Tourism industry is showing increase every year as more and more people are travelling, but moreover most of them are traveling more often and try to explore as many as possible places in their free time and experience new hotels and restaurants.
There are every year new hotel openings, new restaurants and bars popping up in different “posh” locations trying to meet the demand of people who travel.
All these are positive trends and facts…., but only on the surface.
If we look deeper in to the details we will find out that the hotels are opening sometimes earlier than projected, in fight to start gaining revenue as soon as possible. The same applies for bars and restaurants. First clients / customers to one new establishment often experience the lack of work experience, but in addition lack of service, lack of quality and lack of standards – all that doesn’t mandatory means that you have spent less….unfortunately. This is not a comfortable experience a guest / client may have, but somehow acceptable to some level.
But what if you experience all this in a hotel that is already running for over a year time, or even more…?
How many of you have experienced that, or have heard a friend sharing his stay in that “disgusting place”? To be very honest, it happens to me very often, as I travel a lot lately due to my work obligations.
Hotel owners or top managers often undervalue or underestimate the importance of training their employees. For them the two most important tools for the success of one property are the Location and the Building (here I include also the hotel amenities)…
If you ask them what about the Staff? Most of them will either laugh at you, or tactfully will skip the answer and give you some bla-bla answer which they don’t really believe in.
This is where I see the main problem.
For the success of each hotel – the location, the building and the staff are equally important. I would even say that the staff is one idea more important. The staff can influence a guest stay and turn into positives all the bad experiences a guest may have by having the correct approach and providing professional level of service. Guests want to be treated nicely and to be recognized as such. For them the inconvenient location or a bad infrastructure of a building can be overcome, but lack of service – very often NOT.
Guests / clients / customers travel more and more and have the ability to compare and to expect. The financial crunch that crush on all of us made people more careful about their spending’s. They want to travel, they want to explore, but are not willing to pay as easy as they used to some 10 years ago. The reason is very simple – they have less money. And with less money they expect “more”.
This is the reality. These are the facts. If the hotels / restaurants don’t adapt to this reality, someone else will and will kick them out of the market.
If one business wants to stay and to generate revenue they really need to invest in trainings in their staff members.
From the very beginning that a person enters the company it is a must that he receives proper induction trainings, on-the-job skills training and such that helps him to elevate to a higher position and many more…
It is very sad when an up-scale property that is worth over 1 million euro is not able to run successfully as a hotel, because of not properly trained staff members, due to 0 euro investments in Trainings.
By not training the staff members the owners / managers are actually putting on risk the business in long-term. In addition the time for ROI is extended in time and when the business applies for a bank loan, for instance, the current figures would not support a positive result.
Another point that managers need to pay attention on, concerning staff members is to make sure that there are no people who are wrongly positioned. They could be trained, but their low motivation and lack of good self-esteem make them a real threat for the business.
The more trained your staff members are –> the more involved in the business they are –> the better results will the company have in a long term.
If the owner have invested a significant amount of money on the building (in some cases we talk about millions of euro), who are the managers to neglect that fact?
If the management is “lazy”, or not really focused on this task, I ask that the owners “wake up” and push for this to happen, otherwise their investments will be washed or at least their business will be not productive to the level that it could be.
Do you agree with me?
