Goal-oriented retreats

Abstract

Out of Office Workations is a Dutch startup that focuses on organizing and planning unique group experiences outside the usual work environment, called workations. This service provides a right balance between work and leisure inspired by the nomad lifestyle which combines their ability to work remotely dominated by an attractive location offering a variety of leisure activities. While Out of Office Workations primary target is the digital nomad community, this master thesis focuses on identifying different areas of opportunity for a goal-oriented retreat in new potential market segments since their ambition is to become Europe’s customer-centric, innovative and sustainable retreat solution. To achieve this ambition, Out of Office Workations must discover how to fit their offer to new market segments to create a long term sustainable growth with their workation service by stimulating a work-time-balance setting. First, to gain a holistic understanding of what is a workation and what are the factors associated with this service highly exploratory research, website content analysis, semi-structured interviews with workation providers helped clarified the context, the target audience, and the different value propositions behind the offer of workations. Next, interviews with potential clients are executed to find new market segments for Out of Office. I identified three customer profiles in these interviews, two being addressed by the competitors and one remains relatively uncharted: the consulting segment. I have chosen this customer profile as this new market segment is not being forwarded by the competitors representing a valuable opportunity for Out of Office to scale their workation to a new unexplored direction. To properly fit the workation offer to the consulting segment, ten interviews with consultants from a variety of consulting firms were scheduled to understand this customer profile. Once gaining a more detailed and structured view of the consultants’ professional and personal life, the design solution “Out of Office Professional Services” is created to meet their needs, aspirations and frustrations. The presented solution is intentionally transformed as a quotation form to integrate it into the Out of Office website. This quotation form enables consultants to know what value proposition is suitable for their needs and facilitates the construction of their own workation. Once having the answers from the quotation form, Out of Office can create a personal and tailored-made experience for them. These four value propositions have been validated with the CoFounder of Out of Office Workations, however, to verify fully the effect of them Out of Office should test them in real-life projects with the stipulated target market.