Hospitality Luxury Operations Design

Catalog description

The exceptional and changing nature of high-end tourism (experiential, emotional, authentic, individualized, etc.) suggests that luxury tourism professionals require a unique set of skills. As such, this course will provide students with the theoretic foundations to luxury service design, preparing them to operate in today’s luxury segment and enabling them to create and manage personalized experiences. Luxury service design is a holistic design process operating in the realm of constant uncertainty and change, i.e. chaos that arises from the contextual nature of personalized service and the ambition to solve problems that customers do not even know they have. Consequently, the chaos comes from the customers by default because they, by wanting personalization, resent standardization, which in turn means that organizations have to rearrange their stratagems in real time around what they hear from their clients. The luxury service design must therefore use skills from a variety of disciplines (design, psychology, management and process engineering) to develop models of co-creation of unique value with each individual customer, i.e. personalized experience in the process of continuous experiment. Tools like market analysis, active listening, analysis of customer behavior, mapping, heat-mapping, blueprinting, service marketing, complex service networks and imagineering will help to discern the new opportunities for value creation in the convergence of customers’ needs and desires, technological capabilities, and organizational innovations, taking customers beyond their current horizon of cognition.