A long history and a fast rate of growth lend the hospitality industry a unique set of innovation challenges. Tradition prevails within many hospitality spaces and services, making improvements difficult to identify and implement across individually managed locations.

IDEO began working with Marriott in order to explore brand-based initiatives to enhance the guest experience at their TownePlace Suites extended-stay hotels. The outcome would include a brand brief that outlined the brand's renewed identity, and a plan for enabling more meaningful customer relationships.

The plan, referred to as an "experience blueprint," was designed to act as a roadmap for understanding extended stay guest behavior, identifying key touch points in the guest journey, and developing relevant spaces and services. To learn about the brand's clientele, IDEO visited TownePlace Suite hotels around the US, shadowing guests and meeting with employees to gain insight through observation and feedback.

As a result of this fieldwork, IDEO identified five touchpoints of the guest journey, using them as the basis for a new set of services, spaces, and experiences. Included in these was the revamping of the lobby to convey the extended stay experience as more home-like than hotel, with a map wall of visitor-recommended local destinations that served as a DIY concierge, and a pantry area stocked with healthy, locally-sourced food items for sale. In the guestrooms, a versatile live/work layout was planned for more comfortable tasking and relaxing.

To evaluate the effectiveness of these concepts, IDEO worked with Marriott to employ new methods of rapid prototyping with guests and general managers, thereby creating a feedback loop and decreasing implementation costs.

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