Improving Hospitality Experience for LGBTQ+ Customers
Below is a description of an academic project involving design research and insight generation for a hypothetical hospitality company to better serve the LGBTQ+ community.
My master’s program in design innovation dedicated a 5-week design research course during which I worked with a team to generate meaningful insights for a hypothetical hospitality company about how they can improve the experience for LGBTQ+ customers.
Our Hypotheses
Before starting, we used our baseline knowledge and a bit of secondary research to lay out a few research goals we wanted to achieve when going out in the field:
Our primary goal was to gain insight into:
Experiences that LGBTQ+ consumers have while traveling as it relates to accommodations
Which factors that affect the LGBTQ+ consumers decisions about whether or not to travel, where to travel, and what type and brand of accommodation they choose
Secondarily, we also wanted to frame the joint experience of both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ consumers in shared spaces
Additionally, we wanted to create a customer journey mapping of a LGBTQ+ traveler from pre, during, and post hotel stay, including stakeholders, pain points, and emotions involved throughout the journey
Overall, we believed that the hospitality industry can approach serving the LGBTQ+ community using the same mental model it uses to accommodate for other specialized groups like the elderly, families, and differently abled persons. They already recognize the different needs of these groups and create specialized offerings to meet their needs, and can do the same for LGBTQ+ customers.
Methodology
After setting research objectives and drafting a discussion guide, we set out to speak with a diverse set of stakeholders. We interviewed members of the LGBTQ+ community, LGBTQ+ community experts and organizations, and hotel employees. Our methodology was varied across context and medium in order to capture varying perspectives:
Interviews with a small sample of users, including the use of research stimuli. The research stimuli were cards containing various travel-related images. Participants completed various sorting exercises with simple prompts with the stimuli.
In-context observations at various travel accommodations, including hotels, hostels, and Airbnbs
In-context observations in other service spaces that serve LGBTQ+ users- such as shopping and restaurants. The goal here is to observe how LGBTQ+ customers are served in other areas of the service industry
Online “radical listening” observations, including brand sites, review sites (ie. TripAdvisor) and other online forums (ie. Reddit)
With LGBTQ+ customers, we visited them in-home to talk to them about all aspects of the travel experience – what sparks the idea to travel, how they plan their trip, and what the trip experience is like while they are traveling. We will ask them about how they make choices during the travel experience. We also interviewed LGBTQ+ supporting organizations to talk to them about how they support the community through education, marketing, and services rendered. We got their expert advice regarding emerging trends in how businesses are better serving the LGBTQ community. We also interviewed employees in the hotel industry to talk to them about how they have observed their employers’ service to the LGBTQ+ community: what is being done well, what could be better, and their personal experiences in serving members of the LGBTQ+ community.
What We Learned
After spending time out in the field, we gathered all of our observation to process and synthesize themes and learnings. Based on our research, we found three key areas of opportunity for hotels to better serve LGBTQ+ customers.
Insight #1. The community notices whether you are really showing up as a true advocate year-round.
As one of our interview participants said: “Every business is going to take advantage of Pride week, but what about the other 51 weeks of the year? It's really hard to convince the community that you are really an advocate.” Another interview participant gave the example of Miller Light and Absolut Vodka. Miller Light would often sponsor events and put up posters in the gay bars he went to right around Pride week, but he didn’t see the brand anywhere else during the rest of the year. Therefore, he saw Miller as using the Pride movement as an opportunistic marketing tactic. But he viewed a brand like Absolut as more of an advocate of the community because he felt their presence more consistently throughout the year. We recommended that our hospitality client sustain a consistent and authentic presence within the LGBTQ+ community, which would garner more trust and favorable attitudes.
Insight #2. Signals of support and allyship don’t have to be grand. But they do matter.
We also that signals of support - even simple ones like pronouns on name tags or “all are welcome” signs - can have a massive impact on the customer to make them feel more welcome and open to visiting a new establishment. When these signals are missing, LGBTQ+ customers sometimes have to make up their own personal tests to determine whether the business is LGBTQ-friendly.
For example, one participant would look at Yelp pictures before visiting a new restaurant to see if they could tell if the crowd “seemed friendly” based on their clothing and demeanor. He would also inspect the menu to see if they had a cocktail menu or not. In his experience, restaurants that had a more extensive cocktail menu seemed to be “friendlier” to gay people. He admitted that this litmus test is probably not the most accurate, but would make him feel more confident in trying out a new place.
The hospitality industry can improve their signals of support by incorporating physical indicators like a sign “Everyone is welcome” on the front door, hiring diverse employees that are representative of the community, and including inclusive language and people in their online marketing materials.
Insight #3. One size doesn’t fit all. Some LGBTQ+ travelers desire community-specific spaces, while others prefer integrated spaces.
The preferences with regards to having LGBTQ+ specific spaces while traveling varied greatly with the people we interviewed. For example, one person wanted to be able to have a safe space dedicated for queer people while another person said: “I don't want to go on Google and find a bed and breakfast specific to LGBT customers, I just want to find a place where they are accepting of everyone.”
Therefore, it’s important for hotels and hospitality businesses to have LGBTQ+ specific services and spaces that are easily accessible, but not so overt that customers feel they are forced into those offerings. The balance would be nuanced and require iterations to achieve. We’d recommend that the hospitality client test different models to strike that balance.