Choklit Blog #39: Eight Important Elements of the Hospitality Industry

[It's my final paper for HOS 140]


As the fast-paced life of the typical American becomes more stressful, more of us are looking for ways to get a quick, easy meal or take a relaxing week off.  Enter the hospitality industry.  Many people count on the hospitality industry to cater to their every whim whenever they feel like taking a break-- and the industry aims to do just that.  Pampering people may not sound like a complicated task, but there are many important concepts to remember when you’re working with hospitality.

Exceptional Service.  When you go to a restaurant, what kind of service do you expect?  Probably good service-- you want the employees to meet your requests.  When a person experiences good service from a hospitality company, they’re likely to be satisfied and maybe come again.  However, if you want to ensure repeat customers at your establishment, you must provide them with exceptional service.  This means going above and beyond “good” or even “great.”  Your customer should feel relaxed and at ease; they should feel pampered, like you truly care about them.  Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and treat them the way you would want to be treated.  Looking at things from a different perspective every now and then will greatly improve the quality of your service, which will positively affect your number of customers and amount of profit.  Whether it be a friendly server, an extra amenity, or simply a pleasant atmosphere, exceptional service will not go unnoticed

Organization.  If you're not organized, you can count on never getting anything done.  I recently participated in a group management project, in which a group created an employee handbook for a fictional restaurant.  With this one simple project, I had about fifteen different files on my computer, which I constantly had to refer to or email to someone.  It was essential to the success of my group that I keep all the files organized properly, or our handbook would have been a disaster!  Creating an employee handbook is only a small part of running a business; hospitality managers have so many other things to keep track of, such as finances, menus, and employees.  Without good organization, a company can fall apart.  Of course, “good organization” doesn’t just mean keeping track of information.  A good manager will also properly organize his schedule, keeping tasks prioritized and allowing time for mistakes.  The hospitality industry can be stressful, but good organization will lighten the burden significantly.

Business and technical knowledge.  Know your industry!  Two reasons why many restaurants fail are lack of business knowledge, and lack of technical knowledge.  The hospitality industry is competitive, and you can’t expect to survive if you don’t know what you’re doing.  As far as business knowledge, you should know things like what to pay your employees, how much to charge for services, how to market your business, and what you can and cannot do legally.  Technical knowledge is required to successfully select a restaurant site, plan a concept and menu for your company, and purchase necessary materials to produce your services.  Without this kind of intelligence, you cannot run a hospitality business while avoiding risks of being shut down due to illegal practices, running out of money, lacking customers, and completely failing.  It’s also important to keep up with industry trends, as no one wants outdated services.  As I said before, the industry is competitive; you have to know what customers want, and know how to give it to them successfully.  Without business and technical knowledge, you cannot expect to accomplish that.

Balanced cost and quality.  If you spend all your money, you won’t make any money.  If your products are too low-quality, you still won’t make any money.  It’s important to keep cost down and quality up in the hospitality industry.  However, cost and quality often present a great conflict in any industry; typically, low cost produces low quality, and high quality requires high cost.  The key to controlling costs while maintaining good quality is to plan menus with as few ingredients as possible, and with inexpensive ingredients.  If you offer products that require normally expensive purchases, it may be difficult to afford quality ingredients.  You must also be sure to calculate prices for your products that are low enough for your target market segment, yet high enough to produce necessary revenue.  This is one area where business and technical knowledge come into play.  While balancing cost and quality can be difficult, it is a vital part of success in the hospitality industry.

Marketing.  One of the more obvious needs of a good hospitality company is marketing.  Without marketing, a great business can fail miserably just because no one knows about it!  However, marketing is not as simple as it may seem.  You can tell people about your business all day long, but that does not guarantee that you will actually have customers.  A good marketing campaign should grab potential customers’ attention and promise them something they can’t resist.  It should be a combination of offering them what they want, and telling them what they want; offer them a product or service they want, and tell them they want to get it from your establishment.  Advertisements should look appealing to your establishment’s target market and be easy to spot; they should be in locations that are common to your target customers.  It’s important to have a marketing budget, as marketing can be expensive.  Basically, marketing should grab people’s attention, convince them to purchase your product, and stay within budget.

Ethics.  One of the biggest issues in the hospitality industry is discrimination.  Discrimination can occur on the basis of race, sex, religion, age, disability, appearance, or many other personal characteristics.  Some discrimination is legal, but it is important for hospitality managers to know what discrimination is legal and what is illegal, as illegal discrimination could be very costly  to the company.  There are other ethical issues in hospitality, such as harassment.  Sexual harassment is a growing problem in the hospitality industry, possibly due to the large numbers of male managers over female employees.  Hospitality companies should make an effort to educate their female workers about ways to avoid harassment and what to do if it happens.  The companies should also do what they can to help prevent harassment and other ethical problems.  Social responsibility can be expensive, and the benefits are hard to measure, but it can help a company to steer clear of legal issues and unnecessary expenses associated with fixing problems.  In addition to preventing problems, some hospitality companies choose to be socially proactive by donating time and money to charitable foundations.  There are many different issues concerning ethics in the hospitality industry, and while practicing good ethics may appear to cause unnecessary expenses, it can greatly benefit a company.

Selecting and training employees.  A company’s success depends largely on its employees.  A company must have an effective employee selection process and training program.  If a company hires bad employees, they will either lose money because of bad service, or they will lose money from constantly having to hire new employees.  It is far more expensive to keep firing and hiring than to get someone good right off the bat.  Before the selection process begins, of course, the company must advertise open positions in the right places.  Hiring may be done internally or externally; the important thing is that the company knows where to look for good employees, and knows how to select the best applicants.  Once the employee is hired, they most likely will not be able to do their job correctly without proper training.  There are some dangerous work environments in the hospitality industry, and it is vital that employees be able to safely perform all the tasks required on the job.  Good employee selection and proper training can help hospitality companies avoid excessive firing and hiring as well as legal issues associated with work-related injuries, and it will improve the quality of the company’s service.

Reducing turnover.  The hospitality industry has a very high turnover rate.  This may be for any of several reasons including discrimination, unfair pay, poor management, or bad lower-level employees.  There is not just one issue that can be addressed to fix the problem of high turnover.  Turnover reduction, often referred to as employee retention (as many companies feel they can better begin to solve the problem by referring to it in positive terms), must be solved on a case-by-case basis.  One restaurant may need to hire a new manager, while a hotel may need to pay its employees higher wages.  Some turnover is desired, as a company will most likely always have a few poor employees.  A good way to deal with this problem is to focus on making an ideal work environment for the average and above average employees and to encourage the poor employees to work for competitors.  Every hospitality manager should evaluate his own company and figure out how to best satisfy his employees.

The issues I’ve discussed here are crucial for any hospitality company.  Without exceptional service, proper organization, business and technical knowledge, balanced cost and quality, good marketing, ethics, effectively selecting and training employees, and reducing turnover, any hospitality company is at risk of failure.