HOTEL REVIEW

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (planning and execution)…and God saw that it was good (assessment and review). In between these two extremes was the chronological order of creation (project management). There is so much to learn here without offending anybody religious sensibilities. Most people go into business or treat existing business without any sense of planning, thereby escaping project management and at the end having no need to review or assess since there is nothing on ground to review or assess anyway. The term project management is often misconstrued to mean project construction specifically. In business management however, project often refers to a specific plan or idea with timeline, goals and objectives meant to further the organization’s goal.

The year has come to an end and there is absolute need to review how far the business has gone in comparison to its set goal and target at the start of the year. Now, I have heard so much about the futility of looking behind rather than look forward in life. That used to be a popular maxim in the olden days and in religious circles. The truth however is that, the future looks bleak and the present un-navigationable without the tortuous lessons of the past. Enough of philosophy you will say, let’s move to the familiar terrain of hospitality.

It’s completely easy to get away with a lot of slack management in the hotel because of the peculiar nature of the business. Like other business where cash flow is almost non-stop, the inflow is likely to give a false sense of right business approach until very late. We look at the figures and feel contended. Since there are no provision for measuring guests’ satisfaction, staff service delivery, budget appraisal, revenue management and so on; hotel owners are pleased with the inflow. A lot of hotels simply do not do proper accounting. Depreciation is not provided for the operating equipments, books are rather cooked than audited, while fund is not set aside for re-injection into the system to take care of re-training and manpower development. All these render a complete picture of the hotel blurred.

If we were to do honest assessment of some randomly picked hotels, you will be shocked at how many of them that are in dire need of process management, staff audit and retraining, budget planning and target setting, revenue management, guests’ satisfaction index implementation, not to mention sales and marketing strategy. Shockingly, affected hotels will not look behind nor contact a consultant to take a dispassionate look at the overall performance of the hotel in the past year(s) so as to plot a way forward. Guests are still coming and fund is still in the system, it will be business as usual until the bubble bursts.

Have a happy new year!