Hospitality Paradigm

Have you noticed how our guests have become smarter over the years and are now able to wangle better deals from you? As much as the world gets smaller, travel has become much less complex and affordable and today’s guests can be geniuses at negotiating much better deals than earlier. Besides, a larger supply of hotel inventory as well as destinations has tilted the scales in the favour of the guest.

Following are some of the most popular tactics that used by Guests

• Shortage of funds/ limited budget/ more than estimate
• Complaining from the time of check in /event
• Never appreciating the positives during his stay
• “I am too busy now, meet me later”
• “Your competitor is offering me better rates than you”
• Praises the competition
• “What is your best offer?”
• “I’ll book with you only if you quote me a discounted rate”
• Referring documents to make out as if he is comparing your quote with competitors, but not specifying any comparison
• Asks you to give him a minute and keeps on doing other things for a long time
• Does not pay proper attention – talks to others around – Leaves in the middle for a while
• Raises his voice on the phone with the person he is talking to in front of you
• Showing off that he will be favouring you if he commits in your favour
• Asks for a complimentary stay to check quality (in case of a large residential banquet query)
• Makes out that he is very pressed for time

An interesting case study…

First you hire someone, then you train them. Right? David Bowd thinks that’s backward.

Earlier this year, the CEO of Salt Hotels was preparing to open his fourth location, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. But he didn’t run a cattle call. He and his team started Salt School instead.

“This is an industry where it’s all about attitude and hard work,” said Bowd, whose resume includes stints with boutique hoteliers like Ian Schrager and Andre Balazs.

The company invited local job-seekers to a free, 10-week, 25-hour introduction to hospitality, and the only requirement was explaining why they wanted to be included. The result: 380 applicants, from teens to 60-year-olds, for 160 spots – many with moving stories of seeking a break, a second chance, or to be a role model for their kids.

“We set about calling in every favor we could with all the hotel friends we had” to staff the Saturday morning sessions, Bowd said, which focused on topics like sales and marketing, F&B and revenue management. In one class, students role-played front desk scenarios – luggage delivered to the wrong room, complaints about loud neighbors. “The purpose was to make decisions on the fly. It’s thinking creatively,” he added.

Bowd watched students gravitate toward certain responsibilities. “It was such a natural evolution of people moving toward areas that they felt comfort in and had a passion for,” he remembered. It also fostered a healthy competition. “You see who’s shy, who’s outgoing, and you are able to match people with their skill set much easier because you see them perform,” he said.

In the end, 110 students graduated, and the hotel hired 67 (three have been promoted); 90% were from Asbury Park. Other local companies have inquired about hiring the students, as well.

“At the end I thought, why have we never done this before? We just employed a whole workforce that we’ve already spent 10 weeks with,” Bowd said. “They know what our core values are, they know what to expect, they have a passion, they’re all local. This is a no-brainer.”

It’s also a lot of hard work, he acknowledges, but with results that far exceeded traditional recruitment, using an approach that he would like to see larger companies use in the communities they enter.

The school moves next year to Topeka, Kansas, where Salt is working on a 109-room hotel. Former students will become staffers to help prepare for an early 2018 opening. “I’ve opened many hotels, and this is the best way of doing it,” Bowd said.

Emotional management skills which provide competency to balance emotions and reason so as to maximize long term happiness for self as well as dealing with others, when applied within organizations has major benefits.

Customer Service: Learning how to help your customers feel heard, understood, helped, served, respected, valued and important.

Hiring: Selecting employees with relatively high Emotional Intelligence, i.e. emotionally sensitive, aware, optimistic, resilient, positive and responsible.

Turnover: Enabling turnover reduction through helping employees feel appreciated, recognized, supported, challenged, rewarded and respected.

Training: Raising EQ at all levels of the business through Emotional Literacy and EQ awareness workshops.

Corporate Culture: Creating an environment where employees feel safe, trusted, special, needed, included, important, cooperative, focused, productive, motivated, respected and valued.

Productivity: Developing intrinsic motivation. Increasing employee commitment, cooperation and cohesion. Reducing lost time spent on conflicts, turf-battles, defensiveness and insecurity.

Goal Setting: Setting goals based on feelings. For example, stating the goal that we want customers to feel satisfied, appreciated, etc. and setting similar goals for employees, and then getting feedback on feelings and measuring and tracking performance.

Emotional Support: Mitigating negative emotions like fear, worry, anxiety, and stress.

Leadership: A leader with high EQ is emotionally aware. This means that he or she is aware of his own feelings and is not limited to logic, intellect and reasons when making decisions and managing people.

Its going to get harder and harder to think of Instagram  as nothing more than a simple tool for sharing a filtered version of your life with family and friends as this social media platform is fast becoming a marketing machine.

Now, businesses can set up a profile that contains a “contact” button that allows prospective buyers to call, email, or text a seller without ever having to leave the app. That grill making your mouth water? Call and make a reservation at the restaurant.

There is also the new Insights feature which promises to give businesses actionable information about ‘who their followers are and whose posts resonate better than others.’ By learning more about the behaviour and demographics of your audience, one can create more relevant and timely content.

Sellers will be able to promote posts, turning well-performing posts into ads right within the app. A business simply has to select an existing post, add an action button, and then select a target audience (or let Instagram suggest an audience on its behalf). From there, you will have an ad ready to run for as long as you’d like. The whole world will be able to access these tools by the end of the year.

