Everyone who subscribes to streaming music giant Spotify is checking out their Wrapped lineup today, which is the annual accounting of the top songs, artists, albums and even genres you listened to in the past year. It's a fun combination of "of course I could have told you that!" and "Um, I do not remember listening to that song at all."
Raise your hand if Taylor Swift was your top artist of the year. She was for me, but I think that's because I shared my Spotify login with my mom, who is a superfan.
Anyway, I love Wrapped because it's all data at work. Sure, you might tell yourself and the date you're trying to impress that you're way into new indie bands, but if your Wrapped tells you Snoop Dogg is your top artist, you can't argue with the data.
Spotify is a self-contained mini model of what machine learning algorithms and personalization can achieve, if you think about it. All day, I listen to the music I choose. Spotify digests that, uses its machine learning to suggest similar artists, which I'll dip into, maybe add to my liked songs, further feeding the beast. Then I add to the recipe all the time, by mixing in new songs I hear along the way. Spotify listens, suggests different similar songs and artists, and the process goes on.
This is personalization that requires no additional effort from me, but I benefit from it. I can recognize that the effort ended up bringing something new and enjoyable to my day that feels like it meshes with what I like.
It's not earth-shattering. I'm still going to find new music that I like on my own. But it's a nice little personalized touch that is driven by data and algorithms. It's all it needs to be.
That term "personalization" is used so much in the hotel industry, particularly in conversations about how hotel brands and management companies plan to use the vast amounts of data at their fingertips to "personalize the stay" or "create personalized experiences that guests crave."
Honestly, if I've heard one hotelier say that phrase, "we focus so much on personalizing and customizing the guest's stay" this year, I've heard 100 say it.
And while I understand very well how data helps hotel marketers identify certain personas to reach certain types of people with various sales offers — absolutely personalization, in my book — that's not how hoteliers have been throwing the term around.
No, so many speakers I've heard this year use "personalization" and "customization" in ways that imply that not only do they know my preferred TV channel lineup, sheet thread count, shower gel and snack choices, but that they can and somehow might deliver on that personalization to me when I check in. At a midscale hotel.
And never once, not ever, have I ever received any sort of "personalization" during a hotel stay, luxury hotels included.
This is, of course, ludicrous. Hotels don't have this data. And as I mentioned just now, I've never once had a hotel use any of the data they have on me to personalize anything about my stay. The most personalization I've received is maybe a check-in agent saying, "I see you've stayed with us before. Welcome back!"
And you know what? That's fine! While I expect personalization from Spotify and Amazon, I really don't expect it from hotels. I stay in hotels for three, maybe four nights maximum. I don't need white-glove treatment that I know hotels are not staffed to provide.
Now, I'm not a regular, repeat guest at the world's finest luxury hotels. Maybe this type of personalization happens at that level of the stratosphere, but even if it does, my guess is that it's aided heftily by attentive staff at the hotel. If that's the case, fantastic. That's hospitality.
But moving forward, I think the general hotel industry needs to be a little more careful with how they really execute on these ideas of personalization and customization, because it's one thing to talk about it, but another to deliver it.
And I don't see the delivery quite yet.
What am I missing? Email me, or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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