eHotelier caught up with Swiss-BelHotel President and Chairman Gavin Faull recently in what turned out to be a familiar conversation about the sometime interesting priorities of hotel operators.
Staying in one of his own hotels, Gavin related a frustrating experience at the breakfast buffet. “I like toasted muesli for breakfast. The selection of cereals was dominated by Coco Pops. So I asked the manager on duty why there was such a large number of Coco Pops boxes on the buffet, and why was the toasted muesli hidden up the back out of sight?”
“His reply was that they had an oversupply of Coco Pops!”
Often, hotel teams wind up focused on the wrong areas; their motivations driven by factors other than the core business purpose of a hotel – delivering customer satisfaction.
How is it staff lose focus on what the customer wants? Is the fact that the hotel has excess stock of Coco Pops the guests’ fault? Should they eat Coco Pops for breakfast to support the hotel’s motivation to reduce its stock? It’s not their problem that someone ordered too much chocolate cereal.
It’s all too easy for staff priorities to shift from customer satisfaction to a blinkered focus on profitability, cost reduction, stock clearance or other bottom line considerations.
Everywhere you look in hotels you can see the Coco Pops syndrome. How many of these do you recognise?
- For security, the in-room safe has been bolted to the wardrobe floor. The catch is guests must lie on the floor to open it.
- The tea and coffee display is on a desk with no power outlets for the kettle.
- The room television is ridiculously small, even though it cost the same to the hotel as one three times the size.
- Power points are behind the night stand, so guests can’t charge their phone and also use it as a bedside alarm.
Many of these examples we could argue as building design faults and other frustrations that have evolved as guests’ tech habits have changed, but there are still many that are straightforward service issues, such as the Coco Pops example.
Do you have an example of Coco Pops syndrome where hotel departments have lost sight of customer satisfaction in pursuit of other goals? Why not share it in the Comments section below, and lets create a checklist to ensure we remain focused on the customer – after all they will ultimately be the drivers of our profitability.
About the author
Matthew Stephens is the Vice President of eHotelier. He has 20 years of experience in both General Management and IT roles in the hospitality industry. Read more about his background in the About Us section of eHotelier.
