Strategic Plan For Improving Hotel Services

Strategic Development Plans

After reviewing the key performance indicators in our various departments in the hotel, we decided to create a strategic plan to improve the services of the hotel. We used our scorecards for year one and year two to determine the areas of improvement that were needed in the hotel and how to improve in these areas. Feedback from our guests was also essential in creating the strategic plan for improving the key indicators for the various departments in our hotel.

The strategic plan below is focused on achieving our new mission and our vision. The new mission is to create memorable experiences by offering quality services, and our new vision is to be the leading hotel in the state. Some of the strategic development plans that we have used are, mission and visions statements as mentioned earlier, SWOT analysis, competitive analysis and PESTEL analysis. SWOT is an acronym for Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and PESTEL is an acronym for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal factors.

After reviewing our scorecards and the guest feedbacks, we decided to develop new strategies to improve the front office services. In this instance, we used the SWOT analysis to identify our strengths and weaknesses. Some of the weaknesses we identified were: (Chow, 2016).

• The staff operating at the front office was insufficient. This we noticed caused many calls to go unanswered as at times the staff at the front desk had to attend to other matters.
• There was a lot of miscommunication between the staff at the front desk and the customers.
• There was lack of communication between workers at the front desk and workers that cleaned the room.
• The general appearance of the front office was not appealing to many customers. The feedback we got was that it was cramped and outdated as well.
• The service from the staff at the front desk was poor as many guests complained that they did not get the services they need.
• The service was slow, and many guests complained about this.

The following is our strategic plan to improve the key indicators in this department

We plan to enhance the general appearance of the front office. We have decided to set a budget of $20000 to re-furnish the whole front of the lobby. In this budget, we have included new coaches, chairs, drapes, curtains as well as carpets. We decided to change the entire decoration as guests had complained that it was outdated. We decided to use more modern furniture that the guests will be able to relate to. This we plan to do before the beginning of year three of opening business (Buhalis & Mamalakis, 2015).

We have decided to include a welcoming concierge in our budget to welcome guests at the front office. The concierge will provide refreshments and drinks to the guests coming in and also welcome them in a friendly manner. We hope that this strategy will encourage the guests to stay in the hotel for longer and also make them feel at home (Devrim Yilmaz, 2017).

Part of our strategic plan is to employ more staff at the front desk. We want to ensure that all guests are attended to and therefore do not feel neglected. We have set a budget of employing three full time and two part-time staff at the front desk. With the addition of the staff, we hope that services for the guests will be carried out adequately and on time as well. This way our customers will be satisfied (Fraj, Matute & Melero, 2015).

Front Office Improvement Strategies

We have decided to include in our work schedule weekly training for the staff assigned to the front desk. In the training, we plan to educate them on communication, listening and how to deal with guests. With the training, we hope that the staff will learn useful communication skills so that they can be able to handle guest correctly in cases where they are faced with challenges. Our strategy is that the front desk staff will be equipped with the useful skills they need to offer quality service to customers.

The weekly training is inclusive of how to provide quality service. In the training sessions, we plan to give the front desk the solutions to various challenges and equip them with knowledge on how to act and talk to the customers. We aim to put the customer as the priority by catering to their needs and desires (Ustrov, Valverde & Ryan, 2016).

With these strategies, we hope to improve on the following in our scoreboards in year 3

• Reduce the staff turnover from 52% to 30%. This is because with more staff those at the front desk will not be strained.
• Increase the customer satisfaction thus increasing the occupancy rate from 44.7% to 60% during low seasons and 75% during peak seasons.
• The change in the interior décor of the front desk will attract more customers as they will find it appealing which will, in turn, increase the number of rooms occupied. We hope to increase the rooms occupied by 10%

We decided to develop new strategies to improve on our housekeeping as we had received many complaints from our guests and this affected our scorecards in that the occupancy rate was not as high as we hoped. We identified the following issues in housekeeping to help us in developing effective strategies (Gibbs, MacDonald & MacKay, 2015).

