The Anonymity Test

At the end of the previous conversation, I was still thinking about an idea that seemed simpler the more I returned to it. Perhaps too simple to deserve serious attention.

If a hotel needs to be able to explain itself clearly before it can hope to be recommended, how could we determine whether it actually succeeds?

For several days, I looked for a way to answer that question. I considered different ways of evaluating the information available, but they all seemed to measure parts of the problem without ever reaching its centre. Until I stopped thinking about how to evaluate a hotel and began to wonder what would happen if the thing that identified it most easily disappeared: its name. We would keep the photographs, the services, the experiences, the policies and everything else someone might discover about the property, but remove the simplest answer. If we could no longer know who it was, would we still be able to understand it?

I decided to test the idea on a hotel in Patagonia. I did not choose it because it was perfect, nor because I needed to prove that something was wrong. Quite the opposite: at first glance, there was little to criticise. Everything conveyed care. The architecture had character, the photographs were well executed, guests spoke enthusiastically about their experiences, and its digital presence reflected the work of a hotel that had been building its identity for some time. That was precisely why it seemed like a good place to begin.

I opened its homepage and tried to explore it as though I were seeing it for the first time. Mentally, I removed the hotel’s name and any reference that might lead me too quickly towards a conclusion. I kept the rooms, the photographs, the services, the experiences, the policies and everything the hotel had chosen to show. Then I tried to look at the whole without filling in anything from what I might already know.

I was not evaluating the site’s design, its loading speed or its search ranking. Nor was I trying to judge the quality of the hotel. I wanted to discover how much I could understand about it without its name helping me.

My first impression was positive. The photographs conveyed warmth, the spaces were carefully presented and the information was well organised. It was clear that serious, professional work lay behind that digital presence. Yet as I continued, a strange feeling began to emerge. I knew more and more about the hotel: how many rooms it had, what services it offered, what its common areas were like, and I could even imagine the style of its restaurant. But all that information did not necessarily make one fairly basic question any easier to answer: what was it that connected all those pieces and made this hotel a particularly suitable choice for someone?

That was when I realised the exercise was not revealing a problem of information. The information was there and, in many respects, there was plenty of it. What I was actually seeing was a problem of meaning. The hotel was saying many true things about itself. What was difficult was understanding how those things related to one another, what kind of experience they ultimately created together, and why that particular combination might be especially valuable to certain people.

Only then did I understand that the exercise was not a way of evaluating the quality of a hotel. It was a way of observing something much more difficult to measure: how clearly it was able to express its identity. The test did not tell us whether the hotel was good or bad, modern or old-fashioned, appealing or unremarkable. It asked something that came before all of that: how much could someone understand about the hotel without yet knowing who it was?

From then on, I began to call it the Anonymity Test.

Management Perspective

The amount of information available about a hotel does not determine how clearly it can be understood. A property may accurately describe its rooms, services, policies and spaces and still leave travellers to work out for themselves how all those pieces relate to one another. Before adding more content, it is worth asking whether what we already show allows someone to recognise an experience, understand who it may be particularly well suited to, and find sufficient reasons to distinguish it from similar alternatives.

The Case Study

For the boutique hotel in Patagonia that will accompany the conversations ahead, we mentally hid its name and kept everything else: photographs, rooms, services, experiences, policies and guest accounts. The information revealed many things about the property, but reconstructing what connected them was considerably more difficult. The purpose of the test was not to judge the hotel, but to discover how much of its identity could be recognised without allowing its name to do the work for us.

A Question Before Moving On

If your hotel’s name disappeared from its entire digital presence tomorrow, what would someone discover about it that could not also be said about other similar properties?