Delivering Great Experiences

    By Agnelo Fernandes, Chief Strategy Officer & EVP, Terranea Resort, Los Angeles

    The Evolution of Luxury Guests

    As the nature of luxury travel continues to evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have found that the expectations of our guests have escalated, primarily due to safety concerns, and rightfully so. To that extent, as Terranea continues to welcome back our guests, our team is squarely focused on delivering extraordinary moments, keeping the health and well-being of our guests and associates top of mind. This focus promotes our promise to provide a safe and comfortable stay for our guests as we continue to deliver a highly personalized service experience with limited contact.

    Right after Terranea temporarily closed on March 19, 2020, the executive leadership team spent countless hours, tracking and complying with the ever-evolving government mandates and public health guidance, innovating and developing new standards of guest care. We paid careful attention to balancing our experiential programming and aligning it with the new standards. It was critical that we constantly communicated with our community, letting them know that we looked forward to welcoming them back to Terranea, and giving them a glance of what was to come. With feedback from our team, loyal guests, and advocates, we launched Terranea Promise, our new messaging platform that informs and updates our community on what the new experience entails and above all, letting our guests know that their safety is paramount. The level of engagement and acceptance has been beyond our expectations. The leadership also ensured that the resort’s upkeep was never compromised, successfully completing several projects related to the physical structure, including reimagining spaces in dining and meetings.

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    As we thought about our approach for reopening, we relied on what carried Terranea to prominence in our first ten years of existence: our purpose for being and our passion to serve. We seek to inspire connections and seek moments to deliver the extraordinary, and, in doing so, we promise our guests and visitors that, at Terranea, they will see, feel, and discover life differently. To ensure that we remained true to our brand values, we thought through and simulated our associate and guest journeys so that we were aware of and addressed every possible nuance. This helped lay the foundation for a safe and consistent experience throughout each journey. As Terranea reopened on June 19, 2020, we were confident in our readiness to deliver an exceptional experience. Our success depends on our team being well informed so that they are able to communicate with confidence on any aspect of the resort’s experience and offering. Through our intense onboarding, we educated our ambassadors to speak in our brand voice, and made sure that their interactions were genuine and refreshing as they deliver service in a heartfelt manner. Our team understands that our guests choose us because they want an escape from the harsh reality that has confined many of them to stay at home.

    Our approach has always held that guest service is a vital part of our marketing platform and it gives us the opportunity to create raging fans. With enhancing our reputation as the focus, we find that the formula is simple and it involves empathy and compassion to gain the emotional trust of our guest. It involves communication with confidence, and guest engagement throughout their stay.

    Our service playbook accentuates guest satisfaction above everything else; this is the ‘hospitality’ business which means ‘people’ business and to that extent, we remain committed to being unconditionally attentive to guests and delivering unforgettable signature moments.

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