• The housekeeping services were poor. Most of the guests complained that their rooms were rarely cleaned and their towels were never changed.
• The rooms were in poor conditions, and some had a bad smell. One guest said that the room looked like a hostel and not a hotel and another said that the toilets were damp when they checked in.
• The quality of the housekeeping services was also poor. One guest said that the room was clean enough meaning more effort could be made.
• There was lack of communication between the front desk and the housekeepers. In one instance a guest requested for towels severally at the front desk, but they never received them.
• The rooms had low-quality furnishings, and this affected the stay of the customers. One guest said the rooms were a bit run down and gave it a dingy feeling

The following are the strategic plans we hope to achieve to improve the key performance indicators in this department.

We plan to ultimately bring in new furniture including the bed stands as we want our guests to feel at home in the hotel rooms completely. We also plan to change the lighting in all rooms so that they do not give it a dingy feeling. Our set budget is $50000, and we hope we can use this for all our 3000 rooms. In this plan, we hope that by re-furnishing the rooms will look more presentable and thus prompt the guests to come back (Rahimi & Gunlu, 2016).

Also in re-furnishing, we plan to use a supplier so that we do not eat into our profits. With this, we hope to improve our customer satisfaction from 44% to 75% by the end of year three. We hope to get a discount so that we can save the money and use in other areas as well.

We plan to create a weekly program that reminds all the housekeepers to clean the rooms every morning. In the schedules, we will clearly note down everything that needs to be done so that the housekeeper does not forget anything when cleaning the room. This we hope will increase our customer satisfaction by offering quality service and therefore they will come back. With cleaner rooms, we hope to keep the customers coming back so that we can increase our average daily rate. From the scoreboard, we hope to increase the ADR from $89.90 to $109 (Rauch, Collins, Nale & Barr, 2015).

Housekeeping Improvement Strategies

We plan to create training sessions for our housekeepers to equip them with the knowledge that they need. A lot of the guests complained that the housekeepers provided poor service and did not accomplish tasks as requested. In the sessions, we plan to train them on effective housekeeping and how to communicate and listen to the guests. We hope that these training sessions will allow them to have the skills that they need to offer quality service as well. With this, we hope to increase our ADR as the guest will be pleased with the services that they receive (Tran, 2016).

We have scheduled team meeting for all housekeepers including the staff at the desk so that they can communicate with each other to offer quality services. In these meetings, we plan for all staff members to be able to air their issues and find the solutions to them. We hope that the communication between the employees will be improved and therefore they can work together to offer quality service (Kim, Lim & Brymer, 2015).

With these strategies, we hope to increase our annual profits in the year three by increasing the ADR as well as the occupancy rate. Also, we hope that we can decrease our yearly turnover as we expect the housekeepers will be equipped with the skills that they need therefore will not leave the job. By also providing quality service, we hope that our guests will be more satisfied thus increasing our customer satisfaction (Yuan, Li & Zeng, 2018).

After reviewing our customer feedback, we noticed that in this department we were getting a lot of negative reviews and this was affecting the profits of the organization. Some of the issues we identified in this department to help us with the strategic plans were:

• Most of the guest complained that the food was overpriced.
• Most of the guests complained that the food was not up to standard.
• The breakfast served did not meet the satisfaction of any of the customers.
• The following are the strategic plans that we hope to implement in the coming year to improve the key performance indicators in this department.

We plan to lower the cost of food by 5% in the coming year to motivate the customers to order the food because of their low prices. However, we do not plan this to stick forever as we will increase the price once the quality of food is improved and we have the demand. This plan is to attract customers first before increasing the price when they cannot look for another option. This will lower our gross operating profit at first, but we hope we can pick up once we can find the market (Kariru, Kambona & Odhuno, 2017).

We noticed many guests complained that our food was bland and terrible and therefore we plan to recruit a whole new team for the kitchen. We plan to hire two head chefs and 15 kitchen staff members. Although this might create a hole in our profits, we hope that this step will improve the quality of food in our hotel. We want to ensure that we not only get guests that sleep to order but also guests that come in for the food. This way we can increase our revenue.

Food and Beverage Improvement Strategies

We plan to offer affordable food packages for the guests that come to the hotel room. For instance, a standard room with breakfast goes for, and we have decided to reduce this to $75. We have created additional packages such as a standard room plus breakfast and lunch as well as a standard room plus the breakfast lunch and dinner. The packages will ensure that we are earning money from both the occupancy rate as well as the food and beverage sales (Huang, van der Veen & Song, 2018).

