A Critical Evaluation of Various Factors in a Five-star Hotel

Question: Discuss the critical evaluation of various factors in a five-star hotel. Answer: Introduction Singapore is big tourists place, and there are many Five-star Hotels running to provide exceptional services to the potential customers. A Five-star Hotel has many factors that make it a success amongst its competitors. Also, there are many factors that are needed to be used and developd in a hospitality industry, which provides help in the working of the Hotel. In this report, some of the major factors that may affect the working of a Five-star Hotel are being discussed. Critical evaluation of the importance of marketing mix in the success of a Five-Star Hotel, along with employee engagement in the food and beverage department of the hotel is discussed. With the critical evaluation of cross-cultural management and its importance in the hospitality management, the role of CRM in a Five-Star Hotel is also being evaluated (Abdullah and Antony, 2012). Today information communication technology plays an important part in the hospitality industry. How effective it is will be analyzed with the help of critical evaluation. For all the above activities, it is necessary to train and develop the front office department, its effectiveness will also be critically evaluated. In the end, the conclusion of all the evaluations will be given to summarize the whole thing (alem Mohammad, bin Rashid and bin Tahir, 2013). The importance of marketing mix for the success of the Five-Star Hotels A proper marketing mix is a crucial step for a five-star hotel that helps in deciding its marketing efforts. A marketing mix identifies, and indicates the sales team about the several marketing variables that can be used to target the specific market segments, for example, Transient, Conference, Corporate, Leisure, etc. it is necessary for a five-star hotel to have the right services/facilities, good promotional strategies, and the most important thing at a right price (Ashrafi et al., 2013). For a successful business, one need to: - get all the right elements Balance between the elements need to be stroked Differentiation in a business from its competitors can be achieved by adjusting the elements identified by marketing mix to make the product more attractive. Marketing mix help in the following ways in the success of a five-star hotel: - Services or Facilities- Analysis of different market segments of a Five-star hotel through marketing mix is done by the sales and marketing department helps the management to find out the specific requirements and work along in improving the services according to it or develop them if required (Berg and Sevon, 2014). Place- a hotel never travels to the customer, it is the customer that comes to a hotel. A Five-Star Hotel can be anywhere like in the citys heart or on the outskirts, or it could be a resort. The customers are reached with the help of direct methods or indirect methods. Promotion- an effective promotion strategy is a necessity for a five-star hotel as it is the way to communicate with the targeted customers. Customers are generally targeted with the help of effective communication channels. Pricing- a correct pricing strategy is an important factor need to be defined by the marketing mix. If the hotel services are not priced competitively, then the customer will not use the hotel services (Choi et al., 2015). The marketing mix elements influence each other. The business plan made for a hotel if handled right can result in great success. But if handled wrong then the hotel can take years to recover. A lot of understanding, consultation and market research are needed by marketing mix to give a right mix of the success. Importance of Employee Engagement in FB Department in a Five-Star Hotel The Food and Beverages department is an important part of any Five-star Hotel. This department gains around 40% of the total profit for a hotel. All the five-star Hotels try to provide the best food services to its customers, and for that the enthusiastic and talented staffs are very necessary. Employees have many responsibilities that they are needed to fulfil for a successful FB department (Costen and Salazar, 2011). Responsibilities of employees in an FB department are:- A responsible employee manages the day to day operations of the FB department within the guidelines set by the hotel. He preserves the excellent levels of external and internal customer services. Help in designing exclusive menus, making necessary improvements and making regular purchases. They can identify and actively respond to the customers needs. They should be attracting, trained, talented, and recruiting personnel. They should follow the established targets, policies, schedules, and procedure They should be motivated and also believe in team work They should follow all the safety and health regulations If the staffs of a five-star hotel follow all the above-given responsibilities, then the customers will get happy and would want to return to the hotel. However, if any employee is reluctant in giving his best to the job then, it may hamper the services needed by the customer which may give a bad reputation to the hotel (Grobelna, 2015). Marina Bay Sands located on the Marina Bay in Singapore is famous for its seven Celebrity Chef restaurants; Fairmont Singapore the Raffles Plaza is a very famous five-star hotel in Singapore which have fourteen different FB outlets and restaurants to serve its customers, The Fullerton Hotel of Singapore is famous for its five different FB outlets and has also won a major travel award which is Conde Nast Traveler Gold List award. These are the few examples of famous five-star Hotels of Singapore who provide extraordinary food services to their customers, and all this is possible because of their engaged employee of FB departments (Ham and Choi, 2012). The Cross-Cultural Management in the International Hospitality Management The numbers of international travellers are annually increasing in Singapore. Thus, the hospitality department of the Five-Star Hotels is needed to be aware of the importance of the cross-cultural management and hospitality skills. Staffs have to provide services and satisfy the customers needs. Staff appointed on the front desk should be able to predict and read the guests verbal and non-verbal