By Doug Kennedy
September 8, 2015
There is one thing that every hotel room in the whole world has in common; when you turn the lights off they all look the same! When you stop to think about it, the activity which most guests spend the most time doing in their hotel room is sleeping! When you subtract out sleep time from their total time in the room, the hours a guest spends awake and conscious in a room is actually quite few.
For a business traveler, this might be as little as three or four hours in the evening between dinner and bedtime and maybe one or two more hours in the morning before the workday.
Even for a leisure traveler on vacation, when you take out the time spent sightseeing, enjoying the beach, pool, golf or other recreation, shopping and dining out, they also spend as little as 5 or 6 hours in their guest rooms.
From our side of the financial equation as hoteliers we look at RevPAR. Fortunately for us our guests do not look at their investment that way. Imagine if they divided their total nightly cost by the number of hours they were awake in their room. (What would that acronym be? How about DSPAH – “Dollars spent per awake hour.”) Based on the rates I see these days that would easily be $25 to $100 or more DSPAH.
Now I’m sure our hotel industry developers, interior designers, and purchasing managers would like to think that our guests select a specific hotel based on factors such as décor, lighting, bedding, linens, technology and amenities.
Yet as a frequent traveler, I notice that when it comes to hotels within the same classification and market segment, there is a lot of copy-catting going on in our industry. Whenever one hotel brand adds a nifty new feature it is not long thereafter until all the other brands follow suite. There are so many examples in recent years. For branded hotels these include: curved shower rods, the use of white linens during the bed bug crisis, the addition of hi definition TV’s and more power outlets, and most recently the use of sanitized remote controls. For luxury hotels a good example is the pod coffee makers and espresso / coffee machine combination, and more recently the offering of an iPad for service requests or room service.
However, what truly makes the difference between a “good” hotel and a “great” one has not changed; it is the power of people. While purchasing managers can all buy from the same vendors, or simply ask their vendor to supply a product offered by another hotel, the power of people must be nurtured internally like a well-tended garden. You can select the right seeds, but you must plant those seeds in fertile soil, water them regularly, and tend to them as they grow.
Certainly a good HR department can recruit in the right channels, pre-screen candidates using nifty pre-employment testing, and conduct multiple interviews. However the “nurturing” part begins on day one of the onboarding and is impacted by the hospitality culture (or lack thereof) that the new candidate is dropped in to.
When you take time to read guest surveys and look at online guest reviews there are always a few comments about décor, furnishings and comfortable bedding. But what really stands out at top rated hotels is the multitude of remarks about the people on your team. Likewise, at poor performing hotels, more often than not the predominance of comments are about a lack of caring, empathy and lack of an apology.
Great leaders know that the hotel business is not about renting rooms, it is about creating genuine, authentic travel experiences every day, every shift for each and every guest.
