Viability director Guy Wilkinson says hoteliers can get away with an awful lot, from check-in delays to messy rooms and musty smells to feeble showers, but still be liked by their guests
There is a famous metaphor, much beloved of hotel consultants, that says ‘hotel rooms are a perishable product’. The phrase aptly suggests that hotel rooms need to be sold afresh every day, or else they ‘go off’ like bad milk, stinking fish or mouldy cheese, and you’ve missed your chance.
To take the culinary comparison too far, I’d also like to suggest that, just as there are ways to disguise food that’s been around a bit too long in a restaurant, so it is also true that rooms can be sold even when ‘there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark’ — to borrow a quote from Hamlet.
What I am saying quite simply is that the hotel industry is very forgiving, precisely because of this daily opportunity it affords for hoteliers to have another go to get it right. You can cock up all manner of things and still successfully sell your rooms, night by night.
This is particularly true in booming markets, as Dubai’s was before the recession, for example, when there was so much demand that hotels could effectively just ‘open the door and let ‘em in’.
Under such conditions, people are often glad just to have a roof over their heads. I’ve heard stories from hoteliers who experienced the early days of Kuwait’s hotel sector, for example, who explain that business people were simply glad just to be able to sleep in the corridors of a luxury hotel.
When hotels are full, they can also get away with a panoply of operational ‘no no’s’ that guests grudgingly overlook because they more or less have no option. Delays in getting rooms ready for check-in.
Sloppy rooms cleaning that results in all sorts of unpleasant surprises, missing towels, half-used shampoo, little unwanted souvenirs of the previous guest, even creepy crawlies availing themselves of the amenities.
Poor maintenance, curtains clogging in their rails, TV remotes needing new batteries, blown light bulbs, dead sockets, air-conditioning on the blink, even internet that requires three technicians each with a PhD to connect.
There’s nothing more depressing than musty smells, worn carpets, chipped furniture, fuzzy TV channels, cracked mirrors, outdated tiles, and feeble showers! And yet under the right market conditions, those rooms keep on selling regardless.
Successful incompetence?
This brings me inevitably to the sad conclusion that operations can be handled with impressive levels of incompetence and still be relatively successful. Hotels can lack leadership, systems, training, morale, continuity of manpower and all kinds of basic, desirable attitudes, and still work.
I’ve met GMs who couldn’t organise their own underwear drawer, but who have been entrusted with the fate of several hundred luxury hotel rooms. Characters so weak, dishonest and/or mesmerised by political considerations (for which read, covering their own backsides) that they have allowed little mafias to develop throughout the hotel.
Mafias who siphon off money and cover each others’ tracks to make it nigh impossible to detect. Mafias whose power allows them to clock-in late, clock-out early and do damn all except whinge and make others’ lives less pleasant and productive.
Hotels in which anarchy is on the verge of reigning, but is only prevented by the need to keep up appearances in order to milk the system more effectively.
Sad but true — but even then, they can to all intents trade adequately and guests will be none the wiser.
I should stress that this is definitely the exception rather than the rule, but it would be naïve to suggest that it does not happen. Incompetence is much more common than dishonesty, and often results because well-intentioned workers simply don’t have the opportunity to get the right guidance, or because the systems have not been implanted to provide clear guidelines and controls for department managers and supervisors to follow and inculcate.
The role of the regional and international head offices in such matters is also called into question, and needless to say, I have been privileged to witness much inefficiency at that level too.
I’ve seen it all and yet, these are companies and hotels that often make good profits and are popular with guests. That’s why I say, it’s a forgiving industry.
