Attending last week’s Global Revenue Forum at the Hilton London Bankside, I heard a theory from attendees on “cognitive load.”
I know what this is, even if I had not heard of the term before.
From what I understand, it has to do with how many thoughts we can keep in our head. For hotel revenue managers, that might be translated as how much content and how many offers, photos, channels and price points the brain can handle before switching off altogether.
An understanding of cognitive load, which academics formulated less than 40 years ago, might well mean better conversion at higher average daily rate.
That’s the gist as far as I understand it.
Maybe revenue managers would word it as giving someone booking a hotel a better user experience.
I have always held onto a half-baked theory that people in most walks of life are looking to whittle down choices.
Is that the same as cancel culture, where if someone does something one does not like, you can merely write them off with no second thought?
Ultimately, it is one less thing or person to think about, and with so much going on in most people’s lives that might be perceived as welcome.
It is easily possible in this way to write off what would have been the best choice.
According to educationcorner.com, “Cognitive Load Theory explains that working — or short-term — memory has a limited capacity and that overloading it reduces the effectiveness of teaching. There are three types of cognitive load: intrinsic (how complex the task is), extraneous (distractions that increase load) and germane (linking new information with the already stored in the long-term memory).”
At the conference last week, attendees were told that the average human has an attention space of 8.25 seconds, 0.75 seconds less than a goldfish, and it came during a very insightful keynote speech from Nathalie Nahai, author of “Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion.”
I have that written down in my notepad, so I know that is what she said, and because my span of attention might well be far less than 8.25 seconds.
That psychology — call it manipulation if you so choose — has had a place in selling hotel rooms since long before the advent of the internet.
It is the science that is so interesting, and the idea that even those of us who think we might be tuned in to when we are being manipulated — for good or for worse — still are pushed and pulled into making buying decisions.
I remember one speaker telling a conference that when they added a simple gray line across the top of a website, that increased sales by an extraordinary amount.
I cannot remember the details as to by how much — maybe that sentence took more than nine seconds to relate? — but I was staggered that this simple exercise had been so successful in sales.
If the guest fully knows their hotel choice, then this cognitive load theory does not exist, I imagine, and once they are in the hotel then they can be as attentive as they please.
Many hotels pride themselves on being oases of calm, where the cognitive load of “real” life is temporarily negated.
For those people, though, I assume revenue managers can bombard with cognitive load data on upselling opportunities.
The industry’s favorite word of the past five years is “experience,” probably even more so this side of the pandemic. How much content can be sent to a guest before, during and after their stays to encourage them to buy is an interesting topic to investigate.
Are guests able to increase their cognitive load after a trip more so than they can before it, and does what type of trip it is also affect the science?
I’d be interested to know.
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