ways of communication. The cross-cultural interaction with an overseas guest or with a traveller with an ethnic background is an important part of a person working in a five-star hotel in Singapore. While getting involved in an exchange with a customer coming from a different culture, an employee may experience many moments of truth as referred by the hospitality management (Jakovic and Galetic, 2014). It has been found that in general hotel management prefers having language study rather than having cross-cultural awareness training. This shows that the management has still not signified the importance of cultural awareness while interacting with guest and their overall satisfaction. A problem may surface when people coming from different cultural backgrounds talk to each other and misunderstand, which results due to language barriers and the cultural differences. Thus, it becomes very important for the hospitality department to have a trained staff that not only able to speak and understand foreign language but also be well informed with the cultural differences of different countries (Josiassen, Assaf and Cvelbar, 2014). Cultural awareness and intercultural communication are very important for the hospitality industry due to the international nature of the business they have, both in regarding with the guests and also the employees of the hotel. Reasons for justifying the importance of cross-cultural management are: - With the growing arrival of foreign tourists, it becomes obvious that social interaction will likely to be continued between guests of diversified cultures and the employees. Thus, for successfully operating hospitality management, it becomes necessary to understand its importance (Karunaratne and Jayawardena, 2011). The management of The Hilton Hotel, Singapore claims that their chains of hotels have 300,000 team members from ninety-three countries which provide a culturally diversified nature. As a result, some different cultures work and communicate with each other on daily basis. This diversification helps the staff to interact with the different cultured guest. Summing up, diversified cultures are an important section of the hospitality industry, and here an effective communication plays an important role while operating in multicultural surroundings successfully (Kim and Ham, 2006). The importance of Branding for the success of Fast food restaurants in a five-star hotel Branding and what a brand stands for a fast food restaurant are the core values for maximum fast food restaurants. If a fast food restaurant manages its branding well then, it will help in increasing the competitive advantages for it. The basic features of a fast food restaurant also help in excelling because a brand has few fundamental steps need to be followed for creating a difference between several competitors. Almost every famous fast food restaurants have a distinguished brand identity like McDonalds golden arches, Pizza huts cap, or the old man of KFCs. All these are easily recognisable by the customers because of their branding (La and Yi, 2015). Strong brands provide many advantages like larger brand loyalty, reduced competition, and increase response to any kind of price adjustment, brand extensions, and larger profit. Branding helps in making clear a restaurants reason for its existence and inspires employees to get accustomed with the brand to build it for their customers. Building strong brand equity can be a priority for all the fast food restaurants, but the attainment of this objective is not an easy task as the products and services of mostly all the fast food restaurants are same and also their methods of distributions. Price is the way one could differentiate with one brand from another. Consumer loyalty and preferences and a greater market share come from a good brand management as it brings a clear differentiation between products (Law et al., 2012). One thing fast food restaurants should keep in mind that branding is necessary for customers to identify the product but with branding comes the responsibilities to maintain the fundamentals promised by the fast food restaurants. Just having a catchy name, or a good logo or an image will not be sufficient for the success of the fast food restaurant. The fast food restaurants should deliver outstanding food experience at a right price with proper hygiene to its customers and maintain it. This will help in making customer remember the brand of the fast food restaurant and make them a loyal. The role of customer relationship management in Five-star Hotels In the present competitive world, the potential guests are becoming more sophisticated, price sensitive and less brand loyal. Thus, it becomes important for a hotel to develop Customer Relationship Management strategies that aim to gather, share, store, and seek guest information through the whole organisation for creating unique and personalised guests experiences (Law et al., 2012). The hotel industry is undergoing significant developments. Now the marketing strategies are more focused on retention of customers rather than acquisition of them, strategies of products are now designed around customisation, reengineering of the internal organisation around the customer-focused processes, and ICT is being applied in order to build relationship, enable customisation, gain customer insight, and provide new opportunities for the distribution of services. CRM focuses as an important strategy for sustaining advantages on competitors in the current global market. However, CRM policy has not been still a successful strategy for the hotel industry but still it is being worked on to be designed for a better result (Lee and Arcodia, 2011). An effective CRM implementation will lead to increased revenue by creating and maintaining the close relationship with customers. It also helps in acquiring new customers, reducing the operating cost, increasing the customer satisfaction, and making sure of long-term sustainability and profitability. But the recent studies show that CRM is mostly applied by large hotels rather than small hotels. This does gives the actual outcome of its success ratio. Just gaining the data of guest is not enough if it is not applied at the right time, and at the right place. CRMs main idea is to give the extraordinary guest experience while their stay in the hotel. For this