In our recent blog post we spoke about the “pre and post experience” of participants in general and how to make the experience curve last longer.
In this post I want to speak only about the experience the participant has while travelling to an event.
You might think this is not as relevant to the overall experience as the things that happen while at the event.
I do believe though, this is one of the most important things to take care of!
What happens if the travel experience in the participants journey is a bad one…?
The participant will get annoyed or stressed and bring this feeling into the meeting itself.
It will poison the experience he/she might have at the event.
We have to consider, that the travel experience is based on many circumstances, which we cannot control entirely. Sometimes the participant has booked his/her own travel, sometimes it was booked by someone else. At times airlines, bus or train companies screw up and it is out of our hands.
What we can and should control though, is the journey from arrival at the destination’s airport or station. This is and should be in our control. Here we have the chance to make the participants experience a real good one and the chance to screw up our first impression. And as they say, “there is no second chance to make a good first impression”!
If the participant was promised a pick up and experiences a delay in this, if he/she feels left alone without information about the onwards travel options, if he/she has to wait for a transport or is told to take a crowded public bus, there is not much we can do to make it up to him/her at the event.
This experience will have a huge impact on the overall event experience and has the potential to ruin it.
Even if something went wrong before arrival, this would be the perfect moment we can shine if we are well organized. We can be the shoulder to cry on, because from now on everything will be smooth!
Smooth!
That is the word that describes a perfect arrival experience for the participant. This is what he/she wants to feel. We have to take care of creating this smooth journey experience.
Then we will have the perfect first impression.
Try it! You will see how it works!
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