Quality, Recency and Quantity of reviews are the three key factors that interact to determine a property’s popularity ranking on TripAdvisor. So what does one do to seek for prime positioning on TripAdvisor? Here are some suggestions to do it the honest way…

1. Provide remarkable service
2. Be true to your brand
3. Be honest
4. Mobilize your team in creating a guest-centric culture at your hotel
5. Offer great value to your guests
6. Do it with passion every day
7. Empower your staff
8. Reduce negative reviews by service recovery during the guest’s stay
9. Listen to your guests in order to enhance the experience and overall satisfaction.
10. Encourage guests to leave a review

Sometimes, we all need to be reminded of just how much we’re throwing away by leaning too heavily on OTAs as a primary source of online bookings. Everyone knows that OTA bookings cost more, but very little is ever made of the fact that OTA bookings are usually much lower in total value than direct bookings.

The picture of an OTA customer is clear. They don’t care about your hotel brand (or any other property’s brand for that matter), what makes your experience unique, or any of your updates and renovations. You are a commodity to them. They’re looking solely at price and where they feel they’ll receive more bang for their buck.
OTAs are not only your least valuable booking sources, they are also your costliest. To make matters worse, many hotels attempt to out-do their competition on OTA channels by offering even lower rates than what is listed on their own hotel website (via opaque offers). It’s the hotel industry’s version of hara-kiri. Not only is this short-sighted, it unnecessarily undercuts and cheapens any other efforts you make to drive profitability at your property. Lowering already-discounted room rates will ultimately leave potential guests no reason to book direct.

Let’s take a look around our workplace and really understand our key wealth creation prospect ~ our team. Let’s face it, it is very rare that we are able to recruit “polished jewels”… rather we are forced to look for the mud-encrusted ones which are available in the marketplace. Which of us would not like to begin with a team filled with Jewels? But is this really viable? The truth is that a perfect recruit is as elusive as the will-o’-the-wisp (a person or thing that is difficult or impossible to reach or catch) and as utopian a concept as can be.

Oft times, logic advises us to select for experience, intelligence, or determination. Talent, if mentioned at all, is an afterthought.

Conventional wisdom says that either Experience, Brainpower or Willpower makes the difference.

Some managers place a special emphasis on experience, paying close attention to a candidate’s work history and brands worked for. They see his past as a window to his future.

Other managers put their faith in raw intelligence. They say that as long as you are smart, most roles can be ‘figured out’.

Yet other managers believe in the ‘Success is 10 percent inspiration, 90 percent perspiration’ school of thought. Managers from this school believe that the technical part of most roles can be taught, whereas the desire to achieve, to persist in the face of obstacles, cannot. When selecting people, they look for past evidence of grit.

No doubt experience can teach valuable lessons; intelligence is a boon; and willpower – which great managers actually label a talent – is almost impossible to teach. However we fail to take into account that there are so many other kinds of talents and that the right talent, more than experience, more than brainpower, and more than willpower alone, are the pre-requisites for excellence in all roles – talents such as a restaurant steward’s ability to form opinions, empathy in order-takers, assertiveness in salespeople, or, in managers, the ability to individualize. Conventional wisdom assumes either that these behaviours can be trained after the person has been hired or that these characteristics are relatively unimportant to performance on the job. Both assumptions are erroneous. You cannot teach talent. You cannot teach someone to form strong opinions, to feel the emotions of others, to revel in confrontation, or to pick up on the subtle differences in how best to manage each person. You have to select for talents like these. Talents like these prove to be the driving force behind an individual’s job performance. It’s not that experience, brainpower, and willpower are unimportant. It’s just that an employee’s full complement of talents – what drives him/her, how he/she thinks, how he/she builds relationships – is more important.

The next time you recruit, try looking for talent in an individual and then offer him/her a enhancing & nurturing environment. Then sit back and enjoy the show…

So what’s it with words and the finer nuances they proclaim? Try these…

• I need my order at the earliest! ~ vs. ~ When is the earliest you can supply my order?
• This pricing is not proper ~ vs. ~ We are looking at a better pricing
• We cannot pay you earlier than 30 days ~ vs. ~ We will be pleased to make payment at the end of 30 days.
• I will reject the order supplied if it does not meet our specification ~ vs. ~ Do ensure that the order supplied meets with our agreed specifications, so as to avoid returns.
• Your proposal was unacceptable ~ vs. ~ Regrettably, we were unable to select your proposal

It’s a no-brainer that the statements on the right are the more polite ones and many of us would like to say that we are active proponents of such communication. For those who have been on both sides of the supply chain, the learnings come quicker.

Some organisations believe in calling their Vendors as their Business Partners, but in reality how often do we really consider our suppliers as one of our valuable resources?

Most hotels in Goa contract serenaders, one man bands, duos etc. and this has always been a flourishing business for musicians particularly in this state. During my tenure at Goa’s finest and leading luxury resort, I would audition them myself, plan their performances to match the weekly events and finalise their contracts after negotiating the best rates amongst five star hotels in Goa. Having done so, I would now ensure their comfort in ensuring they had their meals at the coffee shop buffet in comfort after the performance; their roadies were looked after in the staff cafeteria; their payments were made promptly by the 15th of every month as promised in the contract; their issues, if any were brought to my notice and I would attend to them personally. I would also check on their performances many of an evening and even give them feedback on the same. All this startled them as they never had this kind of personalised treatment at the other hotels.

The result? Every six months at the signing of the new contracts, my Musician & Jewish blood would ensure the change in rates be maintained within levels suited to my profitability parameters. The beauty of this was that these musicians & performers (and there were 5 sets of these) never wanted to leave my hotel as they knew that they were appreciated by the management!

Now think back to those Business Partners (Vendors) who stayed with you even when you move to a smaller organisation. You will probably find that the reason they did so was the respect you showed them in your dealings with them earlier. The Ritz Carlton motto – “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen” which we all heartily agree to may now be applied in this context also… what say?