Check-!n Toolkit for Capturing Guests’ Momentary Experiences Without Disturbing Their Traveling

Abstract

In the experience economy, many companies invest tremendous resources and budgets in understanding customers’ experiences and use the insights to design products or services that can make customers happy and satisfied. However, there is still a lack of further exploration of the details that influence consumers’ experience of the journey, one important challenge is to capture and closely understand guests’ momentary experience in each touch-point of their stay. These momentary experiences are details that cumulatively compose the whole experience of a guest’s stay and imply rich design opportunities to improve the whole service. To tackle this challenge, we developed a low-threshold participatory toolkit ‘Check-!n’ for capturing customers’ momentary experiences at the right moment in the right place based on the user sampling method. We used Airbnb as an example case to investigate this toolkit’s usability and usefulness with six participants in 11 different Airbnb accommodations. The results show that the Check-!n toolkit is easy to use for capturing their momentary experience in the context. Moreover, the participants did not consider the toolkit to be interrupting their Airbnb experience. Conversely, the in-suit deliberations caused by the toolkit helped the participants to mindfully reflect on their underlying feelings at the sampling moments, which would otherwise go unspoken in the guest feedback. We demonstrate how the toolkit triggered the guest’s momentary reflections in the Airbnb homes and their nuanced articulations in interviews. We therefore contribute a concrete case of sensitizing and capturing guests’ experiences of Airbnb shared homes.