We plan to create signature dishes for every week that the guests can order while they stay at the hotel. We plan to keep things exciting and interesting so as to keep the guests curious and therefore come for more. This way we will increase the number of guests to the hotel and thus increase the occupancy rate as well as the RevPAR (Mitra, 2016).

With these strategies, we hope to increase our REVPAR in the coming year. Although we ranked first, we want to increase the REVPAR from $40.25 to &50, and we hope to achieve this by providing better food services as well as better food packages (Yang & Buschman, 2017).

After reviewing our scoreboards, we realized that we did not have as many customers as we anticipated our occupancy rates were low and only became high when we reduced the room rate. Some of the guests even pointed out that there were not many guests in the hotel and we hope to rectify this. Some of the strategies that we want to implement to improve the key performance indicator in this department are:

We have decided to use social media as a marketing tool to increase our market. In this case, we will create a website for our hotel as well as create pages on other social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. With the social media sites, we hope to reach large audiences so that we can increase the number of rooms that we sell especially during the peak season (Molina-Azorín et al., 2015).

Some of the information we plan to include in our web pages, and our websites are the room rates, the services offered as well as the packages offered. The most important asset that we will use in increasing our market is sharing pictures of our locations. We noticed that most of our guests rated our location to be excellent and therefore we will use this to our advantage (Nieves & Diaz-Meneses, 2016).

Marketing Improvement Strategies

After re-furnishing our front office and our rooms we will also include these pictures on our social media pages so that they can attract more customers

We want to use our employees as ambassadors that can provide our market on the social media with insider information. The employees will help promote the hotel by providing the clientele with their views. In this strategy, we aim at satisfying the curiosity of the guests by telling them what to expect on their visit to the hotel, and therefore they will want to come (Dopson & Hayes, 2016).

In this strategy, we hope to show our employees that we can trust them and that they are valuable to the organization as well. Therefore the staff turnover will decrease, and we will be able to receive more guests.

We plan to form partnerships with online traveling agencies so that people that are continually traveling can be able to find our hotel by being recommended by the sites. We plan to form partnerships with three traveling agencies at first and this we hope will increase the occupancy rate in the hotel.

After creating a site, we plan to use the Search Engine Optimization so that we can improve the visibility of our website. We want our website to appear as the top 10 when searching for hotels in Google. We are yet to come up with keywords to use in the SEO, but our marketing team is working on it (Findlay-Thompson Doyle Sneddon & Young, 2015).

With all the above strategies we hope to increase the demand for our hotel and therefore increase our gross profits as well by increasing the occupancy rate.

Our human resource department is very important as it sets the plans and strategies that will improve the quality of service in our hotel. Therefore we find it essential to establish strategies that will ensure the HR department will maintain so that we can achieve our set strategies. Some of the strategies for this department are:

We plan to improve the communication between the HR department and all other key areas in the hotel. This is because communication is important to achieve our plans as we will be able to inform each other what needs to be done and what has not be done. This we plan by conducting seminars for learning effective communication skills (Davis, 2018).

Ensure the HR department can work under pressure we plan to train our HR staff so that they can be able to work under pressure be it technological issues, customer complaints, and staff shortages. Our HR department needs to ensure that they can provide solutions for all situations and therefore improve the quality service of the hotel (Leung, Bai & Stahura, 2015).

We plan to implement team building into our curriculum, and it will be mandatory for all the employees. Team building will allow everyone to be able to work as a team in accomplishing our goals and objectives. Also, the team building will allow for transparency between the staff and the HR department. This ensures that the staff can be able to communicate with the HR department effectively to provide quality service is given.

With these strategies in our Hr department, we hope to improve our communication, develop good group dynamics, therefore, creating a strong foundation for our hotel (Blayney & Blotnicky, 2016).

Conclusion

With this strategic plan, we hope to increase our occupancy rates in the coming years so that our gross profit can increase. We also want to ensure that the employee turnover decreases by ensuring that all our employees are happy with their jobs and their working hours. Our marketing strategies will ensure that we get more gusts to visit the hotel including tourists and travelers. We want to ensure that our guests will have the best experience when they visit our hotels as well as recommend their friends and also come back again.

In conclusion, we hope that our planned strategies will ensure that we achieve our vision and mission statements. The strategic plans will ensure that we are able to make massive profits in the coming year and therefore we will be able to succeed. 

References

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