How can the hospitality and tourism industry leverage serious games?
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Gamification has become a focus of attention in a wide array of fields, including business, education, healthcare, tourism, and hospitality. Through the variety of applications and support functions, its potential for both the hospitality and tourism industries is significant.
Gamification of hospitality and tourism majorly contributes to more rewarding interactions and higher satisfaction levels along with increased brand awareness and loyalty to a specific destination.
Serious Games – An Introduction
Persuasive computing technology has become an important part of our regular lives. Serious Games, an advanced type of persuasive technology, are a set of computer or video games featuring a set of cognitive design properties that further focuses on changing your behavior and also transfers knowledge rather than just being used for entertainment purpose. Since the last decade, serious games are being widely used in education, medical, and training applications and leisure activities.
Serious Games In Hospitality & Tourism
The emergence of both digital media and mobile technologies has led to the development of serious gamification in the Hospitality and Tourism industry. It has been predicted by the experts that gamification would be a major trend in the hospitality and tourism industry.
Serious games in hospitality and tourism should be differentiated from traditional marketing loyalty and reward programs, the main goal of which is to increase sales as such games are designed to inform, engage, entertain, and co-create tourist and hospitality products with visitors. Therefore, it can be said that the essence of serious games in hospitality and tourism is not only the completion of the game but also the enhanced experience provided.
It is due to the development of virtual and augmented reality applications that the potential of serious games in both these industries has been enhanced. AR and VR technologies have the potential to maximize the ‘presence’ of visitors at hotels and tourism destinations. Undeniably, mobile serious games employing augmented reality and location-based storytelling are emerging as a new promotion channel for tourism destinations that will enable hospitality and tourism providers to interact with the visitors and create engaging tourism experiences.
Use of Gamification In Employee Hiring & Training
The hospitality industry has witnessed a rapid change in terms of increased demand for high-quality and cost-effective Hotel Training. This competitive industry faces several obstacles when training is concerned, including retaining staff with high turnover, constantly changing compliance legislation, and a customer-oriented model being critiqued by clients and guests. It is because of these issues that demand high-quality training.
Gamification has emerged as the new method to train employees working in the hospitality industry. By introducing serious gaming into your workplace learning approach you can easily engage your employees much better. The reason for high-cost training is apparent which is a high turnover of staff- replacing employees from the business administration’s lower rank jobs can cost an organization up to 50% of the individual’s annual income.
Transforming your hospitality business into an employee-centric and happy zone could be down to serious gamification as a primary mechanism. Gamification will help you stimulate real-world guest interactions which are not possible in lecture-based training. Also, the gaming technology approach is best-suited for teaching soft skills to your employees by using immersive, realistic, role-play simulations to ‘manage challenging situations’’ in the workplace.
Benefits of Serious Games In Hospitality & Tourism
The following mentioned are some areas in which serious games can benefit the hospitality and tourism industry:
Raise brand awareness:
The biggest area in hospitality and tourism gamification is destination marketing. Specifically designed advergames help tourism businesses promote their brand.
Enhance traveler engagement:
Games provide a means of dynamic interaction to tourists through suggested tasks and linking them with surrounding physical locations.
Improve customer loyalty:
Gamification can help hospitality and tourism businesses to improve loyalty programs by adding fun and relatedness levels, along with rewards, points, and leader boards.
Entertainment:
From a tourist’s point of view, pre-trip games can be played to kill time, and during-trip games, particularly location-based games are usually played to enhance on-site experiences.
Employee management:
Gamification is an advanced technology that can be used to manage and train employees by stimulating real-life situations.
Serious Games Stimulating Customer Experiences
Tourism experience has become a research focus in recent years. According to researchers, the tourism industry should focus on providing a multi-dimensional and multifaceted experience for travelers. Serious gamification has emerged as a great tool to enhance tourist on-site experiences in the following areas- fantasy, fun, and immersion.
The main motive of a game player is to experience fantasy and freedom to act in the virtual world. And in video games, the environment has been used to stimulate this fantasy experience for users. For example, location, weather, and seasons are all areas added to stimulate your fantasy emotions. In serious video games, tourists are allowed to choose their avatars and have the freedom to play some other person which enhances their fantasy experiences in a fun and stimulating way. Using role play, you as a tourist can act as an assistant to a virtual figure to explore different destinations.
The concept of immersion from serious gaming is also utilized to improve the tourist experience. Immersion is defined as the psychological components of emotion, concentration, and cognitive evaluation of a particular game. In tourism literature, it has been explained that the feeling of getting immersed and emotionally attached to a destination can be a major part of travel experiences. Through stimulating the augmented surrounding environment, the imaginative background, and virtual sound, tourists can be offered a stimulating and immersive travel experience.
Serious Games Solutions BY DMG Studio
Gamification is emerging as an innovative way of marketing that can engage and attract potential travelers and promote tourism brands. Also, serious gamification is reached as a great approach to training employees working in the hospitality sector.
Based on game design elements, tourists can experience competition, story-telling, fantasy, role play, and rewards which further enhance their on-site experiences at different destinations.
Discuss your next requirement with DMG Studio and get powerful Serious Games for your hospitality business.
