests’ emotional states (anticipation, apprehension, connection, nostalgia, etc) during these stages.

So, although some parts of the journey are perhaps easier to innovate within than others, mapping the end-to-end and really understanding each chapter is essential for capturing the full gamut of guest experience.

1. Awareness & Research: Stopping The Scroll

Think of awareness as the first flicker in a potential guest’s mind. At this stage, your audience is likely indifferent to your brand, but they’re out there, browsing, scrolling, even imagining. In this phase, the goal is to strategically position your brand in the right channels with the right story. What imagery, messages, and reputation are we broadcasting? What can we include to spark intrigue and turn curiosity into clicks? This is the dreaming stage, why not appeal to a person’s most eminent aspirations?

2. Consideration: Building Curiosity

Once your brand is on the radar, the journey moves into consideration. This stage is about showing potential guests why your destination is their destination, weaving together visuals, testimonials, and messaging into a tapestry that cuts your brand above the rest. It’s the part of the map where we look closely at what content they need to see, hear and feel to push them closer to conversion. A well-drawn experience map reveals insights into how to nurture a prospect’s interest so they can see themselves in your spaces.

3. Reservation: Sealing the Deal

Here’s where they’re ready to commit — but only if it’s easy, intuitive and gratifying. Reservation is where any unnecessary friction in the booking process can shatter the experience. Are there too many forms? Do pages load slowly? Do the FAQs not FAQ? Surveying this stage shows us every niche and cavity of the reservation process, highlighting opportunities to remove obstacles and make the booking feel as gratifying as choosing the destination itself.

4. Pre-Arrival: Building Anticipation, Not Anxiety

The pre-arrival phase is about preparing your guest for an experience they’re excited about — not overwhelmed by. Thoughtful emails, tailored recommendations and gentle reminders create a sense of arrival long before they reach your entrance. Interactive explorations (think virtual reality walk-arounds or digital questionnaires) aid in setting context and building hype. Our map urges us to choreograph these interactions, delivering the right messages at the right times to keep guests looking forward to their stay. At this stage, it’s all about transforming apprehension to elation.

5. Arrival: Crafting a Sense of Welcome

First impressions are everything, and arrival is the moment to turn expectation into an exceptional reality. A seamless check-in, a welcoming smile, and perhaps a small gesture that brings the brand’s personality to life — all these elements can be mapped out in advance to create a smooth and warm transition from travel mindsets to escapism, setting the tone of a guest’s stay.

6. Stay: Elevating Every Interaction

During the stay, the goal is to design micro-moments that feel special, memorable and uniquely aligned with your brand. From room amenities and concierge interactions to signature concepts or experiences, every part of the stay should feel like a natural extension of the promise your brand made earlier in the journey. Experience mapping allows us to get granular — anticipating needs, designing pleasant surprises and even scripting service standards so that every touchpoint, from first time at the front desk to the farewell, leaves a lasting impression.

7. Departure: Ending on a High Note

For brands of a certain calibre, the end of a guest’s is not a goodbye but a “see you soon.” Departure can be a bittersweet moment and our experience map allows us to engineer a farewell that leaves guests with a smile. Are there smooth checkout procedures? A parting note? A small takeaway? Departure is a brilliant moment for hyper-personalisation, a time to encapsulate someone’s personal journey or specific element of their experience that resonated. The goal here is to leave that lingering sense of warmth and connection, already gently sparking a guest’s desire to return.

8. Post-Stay: Cultivating Connection through Loyalty and Membership

The stage most marques miss. Journeys aren’t finite, they don’t cease to exist when guests leave the premises. Post-stay initiatives like loyalty programs, personalised offers and small touches ensure your brand stays front of mind. What can you offer to make them feel valued, to draw them back? How can you forge that connection into something lasting and meaningful?

From subconscious influences for awareness to reservation as the point of conversion through to the stay’s experience principles, by outlining the guest journey down to the minutiae we can transform brands. From fragmented, jarring experiences to captivating holistic narratives. While luxury loves to complicate, mapping the future experience provides a clear path forward. One vision, exponential buy-in.

This is how we do it…

Pre-order JOURNEYS now and be the first to read our comprehensive insider guide to the modern guest experience as soon as it launches. Real-world examples, insights from hospitality leaders and creativity-sparking provocations for your teams in one digital journal, written and designed by Matter Of Form.