The Hotel School Dilemma

Imagine a Hotel School training staff for Fawlty Towers

Marketing.... is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must, therefore, permeate all areas of the enterprise.

- Peter Drucker

A couple of weeks ago when on a trip to run Brand Building workshops, I stayed in a Hotel School in a sub-Saharan country.

I must stress that this School is part of an institution to set benchmarks for hotel leadership, management and service. Most of the tools of marketing apply to service brands. such as the School. Per the work of Chris Lovelock in his famous book Services Marketing there are 3 specific tools applicable to service organisations. 

The first is the opportunity to add physical evidence or tangibility to the implicitly intangible service. On the upside, the architecture and facility which includes the rooms, dinning hall, kitchen and landscaping were superb.

The wheels fall off at the front desk where you may or may not find anyone and certainly from 5pm there will be no one.

Physical evidence for a service brand also includes uniform, whether a formal or an informal one. It is a benchmark in a decent hotel to have some formal uniform at least on the frontlines and in the dinning hall. This was not the case. There was also no evidence of any management or leadership. The School appears to be run by whoever you find walking about.

Managing the customer experience

The second critical factor to build a service brand is the use of flowcharts to design systems and processes that manage customer journeys and contact points on both the front and back stage.

The first challenge here was no working bathroom light nor reading lights. Obviously no checklists were being applied. The lights were fixed the next day by taking the bulb of another light in the room for the reading lamp and fitting a bulb in the bathroom that vaguely lit the basin but not the shower or toilet.

Returning at the end of the first day the room had not been cleaned and the bed unmade. The one receptionist who always appeared to understand (but I learnt, never did) assured me that all would be sorted the next day. It wasn't. I eventually found a "manager" who then made frantic phone calls to establish that the actual problem was that the previous guest had taken the room key. The receptionist assured me that she was well aware of this but had forgotten to ask me to leave my key on the first day so that another could be made. Apologies were never in order.

Do we laugh or cry?

On being assured that there was room service a call for a drink failed to result in one. The wireless network is promoted as a service but it was quickly evident that a password was needed. Another of the various casual receptionists was perplexed as to how to find a password but after thrashing the computer handed me a hand written code on a scrap piece of paper. Back in the room, the password failed. The response was that we would then have to wait for someone else. The next day a new code was  neatly typed out but instead of handing me the clean sheet of paper, it was torn off just missing one of the critical letters. I did establish that these ladies have been working in the hotel school for a number of years.

Leaving in the morning to go about my business there would be no one at reception. On arriving first at the start of dinner one would need to pop into the bar to encourage the crew to hit the floor. It should be mentioned that the stay was not for free and the rates are apparently not significantly discounted when compared to a hotel or guest house. I should also say that the quality of the cooking was very good.

The people issue

The third tool mentioned by Lovelock is the quantity and quality of people working for the service brand. Aside from general scarcity of service people the earnest intent and passion was less than that of underpaid and abused waitrons. The people element also includes the extent of visible management and leadership. At least Fawlty Towers had a clown leader and the place is full of colourful and dysfunctional enthusiasm.

As John Kotter has remarked: The increasingly fast-moving and competitive environment we will face in the 21st century demands more leadership from more people to make enterprises prosper.

Based on my experiences, it was, therefore, not surprising to learn that the tertiary institution behind the Hotel School was anxious about financial sustainability. This of course underscores the fundamental truth that well led and managed brands are the precursor for sustainable businesses.

Perhaps most remarkable was to see the institution's leadership having regular lunch and dinner meetings in the Hotel School but clearly neither hearing nor seeing much.

While we all understand that it is difficult to maintain a consistently strong service brand  there can surely be even less of a margin for error in a School teaching people how to run hotels.

As a customer we probably do have some responsibility to inform management of poor service experiences and I undertake to my readers that I will do so.