It used to be the case that you learned about a travel location through the pamphlets on racks by the hotel door. Samantha Hardcastle is on a mission to change that by linking local community and culture into storied experiences. She has the family legacy to help her achieve this goal. Growing up in the travel industry due to her travel agent mother, she has been part of hospitality experiences her entire life. She takes that legacy to the next level by working with clients to craft micro-experiences that connect tourists with local culture. We talk about her approach and client examples of what it looks like to succeed. We also discuss our cultural relationship with vacation, and how we need more chances to just check out. Finally, she describes how she found her way into experience design, and the way in which she pulls from many different areas to create storied experiences.
For regular listeners of Experience by Design, you’ll know that I have had a bit of travel of late. London. Florence, Italy. Even Lake Placid, New York. To be honest, I don’t like traveling. I like being places, but don’t love the process of getting there. I don’t think I’m alone in that feeling. Travel can be taxing. Being there should be enjoyable. Or some might say an experience.
Hospitality is a big part of experience design. In fact, while a lot of attention is given to customer experience, user experience, patient experience, and employee experience, travel and tourism is a major area of work for designers of experiences. Admittedly, it is not something that I have done any work in, but it is something that I have experienced as a person who has traveled.
It used to be the case that you learned about a travel location through the pamphlets on racks by the hotel door. Or some local restaurant. Or a local attraction. These pamphlets don't do much to tell a story about the location you're in. As a result, it can be very difficult to learn about local history and culture. Samantha Hardcastle is on a mission to change that by linking local community and culture into storied experiences.
Samantha grew up in the travel industry, as her mother was a travel agent. She got to see behind the scenes at how things worked. After getting a degree in marketing, her first client was a hotel. Throughout her career, she has sought to create better hospitality and tourism experiences not just for travelers, but for the people who host travelers and the communities in which these places are located.
Today, she runs her own consultancy called The Storied Experience. As her website states, “Our approach puts equal emphasis on cultural immersion, wellbeing and transformation, and regenerative impact to ensure we’re co-creating a highly-valuable, in-demand experience.”
We talk about our relationship with vacation as a culture, and whether we let ourselves to truly turn ‘off.’ As a result, we need to encourage more escapism on a regular basis, and need the places where we can do that. She describes work that she has done with clients to bring local culture into contemporary accommodations and features. Part of this includes creating micro-experiences that engage curiosity and imagination in a way that also promotes reflection.
Finally, she describes how she found her way into experience design, and the way in which she pulls from many different areas. Part of this included books on world building, story development, and ethnography. She even pulls from works of fiction for how to develop characters, a plot, and story arc. A key challenge she shares is how do we continue to create stories and experience when people’s attention spans are so short. This is a challenge that most of us can identify with, and she shares how she tried to crack it and succeeded.
It is a perfect time for this conversation as we are approaching the summer travel and vacation season!
Samantha Hardcastle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skhardcastle/
The Storied Experience: https://www.thestoriedexperience.com/