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No matter if you are working in a hotel or are a frequent traveller chances are that you asked or heard this question over and over again. Many times it’s the question asked most upon check-out and your way out of the hotel. Continue reading How To Improve Your Guest Surveys The Fast Way
Changing the culture is the basic requirement for any enhancements or achievements. If you are aiming to improve your associate or guest satisfaction, reinforce you standards of excellence or improve your star ratings, the first step is to establish a culture with a mindset wanting to be the best at every turn.
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How exactly do you change a culture? Continue reading Changing the culture
At one of the hotels I worked at we faced the challenge of being consistent in how we assigned room upgrades to our guests, and were not in line with the directions of our loyalty program. We had over 70 percent of return guests and were giving upgrades left and right, not just to the next room category, but to junior suites and up as well. This not only reduced the feeling of being special and recognized when receiving upgrades, it also caused our guests to feel entitled to the upgrade and to complain whenever we could not accommodate them. Even more we were not able to up-sell any of our guests that were actually willing to pay for a nicer room. We had a change of GM’s and our new leader made it very clear from the beginning that we would honor the guidelines of our loyalty program in assigning upgrades, and even assigning very frequent guests to the rooms booked, and that we as managers would be expected to be consistent with this. As expected it was a bumpy start and we had to deal with plenty of unhappy guests for a couple of months. Many of them asked to speak to the Hotel Manager and General Manager to express their unhappiness and to complain about the individual providing the service and denying the upgrade. To our surprise the GM stayed consistent with the message given by his managers and front line staff, and supported us 100 percent. After a couple of months the guest complaints disappeared, guests started appreciating upgrades again, were giving us higher scores on guest satisfaction surveys and started to book suites at a higher rather than always hoping for an upgrade. Continue reading Support is everything!
To deliver excellent service, it is not enough to understand how to do it and to have the skills to do so, you need to experience it first.
Working in hotel operations every day we often tend to forget what it means to really empathize with your guests and to put yourself in your guests’ shoes. Everyone knows or has been told a million times that you are supposed to use the guest name at least twice in every guest interaction, if possible, and yet at every hotel I ever worked in, we would always struggle to consistently deliver on this promise. Why is it possible that something as simple as using the guest name can yet be so difficult to do consistently across the hotel at every turn? Continue reading How to deliver excellent service
You most likely heard about the service profit chain before and the ‘magical’ concept behind it. At the end of the service profit chain stands the purpose of your company, the long-term profitability and sustainability of your hotels.
How can you get the most profit for your hotel, and who gives you the most amount of money? … of course happy guests! Happy guests will spend more money each time they stay with you, stay more often and longer, and tell their friends about it. And you probably know how powerful word of mouth can be. Working at my previous hotel in Shanghai the HR director went on a business trip to the US with representatives of the owning company to experience the brand and what it stands for. At one of the properties during their trip the HR director ordered room service for the group who decided to stay in for the evening, and wanted to order a simple Chinese noodle soup, something that her guests would appreciate and enjoy. Once the order was delivered up to the room, it was not what she had in mind for her guests and called the room service order taker back to correct the misunderstanding. The order taker didn’t try to empathize, told her that it wasn’t a misunderstanding, and that she received what she ordered (needless to say a very disappointing and discouraging experience). The HR director came back from the business trip and told this story of how one bad interaction can leave a lasting negative impression at the next operations meeting and general assembly, and I keep telling this story as an example of how powerful word of mouth can be (unfortunately negative word of mouth will always be more popular than positive). So striving to keep your guests happy and satisfied makes sense.
How do you keep your guests happy? Right, with happy associates. Sounds too easy to be true? Well, did you ever receive really good service from someone who did not enjoy her job or doesn’t care? You probably could tell that it’s not sincere and just doesn’t feel right. Happy employees deliver passionate, sincere and caring service to make your guests happy. They will go above and beyond, not because they have to, but because they enjoy doing it. Having learned in a very traditional hotel in Austria, I was very much focused on standards and service excellence, always wanting to strive for perfection, and having the highest expectations for myself and for others in return. In my first real management position in China, I was trying to train the employees in my team to deliver exactly this, excellent service without exceptions, and perfection at every turn. I still remember the review with my previous boss very vividly, and how he told me that I need to change my management style to be successful… something that I found difficult to believe, and didn’t want to hear at first. I wasn’t happy about him telling me that I need to change and tried to argue his feedback. It took me a couple of days/weeks to understand that he was right, and I am still thankful that he didn’t care about having to push back on me trying to argue and simply wanted me to grow and become a better leader. He told me that standards and striving for perfection is important, but the foundation for all this will always be fun! You need to enjoy what you are doing and have fun at it! As a leader you need to be able to motivate your employees to be successful and achieve great results because they enjoy what they are doing, and not because they have to.
Now we covered that we want to build a culture that encourages our employees to have fun at work, make our guests happy in return so that they spend more money and tell their friends about it. But who exactly is responsible for happy employees? It’s not only your manager or HR department, but it’s the leader in you and every employee in the hotel. Everyone has the power to be a real hero, and make the people around you happy!
The Service Profit Chain is not magical at all, but very real, and there is nothing more encouraging and exciting than working in a business whose success is directly linked to the happiness of its employees. Wouldn’t you want to work in a place like this?
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