The choreography of hospitality

I've noticed that my year at home has made me impatient. I'm no longer commuting. No longer walking or driving to meetings in another location. No longer waiting on someone at a coffee shop to meet up. I just go click to click to click and am in the next place I'm supposed to be. So going back into the real world (which we will all be doing soon!) is jolting. Traffic lights. Annoying drivers. Waiting on people. Making decisions at a restaurant. Getting a refill on your coffee. Waiting in line. Sitting in traffic. I am intruder in this world and it's going to take some adjusting. There is no hospitality or welcoming feeling out in the "real world."

What an opportunity we have to welcome people back into events with our natural hospitality mindset! In the short term with our virtual events, we think about the experience of virtual events, making plans to entertain our audience for the full duration of their experience with a warm welcome by playing music, calling out their name when they join, asking them drop where they're from in the chat, and then we kick off the event at the 5 minute mark to ensure people had time to join and feel settled in. We plan our content to have energy highs and lows and plan breaks when breaks are needed for a personal refresh, a content reset, or an energy boost. We fill the break times with well-planned musical interludes or yoga stretch moments or funny videos and commercials. We treat our attendees like guests in our homes. If you want to know the real secret to our virtual event success, what makes our virtual experiences Haute is the feeling that we're welcoming guests, not just pushing out content.

And while we love our virtual adventures and digital Spontaneous Think Tanks, the exciting 3D side of life has come back! Now it's time to consider the choreography and renewed hospitality of in person events. I love Tahira Endean's book Intentional Event Design. As you get ready to bring events back to your customers and clients, grab a copy of it and re-read it. Remind yourself how to think about the in-person experience. Her book covers in-person, digital, and hybrid, and while many things have evolved in the world of virtual events over the last year, these fundamental frameworks are evergreen and useful in thinking about your audience experience.

Applying it to the real world: A Case Study of Naladhu Private Island

On our recent site visit to the Maldives (yes, going to the Maldives is a little like graduating from Harvard... everyone knows you went you there, but you can't help yourself from dropping it into every single conversation you have!), we were struck by how organic our experience felt, while getting to peek under the covers and see how incredibly choreographed it all was. It was like watching The Nutcracker Suite - so smooth, so elegant, part reality and part fantasy, perfectly planned, well rehearsed, and completely magical.

We've studied our experience, mapped it to the 5 C's of Haute Dokimazo (care, co-creation, collaboration, conversation, connection), and boiled it down into an easy-to-follow framework that we can apply to our upcoming in-person events.

1. The Warm Welcome
2. Hospitality Through Food
3. Personally-Crafted Experiences
4. A Space for Change
5. Something That Calls You Back

The Warm Welcome

What is there more kindly than the feeling between host and guest?

- Aeschylus

At Naladhu Private Island, the welcome experience makes you feel like royalty. You arrive by boat (it is an island, after all), and at the end of the arrival pier there are a minimum of 4 people: the general manager, a local drummer playing welcoming beats, your house master (like your personal butler), and additional support for your bags. The general manager welcomes you and introduces you to your house master who gives you a cold towel, assures you that your luggage will be brought to your villa, and then gives you a brief island tour and then a tour of your villa. You are a guest in their magnificent home, and they make you feel so welcome. From that moment on, you know you are cared for, taken care of, and can be carefree. Care is the magical welcoming ingredient.

At Haute Dokimazo, this has always been the #1 differentiator for our events. Our biggest pet peeve is the registration process at events where you stand in a long, boring, unfun line, get handed materials, get labelled with a big hanging albatross of a name tag so people can see if you are a buyer or a seller, and then you go stand in a corner and look at your phone to try and connect with people and not feel lonely. There is no care there. At HD events, we eliminate that with just a warm welcome and a hug (maybe a warm fist bump or a welcoming bow for now) and a first-name-only name badge so people can connect as humans, not as value-added targets. The first name welcome, eye contact, and genuine delight in your presence offers that feeling that we care for you, that you will be taken care of, and you can be carefree during your time at our event.

Hospitality through food

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.

- M. F. K. Fisher

The dining experience at Naladhu is one of co-creation. They offer a menu for those who need guidance, but they can literally make anything you desire - no small feat for a little island in the middle of the Indian ocean. The ability to tell the kitchen your likes and dislikes and have them craft a perfectly incredible delight of a meal is a magical experience. Sitting in a idyllic setting with friends or family and experiencing a seemingly-never-ending outpouring of food love that you had some part in directing is pure joy.

At Haute Dokimazo events our welcome experience includes a family style meal at small tables of 6 or fewer people who get to share a meal and delight in the magic of what's next. Understanding dietary restrictions in advance allows us to ensure that all tables have our signature triad of care: something people want, something people need, and something surprising.

Personally-crafted experiences

Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions -for and to- express it all.

