Traveling offers us a chance to escape from our home and our everyday life, to live comfortably - even luxuriously - and to experience the joy of life, whether over today's fortunes, nostalgia about yesterday, or excitement over tomorrow. Sometimes it can be refreshing to just go without any special reason: look for something - anything - and be pampered and noticed - or unnoticed.

A tourist needs sleep, food, drink, and an intimate place for cleansing. Hotels, restaurants, and cafés become second homes for him. They are multicultural, communal living rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms. They are open spaces with an unreserved atmosphere, while homes are largely closed and private.

Those who travel a lot have noticed how the main streets of many European cities are starting to resemble each other, with the same shopping malls, hotel chains, restaurants, and cafés. The same international brands of cosmetics, music, clothing, beer, and television shows are available from Rome to St Petersburg, from Oslo to Lisbon. Lifestyles are homogenized and culture is globalized.

Safe and Same Won't Suffice!
Contemporary travelers are increasingly critical and selective. For many, the usual is no longer enough. Tourists are searching for choices, variety, and personality - a tourist destination, city, hotel, and restaurant must stand out.

A consumer looking for well-being and pleasure won't be satisfied by traditional service production, but requires new aesthetic, emotional experiences and alluring spaces. He has no need for standard hotels, typical restaurants, or average services. A demanding traveler is utterly annoyed by messy and shabby rooms. He is not ready to pay 120 to 200 euros for a small space filled with noise from the neighboring rooms and traffic.

Nor does he need extreme experiences or super effectiveness, but something meaningful to counterbalance the occasionally distressing everyday life. He wants to forget his worries and find some tranquility and well-being. After the chaotic, torn postmodern times, he wants to live in a transmodern era.

Boutique and Design Hotels Are Cool
Many new hotels and restaurants have understood these natural, sometimes unpronounced wishes and demands. They have improved the quality of their services, created new products, added new wellness services, and invested in the design of their accommodation. Visual, aesthetic, and ethic values are increasingly emphasized in all functions. New design hotels and trendy restaurants in particular want to spend on design to stand out and promote their modernity. New spaces also have a tremendous impact on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and productivity.

For All the Senses
Contemporary design hotels and restaurants are visual oases offering new experiences. Their concepts form an aesthetic unity that cannot be copied. They aim for uniqueness and exclusiveness - for an extraordinary atmosphere. The only problem is that the mood of a place is created almost by accident.

The climate of a time and place - the zeitgeist of a hotel, restaurant, or spa - is mostly made up of the individual and shared experiences of guests and workers. Chicness and trendiness do not come with just food and drink and well-designed space, but there must be something inexplicable in the atmosphere. You can feel the design and sense the experience.


Female Traveler Looking for Luxury
Some affluent 35+ women are utterly tired of the current service standards at hotels and spas. They are vexed by general messiness, pool facilities decorated with plastic palm trees, screaming kids, unpleasant waiting rooms, mass feeding from buffet tables, and inconsistent quality of service. Treatments are generally of good quality, but the spa area might be bland and austere. Waiting in line is the worst thing imaginable. Attending a conference or paying a higher price for a single room doesn't buy enough special services.

An international businesswoman knows what she wants from her leisure time: quality services and attainable dreams. Searching for the balance of inner and outer self and a more meaningful lifestyle, she looks for options and difference. Her work and leisure time might partly be interconnected in a way that is catered for by hotels and restaurants.

Classified Ladies
Some of the demanding female consumers can be subcategorized into the casual +, casual ++ , luxuryELLE, and lady categories, which differ from the every-lady by design lifestyle, taste, and world view. This "classified lady" has traveled Europe, and probably the world, too. She is not necessary elitist, but can be happy with a rather simple life. The essential thing is that the basic infrastructure of her life - her income, house, family and love life, warmth, and food - is taken care of. After that, there is time for other things.

Many non-Finnish mothers living in Finland or Finnish mothers who have lived abroad for a long time are delighted by the Finnish social security system and democracy. At the same time, they are perplexed by the wide-spread culture of normalcy and grayness. Indeed, all of us would like at least some luxury in our lives. Wouldn't it be lovely to enjoy the luxury of leisure, traveling, shopping, hotels, restaurants - and men!

"Helsinki Pleasure"
Accommodation and restaurant businesses have always been based on the sales of food, drink, and space. Today, this must be combined with the sales of experiences and wellness. The competition for the tourist's time and money is won by a business and destination that offers the most memorable experiences and extra "Finland and Helsinki pleasure" for its clients.


Dr V.A. Heikkinen, instructor at Haaga Polytechnic,
research manager and senior consultant at Haaga Research

Ms Sari Kortelampi, wellness consultant.