As part of the Service Design course, students were asked to design a service that re-imagines a more resilient and life-centered tourism industry while simultaneously expanding the economic growth of Costa Rica. Students were given the freedom to define what resilient tourism means for them and the team decided to re-interpret the brief as ‘re-imagining a more resilient tourism by ‘extending’ the end-to-end experience of the tourist.

With this brief in mind, the team partnered with El Brujo  Tours, a tour guide company that focuses on rural tourism in the mountains of Escazú. With the re-interpreted brief and the help of our partners, Yazú was designed.

Yazú is an end-to-end hike experience developed for El Brujo  tours that allows the hikers to experience the cultural richness of the real Escazú in both the digital and physical medium by ‘extending’ the activity beyond the hike. The intent of the concept is to help international hikers to access affordable, beautiful, safe and convenient hikes near the city by providing an end-to-end hiking experience.

The team assisted a hike organized by the company and then conducted initial desk research and interviews with both guides and tourist hikers to have a deeper understanding of a hiker’s journey and their mental model when selecting a hike. From this, the team clustered six interesting findings: 1) Guide experience. 2) Hike experience. 3) Human experience. 4) Nature as therapy. 5) Safety considerations. 6) Sense of adventure. The team selected the first three to bring forward into the co-design sessions as their focus was around the specific experiences that make a hike memorable.

Two co-design sessions were conducted, one with a El Brujo  Tours founder/guide and the other with an international tourist that assisted the tour. From the co-creation with the founder, there were interesting findings: 1) Re-thinking promotion of El Brujo  Tours (how people find them). 2) The 2 Escazú’s (the commercialized one and the real one where the community lives). 3) Escazú has a rich legend culture (it’s known as the city of witches). From the session with the tourist, the findings were: 1) Values a tangible way to remember the hike (El Brujo Tours gives them stickers at the end). 2) Values information through experience (that’s why they value the hikes knowledge). 3) The legends of Escazú were not totally clear. With this information, the team proceeded to develop a journey, ecosystem map and a service blueprint.

From the journey, the team decided to focus on the pre and post hike experience. From the ecosystem map, the focus was bringing the hiker and the guide (and his/her knowledge) closer and the service blueprint gave the group a greater understanding of the entire flow of the service and where the moments of intervention were being placed.

The moments of intervention selected happened before and after the hike. Pre-hike, the tourist will scan a QR code on El Brujo  Tours posters placed around the city which will give him access to the El Brujo Tours community page where they can do a pre-virtual hike of selected routes in Escazú, purchase their tickets and ask for transportation if needed. Post-hike, the tourist will be given a token that unlocks new routes of Escazú for the virtual hike, plus more information of the area and it’s community.

The design decisions the team made:

• QR code on poster: from research it was found that El Brujo Tours wanted to change their company's promotion to increase its expansion, reason why the team included a tangible part (poster) with digital (QR code) as sort of a mystery for the tourist to explore further if they were interested.

• Token at the end: at the end of each hike, El Brujo Tours give the hikers a sticker of the company. From research, it was found that hikers value a tangible artifact to remember the hike but also some of them see it as a mission to complete the different hikes the company offered. The team thought, what if the sticker did something else? And this is how the token idea was now a part of the concept.

• Virtual hikes: the team’s how might we statement: How might we extend the hiking experience beyond the hike? With this in mind and the inspiration from Alternate Reality Games, the team asked themselves, what if the hike began before the hike itself and what if it ended even after the hike itself is over? The virtual hike’s intent is for tourists to grasp the whole El Brujo Tours and Escazú experience.

• Pre-hike and Post-hike focus: Although the team acknowledged that El Brujo Tours have not yet integrated a payment or transportation system, the team made a conscious decision to look at more creative ways to create a resilient tourism which is what the brief asked and El Brujo Tours needed.

• Yazú: a magical vine which used to defeat the witch according to the Escazú legends.