When it comes to hospitality, guest experiences are often formed through a wide array of offerings – the welcome, the beds, the restaurants and so on. But do you know what the most underrated piece of this jigsaw puzzle is? It is the amenities that a hospitality business offers to its guests. May it be the bathroom attached to their hotel room or the room itself in all entireties, what guests tend to focus more on is the little extras that they get during the stay.
We talked to prominent hotelier and restaurateur Sanjeev Nanda to ask for his views on the impact of the right amenities for an enhanced guest experience. According to Nanda, there are many facets to the way amenities make or break the overall experience that the guests have during their stay, and only through understanding these facets can the actual impact of amenities on hospitality businesses be analysed accurately.
So, what pieces do make up this puzzle? According to Sanjeev Nanda, the first piece is the eternal love most guests have for brands. “When guests walk into a hotel bathroom, it adds to their experience if they can find the presence of a renowned skincare, haircare, beauty, or lifestyle brand. The visual experience for most guests starts and ends with names that they deem to be in vogue. This can really make an average stay special for them,” he says.
Another important factor, in the expert opinion of Sanjeev Nanda, is offering a sensorial experience that latches itself to the guests’ memory register. This can be achieved through creating a scent memory for each guest that checks in. Wondering how? The scents encountered by the guests in the hotel lobby, rooms, and even bathrooms remain with them beyond their stay. Whenever they come across those scents again, it induces nostalgia and reaffirms the guests’ positive experience during the stay.
Last but not the least on hotelier Sanjeev Nanda’s list is sustainability. An emerging hot keyword in the recent times, sustainability holds more merit in enhancing the overall guests experience than usually credited with. “It doesn’t need to be a big action. Even the smallest of gestures such as replacing plastic water bottles in the rooms with those made of glass or introducing biodegradable additives can provide your guests with great comfort in the fact that they are having a sustainable stay. Little things like this matter a lot,” says Nanda.
