Executive Summary
Remington Hotel is a large hotel located at the airport and is involved in checking in passengers who want to spend their nights at the airport. The hotel is very large comprising of more than 100 rooms spread across adjacent buildings. It is important for this hotel to provide high quality services to the customers since it is the quality of the services that will either draw the customers to the hotel or drive them away.
These services have to be offered expertly by front desk attendants who serve the guests on a daily basis. It is the endeavor of Remington Hotel to provide its customers with the best services ever. As part of this endeavor, earlier in the year before Lewis joined the hotel, they conducted a service quality assessment to determine the satisfaction of the hotel guests with the services provided. The hotel guests were supposed to provide information on the service dimensions including tangibles like rooms and lounges, assurance, responsiveness and empathy.
The kind of assessment provided by the management was a scale rated up to seven given to the hotel guests to fill. This was a suitable method for the hotel management to determine the level of service quality in Remington Hotel (Hoffman & Bateson, 2010).
Introduction
Hotels located at the airports are crucial facilities that provide services to passengers on transit. This report basically documents my experience after being transferred to Remington Hotel to improve the services at the hotel. One of the reasons why I am transferred to this hotel is because of the good performance I have exhibited in my previous work places. Before joining Remington, I was fully aware of the challenges I was bound to encounter in this new place of work.
This is due to the high number of passengers who check in at the hotel necessitating the establishment of an efficient system to ensure that all guests are handled effectively. There are only two front desk assistants involved in the process of checking in the guests which proves to be quite a hard task (Hoffman & Bateson, 2010). These are some of the challenges that I am expected to deal with.
Findings
Right from the onset, I knew that there was a big challenge to be dealt with and what I witnessed on my first day at Remington confirmed my anticipations. There were about 20 guests waiting to be cleared when a vehicle arrived with 80 more guests also to be checked in. This implies that there were about 100 guests to be checked in by only two front desk agents. However, after 40 minutes the agents had managed to check in all the guests. Despite the fact that the front desk agents had managed to check in all guests within this time frame, I did though get wind of other challenges existing in Remington within the first day.
As I was preparing the ideas that I was supposed to discuss with you on how to improve the service delivery in the hotel, a guest showed up and explained that he was not satisfied with the services offered in the hotel. The guest said that he had called at the hotel after seeing its advertisement and was confident that he was going to get relevant services from the hotel. However, since it was during the day he was informed that there were no services being offered during the day. What this passenger wanted was to secure a room before it was late as he waited for his luggage (Hoffman & Bateson, 2010).
Analysis
Service Quality Gaps at Remington Hotel
In my opinion, there are numerous service gaps at Remington that should be addressed. Instead of the employees providing a satisfactory answer to the guest, the hotel employee who was approached by Spencer simply said that the services were not available during the day. I believe this is knowledge gap among the employees of the hotel because they could not provide information from an informed point of view.
The employee could have explained to the guest the procedures of operation of the hotel and probably inform the guest of the most appropriate time to look for a room. This would have been a satisfactory answer to the guest because he really hoped that the essence of an airport facility was to assist in such situations.
The other gap I have identified from what Madeline witnessed in her first day at Remington is that there is lack of good service delivery at Remington. This is witnessed in the lack of willingness among the employees to assist the guests. For instance, when more guests arrived at the front desk some minutes before 11 p.m, they had to stay there for long. This is because one of the front desk attendants was supposed to be off duty exactly at 11 pm.
It would have been better for this attendant to wait a little bit longer and assist the other colleague in checking in the guests. This definitely shows that there is a gap in service delivery among the hotel employees. In places where service delivery is given the first priority, employees would not be in a rush to leave guests unattended to just because they have to go off duty.
Another gap I identified from what I observed on my first day is the failure to assist guests in delivering their luggage to their rooms. After Mr. Spencer and his wife got a room, they were supposed to walk a certain distance carrying their bags. Their situation was made problematic by the fact that they were also supposed to carry their son who was asleep. They tried to ask for help but they were unfortunately informed that there were no people available to assist them during that time of the night (Hoffman & Bateson, 2010).
