Every hotelier dreams of making their hotel better and upgrading their services. Most hoteliers are all at sea when it comes to these services. Sometimes they may not know where to start from and other times finances are a problem. 

The good news is that your dreams as a hotelier aren’t out of reach at all. Just by tweaking a couple of things, you can enhance your customers’ experience and earn good reputation and revenue.

1. Receiving guests

Treat every guest as they are special. Most hotels tend to give preference to customers who appear to have a better source of income. Hotels can’t afford to make this mistake because every bit of goodwill counts. Word of mouth can give you a good or bad reputation because customer reviews count! We can not emphasize customer support enough.

Coach your staff to be attentive to every guest and treat them with the utmost respect. The staff must be mindful of the customer’s requests. Remember when the customer is satisfied, they’ll reward you with loyalty and even better referrals. Happy customers will also overlook minor inconveniences like small rooms, inaccessibility, etc.

2. Train staff every day

It is imperative that you train your staff every day. It is human psyche that when there isn’t a continuous evaluation, employees may tend to get complacent. Your staff must already be working hard and possibly even over time. This is exactly why you must train them; to make them more effective and efficient.

Teach your staff to keep abreast of all the new technology in the hotel and take training sessions for them. Interpersonal skills are very important for hoteliers and their staff. No one can afford to be rude to customers.

How do you help your staff if you aren’t in the vicinity? There are a lot of tools like Performance Support Systems (PSS) you can use to assist your staff to serve your customers better.

3. Customer service

Provide personalized customer support to your customers. Train your staff to memorize each customers’ names and faces. Hotel staff that can do this and remembers the customer’s preferences are a huge asset to the hotel.

Provide amenities like toiletries and towels to the customers. A lot of times due to a high turnover of guests, these amenities are overlooked which gives your hotel a bad name. Ensure that you delegate staff to each room so there is an ease in meeting your customers’ needs. Employ bell boys and shuttle service to help guests with their luggage. You would be remembered if you arrange transport too. According to Macy Hooper from VegaDirect.ca, hotels that offer extra amenities will get better reviews and book more guests. Going the extra mile never goes unrewarded.

4. Employee orientation

Hotels often see high turnover in their staff. If this sounds like your hotel then you need to change this. Employing new staff and training them frequently uses up a lot of your resources.

Studies have shown that happier staff stays for longer periods and have a better performance graph than the employees who are not happy. This is not a surprise because everyone knows that happy people have a better performance curve. Employee satisfaction should be every organization’s goal.

Employees who are not trained properly make more mistakes and feel like they are not adequate for the job and have a greater chance of leaving because of the lack of job satisfaction. If you have longer training periods which are better structured, employees will learn more and be able to perform better, giving them a sense of adequacy.

As hotel staff, they must also be trained to speak to the customers politely and have interpersonal skills. Their workload can be reduced if they have a working knowledge of all the systems relevant to their work, installed in the hotel.

5. Technology upgrade

Just like any other business, hotels have their own technology systems too. These systems ease daily operations and maintain records of customers and staff. Inventory is also done by systems nowadays. Employees who work in hotels have to maintain all these manually, which is a highly time consuming and tedious process.

Keep abreast of all the technological advancements in the hotel industry and strive to make them a part of your organization at the earliest. Property management systems are employed by most hotels these days and they reduce the manual burden on employees.

It is said that a good hotelier only leaves the customer service to their employees and the rest of the processes are handled by computers. This is not only more efficient but also very cost effective in the long run. These systems may be expensive initially, but don’t be penny wise pound foolish because eventually the benefits far outweigh the hole in your pocket.

6. Measure performance

How do you measure performance? Revenue, of course! But revenue isn’t all that you need to see. The other important parameter is customer service. How soon are you able to fulfill customers’ requests?

In an anonymous survey conducted, 69% of customers have given the feedback that they thought the service was good if their requests were fulfilled quickly and efficiently. If you want to go one step further, have a meeting with your staff and ask them for their feedback too. You’d be surprised at how insightful some of them are. They work in the hotel every day and observe things around them. They are in the best position to give you easy and constructive feedback.

 7. Staff appraisals

As we have mentioned before, happy employees have the best performance graph. You can make them happy by giving them a quarterly appraisal and telling them how they’ve made an impact on the organization. This gives employees a sense of purpose when they see that they have made a personal contribution to the organization. When employees see how their work has a far-reaching impact on the hotel’s revenues and customer reviews, it inspires them to do better. Integrating personal goals with the hotel goals like this makes not only the employees happy but also improves business.

You can reward the top performing employees to inspire others to do well, too. Promote team spirit among teams by rewarding the entire team.

Running a hotel is no piece of cake, but it’s not too difficult either if you oil the right gear. You needn’t spend much money on the hotel to turn around your revenue!