Our bags are packed. We are in the kitchen of our youth hostel drinking tea and making polite conversation with an odd American couple while we wait for a taxi to arrive to take us to the port. Today we take the ferry to Helsinki.

We have to wait a while for the cab. We learn that the American man makes a living by testing 15 different drugs for a pharmaceutical company every morning and that his wife travels with more teddy bears that our daughter does. It turns out they have just arrived from Finland. We ask them to share their experience.

They do. Sort of…

Setting the Scene

Well where should they start? They ask us and each other and then they begin talking over one another and spitting slightly in their excitement as they both tell us of the incredible time that they have just had.

First there were the restaurants  – wow what incredible food and so much choice. And of course the saunas ñ they love their saunas, and steam rooms, and massage and don’t forget the swimming pools. Then the bars and clubs and the notorious Gabriella cocktail that we just had to try – only one though. And at night they sang and danced and everyone wore fabulous costumes and the cabaret was wonderful. And the people were oh so warm and funny. Comedians they were. No really they were comedians. Oh it was magic. No really it was really magic – black hat, white rabbit and everything. And for the children – wow what a fantastic place to take a child. So much for them to do what with the children’s playground and the clowns and the bouncy castle!

I interrupt ‘Oh where’s this playground? Vera Lily loves bouncy castles’ I say. ‘Third floor’they both reply together. I’m confused. ‘Third floor of where?’ I ask wondering if this is the first city w’íll ever visit that requires an elevator to get around. They both look at each other and then at me. ‘Of the ship’ they say slowly. And then as if explaining to a very stupid child they repeat ‘the third floor of the Gabriella, the ship the Gabriella’.  And then in a moment of panic they check that we are travelling to Helsinki on the overnight Viking Line ship and not one of the other ferry companies. ‘Yes’ I say. ‘Oh thank goodness’ they reply laughing with relief. They sigh, ‘Yeah it is truly a wonderful experience’.

Lights, Camera…

Ok so the American couple were a bit bonkers but I have to admit that the Viking Line overnight ferry to Helsinki truly is an experience – a destination in itself rather than a (cheap, slow) mode of transport. I could, like the American couple, go on and on about our experience on board the Gabriella, although I won’t. Instead I want to mention the photographic framing of this experience – the impact on passenger and crew.

Ok so for the ‘guest’ on board the Gabriella your journey starts with your photo being taken paparazzi-style the moment you step on deck and ends with the opportunity to purchase the print from the ‘wall-of-fame’ as you disembark – a bit like a Disney ride.

Now you can see how this works for Disney. The staged flash bulb moment, as you are about to lurch over the top of the rollercoaster, sets your expectation as well as your pulse soaring as it signals that the journey that you are about to embark on will not only be full of excitement and surprise but will crucially be an experience that you will want to remember and treasure always – an experience therefore worth capturing. Seems a bit risky for a transport company. If you start out with this symbolic photographic promise of adventure and then ask people to pay for the printed proof at the other end you’ve really got to your work cut out to make sure you deliver something extraordinary in the middle! I can’t imagine that if one of the ferry services currently shipping people across the English Channel started snapping passengers at Dover and then tried to sell them the photos in Calais two hours later that they’d have many takers.

Of course the Gabriella does deliver and its guests can’t wait to get out their cash and collect their print. Now in the case of the Viking Line ships I’m sure the ‘experience’ came first and the photographic framing was conceived as an additional ‘nice-to-have’. But what if we flip it? What if we were to utilise the idea of photographic framing not just for passenger reflection but experiential incentivisation? After all for the people working on the Gabriella the very visible display of those rows and rows of photographs on the ‘wall-of-fame’ must certainly be a huge motivation to make sure that the team over-commit to delivering the kind of experience that the brand, and that initial flash-bulb moment, promises its guests. You really don’t want any of those faces staring down at you from a great height once the last person has disembarked.

So what if, returning to the English Channel for a minute, one of those services were forced to photographically ëframeí their own journey in this way? Maybe then they’d have to commit to creating an experience in that 3-hour trip worthy of the celluloid memory.

...Action!

1.    If you were to take a photograph of your consumer the moment they came into contact with your brand and then offer to sell them that photo at the end of their time with you what new and different experience would you need to deliver in order to inspire them to pay for that print?
2.    Thinking through this photographic exercise in theory might help us come up with some new ideas for our experiential offering that we might or might not fully deliver. Forcing ourselves to do this in reality would really change the game.