- Danny Meyer

When you go to a hotel or resort, you have a menu of exciting experiences that you can purchase during your time there. In a very transactional way, you are given a website or a brochure with great pictures, descriptions, and the price. You check into your experience, have it, take pictures, and move on to the next one or go back to your room. The experience at Naladhu was so much more. We expressed the kinds of experiences that we wanted to have, our overall budget for our time there, and were given an itinerary of our stay that was perfectly crafted for our sleep schedule, time to work, time to eat, and time to refresh after each experience.

The most magical moment for me while we were there, though, wasn't actually in mind-blowing swimming with sharks that we did (absolutely indescribable!), but when we returned back to our villas after than emotional excursion, our house master had drawn a warm bath for each us. Perfectly timed for our arrival back to the villa, knowing that we needed to freshen up before dinner. This wasn't a paid-for activity. This was a perfectly-choreographed moment in our day that made us feel cared for and connected.

At our Haute Dokimazo Spontaneous Think Tanks and our Experiential Spontaneous Think Tanks (like Secret Family Reunion and Secret Family Refresh), we bring in this same level of care and surprise so participants can delight in the moments. We're known for our "secrets," "world's firsts," and "experience experiments" because we want to offer the feeling of spontaneity and surprise and delight at the perfect moment during our events. It's one thing to look at your agenda and know what time the party is. It's a completely different feeling when the party seems to spontaneously appear out of thin air in the Presidential Suite of the Virgin Hotel Chicago for the series finale of Game of Thrones on the first night of your event.

A space for change

Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.

- Henri J. M. Nouwen

Naladhu benefits from the glorious surroundings of layered blue surroundings, white sands, and adorable hermit crabs, so it's easy to unwind, let go, and let your walls come down. The staff is omnipresent without being intrusive and you can engage with them as much or as little as you like. The spaces on the island are not meeting spaces, but gathering spaces to be molded into whatever you need. Beach cabanas can be used for relaxing, for storing your beach gear, or for conversation gatherings in a shaded setting with a view. The restaurant is called The Living Room so you feel welcome there at any time of the day to make yourself at home and grab a bite. Picturesque gathering spots are dotted all over the island for two to four people to sit together and have meaningful conversations, and larger spaces can be crafted for groups to come together. One evening during a rain storm, they even set up a beachside dinner inside with a bonfire on the TV so we could still have the business session we needed to have with the vibe we were going for. This collaboration between you and staff and the spaces of the island create the environment you need for your visit.

At Haute Dokimazo Spontaneous Think Tank events, we begin by crowdsourcing the challenges and solutions from the wisdom of the crowd to co-create the conversation topics and collaborate on solutions. This brings everyone together with the goal of helping someone or getting help with something. By offering the vulnerable reality that you have a challenge that you need help with, your fellow participants immediately offer support in a non-sales way to share ideas and opportunities. The result is feeling supported and cared for, and actually attending an event that has measurable business value to you.

Something that calls you back

Don’t be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.

- Richard Bach

The worst part about virtual events is that they end so abruptly. I miss the long goodbyes of an in-person event with the hugs, the tears, the see-you-soons. Virtual events end with a click and there you are, all alone in your guest bedroom again. We've begun adding play-out music so we feel a little bit of that end-of-event fun before we click the "Leave Meeting" button.

Our goodbye experience on Naladhu was emotional, tear-filled, and made us immediately make plans to return. We had been working with the staff on the island for 8 months to craft virtual experiences, so getting to meet them and get to know them made leaving them feel like saying goodbye to dear friends at the end of summer camp. But the magic of the islands is that even though we felt a deep connection to them already, all guests get a farewell experience that includes the same people who greeted them upon arrival. They wait for you at the pier, load up your luggage onto the boat, offer you a fresh coconut for your journey, a cool towel, a bottle of water, and the drums play you out as your team waves goodbye. It's a goodbye experience that calls you back and leaves you wanting to return.

At the end of every Haute Dokimazo event, we have a group retrospective where we openly share what went great, what we should improve, and the moments we loved the most. Having that real-time feedback and a group gathering to end the event helps people remember the moments of awesomeness that unfolded during the event. It gives them that final emotional tug of the shared experiences we had that leaves them wanting to know when the next one is; it's a connection to something magical; it's something that calls them back. The business term for this would be "repeat customers," but the magical human term is "like family." That's our 5th C: Connection. It has to be earned. It has to be genuine. That's the magic of Haute Dokimazo.

Liz Lathan, CMP is co-founder and CEO of Haute Dokimazo, sparking profitable relationships anchored in genuine connection through rousing shared experiences and conversations. Explore the #HugLife community for event professionals and Convo, a new year-long program for marketing and sales executives. Subscribe to our Journal of Human-Centric Marketing to get weekly content.

Haute Dokimazo is part of Haute Companies, a family of companies that believe in human connection, from events to media (podcasts, videos, and more) to direct mail to swag to entertainment talent management to strategy session facilitation. Contact Liz at liz@hautecompanies.com to learn more.