“Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen but thinking what nobody else has thought” – Albert Szent-Györgyi

Serendipity is commonly used in reference to ‘the happy accident’. Serendipity is defined as “The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident” (Foster and Ford, 2003).

The eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole originally coined the term “serendipity” to describe, in a Persian fairy tale, the idea of people “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of” (Walpole 1754, p. 407)

Recall a time when you heard a song come across the radio or stumbled upon a favourite movie while channel surfing. Chances are you felt more enjoyment from the song or movie when you landed on it by “accident” compared to choosing the same song or movie from your streaming menu. These happy accidents become “happy” because they lead to feelings of serendipity, which research shows heighten enjoyment. When a product, service, or experience is positive, unexpected, and involves some degree of chance, this generates congruent feelings. source

Consumers will feel that the encounter was a good surprise, make attributions to chance, and feel lucky that it happened — “feelings of serendipity."

Actionable Insights

1. Do The Unexpected.

Unexpectedness is the cognitive process responsible for the feeling of surprise (Reisenzein, Horstmann, Schutzwohl2019)

some ideas:

• Add an item to the conference lunch menu that was never discussed or requested.

• Give guests a goodbye pouch - a snack and some flavoured water will also do.

• A surprise discount! - simple, randomised or spin the wheel!

• A 'pick your lucky coupon' - surprise offers for other services in the hotel/resort/property.

The quantum is not important here. Just the joy of getting something unexpected.

p.s. If you collect birthdays of guests, wishing them on their birthday or offering a cake or cookie if they dine with you is no longer unexpected. It is the bare minimum expectation of a guest.

2. Have An Element Of Luck

Most hotels upgrade based on loyalty tier, repeat purchase, designation, important company account etc. If hotels are sold out on one category of rooms, upgrade decisions are given a lot of thought.

We suggest that once in a while, randomly pick guests and upgrade them. Let the service leader truly not know the 'why' and let the guest also attribute it to 'luck'.

For an event to generate feelings of serendipity, it must be attributed to some chance or, in the case of chance that leads to positive experiences, luck. This occurs because one consequence of feeling surprised is the search for attribution (Reisenzein, Horstmann, Schu¨tzwohl 2019)

3. Make Mistakes

Serendipity may benefit from a degree of sloppiness.

Once in a while, send an order to the wrong room or the wrong table. Then when the guest says they did not order it, offer it with your compliments and apologies. "We made an error and we would like you to keep this". A lot of your guests will share the 'lucky' look with each other.

4. Offer Truly Random Choices

If you aren't recording and using guest preferences, please start doing so immediately. Every app is already doing this and as we mentioned in the insight Customer Expectations - The last best experience that your guest has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want with you.

But here is the twist though, once you know that a guest likes / prefers something, once in a while offer random choices as well, not just what you know. For example, fruits. Let's say a guest tells you or you figure out that they like bananas. Please make sure bananas are in the room every day, but can you keep a small portion of kiwi one day? Berries? Nuts? 

If you are using AI to generate your customer recommendations, add an element of 'completely random' choice to the results.

An example of this could be showing a special rate for a random date in the future when a guest enters their travel dates on your website or showing special rates for a property in a completely different city from the one they mentioned. Just one such result in the whole list, please. Do not overdo this.

Want to make this WOW? 

Do this for your teams.

• Relationships that span groups of individuals that would not normally interact may increase an organization’s propensity to access, absorb, and exploit diverse sets of ideas. Geletkanycz and Hambrick (1997). Once every week, do a random seating in your staff cafeteria.

• Invite a team member to a meeting that has nothing to do with them. Let them sit in. No expectations. If they have something to add brilliant, else, no problemo.

• Celebrate Uselessness! Have awards or points or rewards for team members who come up with completely useless ideas. A ton of great stuff was invented from such ideas.

• Change the route that your team needs to take in order to clock in and reach the lockers / uniform room or office. At random, make them walk through engineering, the kitchens, the banquets, the spa etc. You can do this for routes taken to go to the staff cafe for meals. Leave treasure hunt style loot on the routes.

If you enjoyed this, I am sure you will enjoy - Why Small Experiments Are So Powerful For Your Career & Customers. Start Today.

Create serendipitous moments. As always, we are here to help. reach out on +919872000604 or p.bedi@eclathospitality.com

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Serendipity in science:

The best-known chance discovery in science is the 1928 discovery of penicillin by a Scottish bacteriologist (1881-1955). Fleming was studying the Staphylococcus bacterium and noticed that a blue-green mould had contaminated a petri dish, killing off all the surrounding bacteria in the culture.

Earlier, in 1922, Fleming had accidentally shed a tear into a bacterial sample and noted that the spot where the tear landed was free of the bacteria that grew all around it. After conducting tests he concluded that tears contain an enzyme, lysozyme, that can fight off minor bacterial growth.