Few industries have suffered more from lockdown than the hospitality sector.

In the UK, even with 80% of workers in the hotel and food industries on furlough schemes, the loss of guest revenue combined with maintenance and other fixed costs has left many hotels facing serious losses or even unable to survive at all.

The starting point for recovery is of course governments allowing hospitality venues to reopen. But the next key step is inspiring confidence and providing reassurance for guests to make bookings.

So - how can design thinking help? The first step of its principles teach us to empathise with and find out what matters to potential guests. At a functional level, this insight is already quite well established. The graphic below is from Visit Britain’s publicly available COVID-19 Consumer Sentiment Tracker.

These 4 core themes of Enhanced cleanliness (82%), booking incentives (79%) social distancing measures (76%) and safe staff-guest interaction (63%) provide clear insight into where hotels could focus their efforts.

But design thinking can take the industry much further. It encourages us to think how we could innovate our processes and even our whole proposition, in order to not just make hotels compliant, but emotionally engaging, compelling and perhaps even more efficient than they were before.

For example, one could take the issues of social distancing, reduced capacity and cashless payment and combine them into a single challenge: “How might we use an app on a guest’s phone to replace physical interactions?” This could then open up a wider digital brainstorm around different interactions from checking in and out, ordering meals, using a phone as a digital room key and so on. These would have knock on benefits for managing communal space. A digital concierge would make Reception less busy. A digital room key removes costs of physical versions. Using room service reduces social distancing pressure in the restaurant and in queuing for washrooms.

Design thinking frees us from thinking in existing silos and encourages us to be creative in how such new processes and services might look. In this ideation mode, we would sketch out scenarios that could support a safer, healthier hotel environment. For instance, a multi-storey hotel might promote the use of staircases to reduce queues at elevators, or install awnings to extend the viability of using patio areas for dining to help support social distancing.

Some new design elements might even have potential for improved margins. For instance, free or flexible cancellations are perceived by guests as the most important reassurance factor, especially given the difficulties many holidaymakers have had getting refunds via online travel agencies (OTAs).

A hotel group might take this redesign opportunity to remove offering these rooms to OTAs, and instead only provide them via direct bookings. This would reduce commission payments, and at the same time begin a more direct connection with guests, perhaps by offering discounts for joining loyalty schemes (see above image) or unadvertised room upgrades.

Many hotels also rely on corporate bookings. This is another area where hoteliers may need to redesign their physical space, and flexibility into their offer. For example, Village Hotels in the UK has redeveloped its Meeting Rooms proposition to include:

• additional cleaning rotes of all touchpoints, including IT equipment, as well as providing additional cleaning products, such as antibacterial gel and sanitizer wipes for meeting guests to use

• introducing competitive rates and new flexible re-scheduling terms

• upgrading teleconferencing facilities, allowing more people to join (virtually) - free to use within all meeting packages

• switching hot-desking pods to be hired out as dedicated office spaces for individuals who wish to ensure a totally contact free working day

Some believe that the recovery and rebuilding period after lockdown restrictions will provide the stimulus for more radical ideas such as service robots - an innovation that has already been explored in Japan. It was originally envisaged as a solution for handling dirty, repetitive tasks, but now may be positioned as a route to providing more socially distanced models of operation.

Customer Faithful’s founder Rick Harris believes that design thinking works best when it brings diverse groups of employees together. “Innovative ideas for returning hotels and restaurants into operation will need to combine the skills of operations, front-of-house, IT, marketing, and many more,” he says. “Such collaborative working has not always been common in the industry, but the Covid pandemic has already taught us all how to make virtual meetings more familiar and productive than before.”

For those interested in getting hands-on with design thinking, Customer Faithful and Level7 have collaborated to provide an online 3-day Design Sprint workshop - custom-built to tackle the Coronavirus challenge of finding ways to adapt your customer offer in these uncertain times and beyond. For details, contact info@customerfaithful.com.