staff has to make sure that they are going through every detail of the guest that is being inputted in the CRM details. But this is the fact that most of the time this knowledge is not being effectively used (Pavlenko, 2012). The Mandarin Orchard Singapore, a famous five-star hotel in Singapore has just now adapted CRM software Infor, which can serve more than 70,000 customers information at a time. This software will help the hotel to analyse the data better and quickly respond to the varying market condition as according to the guests service demands. Through CRM, the hotel aims at reducing manual processes, and increasing overall revenue for the hotel. This shows that many big hotels are adding CRM in their operational process to gets the benefits by applying its strategies (Qi, Law and Buhalis, 2013). The use of Information Communication Technology in the Hospitality Industry The merger of communication and information technologies along with sophisticated network manners have open new channels for the hospitality industry. The Technology based systems have lead to a vital position for the hospitality industry to offer better services to its potential guests. Hotels can take the advantages of the popularity of ITC based systems in advancing their business operations (Sekulic and Mandaric, 2013). ITC involves the usage of computer software, hardware, and telecommunication devices to manipulate, convert, send, receive, store, and protect data. With the help of computers and technological devices it has become easier for the management of a hotel to store, collect and manipulate information and data and share it with an individual, or within the organisation. The possibility of how it can be used is endless. Information and Communications Technology has become an integral part of a hotel industry and changed its ways of servicing its customers in the last few years. The use of ITC helps the front office to share information about the guest across the chain of hotels (Sucher and Cheung, 2015). Despite the increasing use and popularity of computer technology, there are still few hindrances one has to overcome to be successful. The very necessity is to have the correct information at the right time, at the right place and communicated as quickly as possible, without this ITC cannot be proved beneficial for the hotel industry. For that, the person sitting behind the computer should have full knowledge that how he should find the correct information out of the data when required. In hotels, computers are being used for accounting for guest, forecasting guest demand for reservations, data management, management of guest services, reservation management and revenue and yield management and all this data is finally used to communicate the right part of the information required to cater a guest. There is a minute difference between the right information and waste information thus, it is necessary to know what is beneficial for the hotel, that information should be kept and rest unwanted information should be deleted as it may prove to be a hindrance in communicating the information at the right time, as the person may get confused with the extra information which may be added to the data base (Tsang, 2008). The importance of training and development in the front office department of a Five-star Hotel Training and development of the front office staff is very important as they are the face of the hotels image with whom the customer will be dealing the maximum. Training and development programs help the front office staff to remove performance deficiencies present in them and train them to interpret the demands of the potential customer to give them the best service possible (Wijayanto, 2015). Training and development help in two ways at least, and they are that the employees become more efficient once they went through the training and development program and an efficient employee contributes in a better way in the growth of the Hotel. As discussed earlier there is a major cross-cultural factor that needs to be handled by the management as Singapore is a big tourist destination that means number of different cultured people will be coming in the Hotel and need to deal by the front office, so it is necessary for them to be able to communicate with the guests effectively. Also, if any guests have any problem they are going to call the front desk for the solution so it is necessary for them to be ready with all kind of solutions that may be required, to solve the problem of the guest. All the CRM data and information that need to be communicated is at the front desk so the employees working on the front desk need to be trained accordingly. It is very necessary for the staff of the front office to be trained and developed according to the requirements of the Five-star Hotel or the guest may get a wrong image of the hotel services. For all the above-given factors efficient staffs is required and that can only be possible through proper training and development programs that have to be specially designed to make the staff efficient enough to render all the services expected from them (Wu and Lu, 2012). Conclusion The above-given critical evaluations of various factors and technological uses for the success of the Five-Star Hotels concludes that marketing mix is important for the success of the hotel, but it is necessary to make sure that the correct marketing mix strategy is adapted by the hotel, or it may lead to lots of problems. Food and Beverages Department and the cross-cultural management department are very important parts of any Five-star Hotel, thus the employees engaged in these departments should have proper training and development for the expected outcome from the employees. CRM and ITC are the technologies being used by big Five-star Hotels and for that they need to have proper trained department to have these strategies prove to be a success. For managing all the factors the front office staffs is responsible so it is very necessary that they are well trained and developed accordingly (Zhao and Namasivayam, 2009). References Abdullah, Z. and Antony, C. (2012). Perception of Employees on Internal Communication of a Leading Five-star Hotel in Malaysia.Asian Social Science, 8(2). alem Mohammad, A., bin Rashid, B. and bin Tahir, S. (2013). 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