Guest quality assurance
Being a hotelier, means that you constantly interview candidates for the receptionist and receive many different CVs from various levels of candidates. Having found a more or less suitable candidate, gritting your teeth, you try to urgently integrate them into the system and set them up at the reception desk (otherwise you are unable to sleep at night) and hurriedly explain right there is Booking, money is taken here, and the signature is put right there.
It takes a person a solid amount of time weave some thought into the bustle of work, and for the most part they are generally uninterested in putting effort into it, since they’re simply adapting to someone’s order of work.. or disorder.
Thousands of startups release projects daily on how to automate something, improve or simplify using mouse clicks or the power of their electronic thoughts so that then Instagram explodes from reposts.
More than 12,000 Property Management Systems exist in the world
When our hero looks at the next technological genius at an exhibition or on a social network, his subconscious estimates in real-time how well such a solution can be adapted. This happens automatically — this is how the brain is arranged. The brain filters the information through the accumulation of neurons, wonders how it fits into our life and how much we ourselves correspond to this phenomenon.
But often it’s impossible to adapt, since reality is already far distorted from the spherical cow that our technical geniuses took for the main problem.
Trying to fill in the organizational holes of our typical hotel, and also financial, we are hanging more and more tasks and duties on employees who, it seemed, did not initially have to fulfill them. It turns out that a typical receptionist, in addition to serving guests at the check-in checkout, also answers the phone, emails, sells excursions, souvenirs, groceries, changes currency, makes coffee … Why? Yes, because “He still has nothing to do! So let him earn money!”
After we hung a bunch of tasks unrelated to the main activity, we can no longer understand — where do we earn? Is it a hotel or a souvenir shop? Maybe then it is worth re-qualify as a coffee shop? But for some reason we do not earn enough either as a cafe, or as a souvenir shop, or as a hotel.
Having unrealistically complicated the organization, we begin to search for the holy grail that will solve all problems at once. To manage the hotel, we need software that will do upsales with bicycles, champagne and tours. We want car parking to be considered free of charge for our loyal guests, and twice as expensive for others. We come up with sophisticated packages with massage and wine for the weekend and after that we are proud to announce that we are a UNIQUE hotel that requires a special approach.
But wait, do customers know about this? Or did you sell all these super-luxury packages on the slate slightly more expensive than the number on a cloudy day? Have you tried to calculate the deep negative that only organization of selling this one-time promotion with wine and massage gives you even before you’ve paid for wine and massage? Perhaps it will be more profitable to give bed-only for free…
Decomposition
Try to identify the functions that directly effect the main activity, and then evaluate whether you really need to be at the reception desk to execute them. The result may surprise you. Phone calls, e-mails, booking processing — all of that can be done outside the hotel. And perhaps even somewhere in a completely different country. Some housewife with a small child in a remote place from Serbia simply dreams of replying to emails and sending links to pay for your non-refundable reservations, if your PMS still can’t do this automatically.
All major corporations use call centers in 3rd world countries
Would you like to sell coffee, massage, wine, excursions or souvenirs? Perform this in a separate line of business, at least in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, and calculate how profitable it really is. It’s totally possible that you have a large flow of customers and it makes perfect sense to open up a store or coffee shop with a separate entrance.
Is a human needed?
Fear of the unknown to leave your guests unattended quickly passes after installing surveillance cameras, fire alarms and purchasing insurance. More than half of the world’s population lives inside rented apartments. Do you know how the safety of real estate in long-term leases differs from short-term ones? They’re identical! Security or concierge is an additional service that your guests should expect and be glad to pay for.
Over 50% of the population are not homeowners
Human Touch
“We have a personal approach!” What does that mean? Is your guest required to manually fill out 20 lines of the registration form? Will you feed him with a spoon at breakfast or carry him to his room on your hands? Most likely you want to meet the guest and show him that you can guess his preferences and advise him of a suitable restaurant nearby, a tourist route or tell where he can park his car. As a result, you get a receptionist who reprints registration forms, accepts payment, encodes cards, and memorizedly repeats where and when is the breakfast, what WiFi password and what the check-out times are. Did you really want that?
Open up Indeed or TotalJobs.com and you can easily see how many students who know basic European languages are ready to work for a few hours a day and talk about the nearest restaurant! Yes, they don’t know how to use Fidelio Suite8, they don’t know how to program a key or send a registration form to the police, but they know where to take a walk, how to use transport and will easily add a route to your guest’s Google map.
It is the assistants who are free from routine activities the ones who feel the guests better and solve their problems faster
Automation
In the tourism business, almost everything is automated and optimized. Rooms are booked online and are automatically sent to your PMS. You can pay online, passports are recognized within seconds, cards for the room are encoded and locks only let guests in during their paid time. How is it that we still require the receptionist to do something that has been automated for a ages?
Why, looking at the automatic reception, we expect that it’ll make coffee, sell a souvenir and bring a newspaper under the door? Forgetting that we ourselves came up with these functions only so that the employee wouldn’t fall asleep during their spare time, since they’re quite poorly organized.
Investments and their return value
“We are a small hotel and it won’t work for us. This is the biggest misconception, the idea that automation is only needed by large businesses. It is precisely the large hotels where there’s a surplus of resources that allows them to function with a staff shortage with only slight deterioration in the service. For a small hotel, the cost of guest service is much higher. It is not automation that’s very expensive, but rather manual labor.
Calculate it yourself (with a salary of €9 per hour):
Encoding and issuing a card in 1..5 minutes — €0,35.
Filling out the registration form 3..5 minutes — €0,60.
Okay, simpler — an incredibly fast check of a family of 3 people with payment, forms and 2 cards in 10 minutes —€1,5. The rest of the time, your employee in the background is answering to letters if he isn’t read Facebook or hanging out in WhatsApp.
Have you also noticed that manual preparation of a card from a room is more expensive than the card itself?
The simple separation of the «human touch» from the functional check-in makes your small hotel business extremely stable and independent of the human factor. Even if your “remote responder to emails” disappeared, the smiling team leader said they are sick and hasn’t come out to talk about the nearest restaurants the guest will still be able to book a room, pay and check in their his own. Your main service will be provided, albeit without a warm, human smile. You have reduced requirements for staff qualifications, although they are increased in terms of communication skills. It is enough for you to provide human touch only during busy hours and it turns out to be easy to reduce operating costs by 60–70% and get a return on investment for the 2nd month.
The main weapon of a good entrepreneur is the organization of a functioning business. It doesn’t matter that (suddenly) tomorrow all the staff hasn’t come to work, or 20 buses of Korean tourists arrived. It is important to manage refined processes that are not dependent on the intellectual abilities or skills of employees. Qualified personnel can bring even greater benefits to the company, but their absence should not stop or break a running machine. Are your people capable of holding a punch and reacting quickly if the only available weapon is “personal contact” that needs to be quickly packed into Japanese words? The one who quickly reorganized the business and sent competitors into a knockout receives the main prize — full occupancy with high profitability.
Like, if you think robots will m̶u̶r̶d̶e̶r̶ save all of us
Share if your friend sits at the reception👏🏽 at👏🏽 night
Leave a comment if you still need ✌️human ️touch✌️
Heart, if you know firsthand💜love!
