I was in a shop with a colleague recently and he picked up a bottle of wine and said “oh that’s a bit on the expensive side’, and put it back down on the shelf. I told him I didn’t know that much about wine, but I knew one bottle and how much it should cost, so I looked for that brand, and that gave me the “price point” for the shop (everything here is 20% more expensive). It’s my personal heuristic.

When I do a check in or check out at a hotel I pay a lot of attention to what is going on because it more or less “signals to me” how the rest of the hotel is likely to be run. For instance last evening, I handed over my credit card when booking in, and as he was taking my credit card booking she told me, with a smile, we’ve upgraded you to superior room. Great I thought. Then I remembered she was the same person I spoke with when I made a late booking for the room two hours earlier. She originally thought I was calling to cancel a room booking, but became jovial and upbeat when I said no, I was calling to book a room, and it would be my first time at the hotel. Obviously the lady at reception was going out of her way to extend a welcome to remember.

It reminded me of being in Brown Thomas buying some expensive cosmetics and skin products the month before. As the assistant was punching the obscene number onto the terminal pad (how apt), she reached under the machine and pulled out a lovely gift pack, beautifully presented, with numinous objects. It seemed to have a lot of stuff, and as we poked through the “free stuff” our attention as deflected from the events at the painful terminal pad.

In both cases, by design or by chance, the free-gift exchange occurred at the most painful moment for the customer; handing over the money. We are already going to be anxious about handing over money, so making me wait to have the act performed upon me, is just going to build, and increase the tension. As consumers we remember the painful moments and the joyful moments, not the hundreds of mundane routine moments. Making the payment moment as easy and painless as possible is important to not creating one of the lows. When you consider that low moments weigh more in cognitive and memory terms, means that waiting to pay, being frustrated with the wait, not having the paperwork in order and at hand, and “looking messy” leaves a disproportionate impact on the overall customer experience, you would think that companies would be super slick. There is nearly always room for improvement.

I think my hotel this morning understood this. When they saw a que of 3 in a row building they immediately opened two other check out desks.  It had the look of a hard wired rule (”never more than 3 people in a que to check out”), but it got me wondering why everybody in the que has to be treated on a first come first served basis. It also got me to thinking about how the hotel might offer you something on the checkout moment, i.e. a copy of the Irish Times for the journey home, or a take away coffee. I think it might work.

Here’s Dan from Predictably Irrational talking about some of these issues but from the theme point of “Sometimes we don’t act rationally when it comes to making decisions around money”.