In my view, this is a big gap in service delivery in Remington hotel since there are no delivery mechanisms for clients to get their luggage to their rooms. Since the management of the hotel is aware of the fact that the hotel rooms are not in the same place and guests might be forced to walk a little bit longer distance, they should ensure that guests have a way of delivering their luggage to the rooms. For example, it was very inconveniencing for Spencer to be left to struggle with the luggage together with his wife yet they also had to carry their child who was asleep.
Service Quality Dimension to be improved first
After my arrival at Remington, you expressed your desire to get some ideas from me on how to improve service quality at Remington. To help me in accomplishing this goal, you presented me with data collected earlier in the year.
The data was collected from amongst the guests visiting the hotel where they were required to give their feedback on the quality of services they received. The mode of rating was a 1-7 scale with 1 being an indicator that they strongly disagreed with the service quality while 7 indicated that they strongly agreed with the service delivery. The rating was based on all dimensions ranging from the tangibles such as the rooms, lounges and dining facilities. Other dimensions evaluated included responsiveness, reliability, empathy and assurance (Hoffman & Bateson, 2010).
From the data you handed over to me, the area where the participants expressed their greatest dissatisfaction is the area of assurance. As a result, this is the area that I am supposed to focus on first in order to improve it. In any organization, it is always wise and beneficial to identify areas of weakness and improve them first. It is not logical to continue concentrating on some areas when there are areas that already require immediate action.
According to the scale that was being used, assurance scored 5 which indicated that it is the area the guests strongly disagreed with. This implies that the perception of the guests was that they needed to be surer of the services they were getting. This could have been occasioned by some of the incidents that they had already reported. For example, after all the hassle Spencer had gone through in his attempts of getting a room, he finally went to the room and his wife and found that the room had been booked. For the guests the indication is that one can be allocated a room yet the room has been allocated another person. It is really important for me to improve assurance for guests to have confidence in the services they get.
Impact of Reviewed Files on my Decision Making
From my observations on my first day in Remington, it is apparent that there is knowledge gap among the front desk attendants who are supposed to check in the guests. Brit Spencer who presented his case me only wanted to secure a room before it was dark as he waited for his luggage (Hoffman & Bateson, 2010). It is obvious that after Remington announced its commencement of services at the airport that the hotel was expecting guests to start checking in. Spencer definitely expected to get services at this time because this is the essence of such facilities in airports. The answer that he got from the front desk attendants confirms that there is knowledge gap that needs to be addressed.
The report on customer expectation indicated that the customer expectation for assurance was 5 in the scale. Although as I took over office assurance showed the poorest results, the data collected by my predecessor indicated that this was actually what the customers expected. This impacts the decision I made in choosing assurance as the first area to be improved positively. As attempts to improve assurance are underway, I need to put more effort to surpass the expectations of the customers because their satisfaction will be higher when the services provided go beyond their expectations
Information I Require to Improve Service Quality
It is crucial for a new employee to have full knowledge of the new organization or place of work in order to start off well (Kandampully & Mok, 2001). Lack of enough knowledge on a new enterprise will often lead to problems in running activities. In my opinion, it is important to know what motivates the employees of Remington since motivation is an important factor in performance. Motivated employees always exhibit high performance as opposed to de-motivated ones. Once she knows how to motivate the employees, they will in turn improve service delivery to the customers and the result will be increased satisfaction for the customers.
There are different ways of motivating employees in a bid to improve their performance at the work place. For instance, hard work and exceptional performance should always be rewarded. I should focus on identifying employees who work hard and give incentives to them. Another piece of information I should possess in order to improve service quality at Remington is to identify the historical performance of the different departments in the hotel.
This will make sure that departments that have always performed poorly do continue with their poor performance but rather strategize on improving their performance. This may also instigate good performance since various departments will be working hard to avoid being identified as one of the poor performers.
Recommendations
It is clear from this report that there is need for Remington Hotel to improve the service quality since many passengers rely on the hotel. Its strategic location at the airport implies that it is a crucial facility that is expected to provide excellent services to guests without failing them. There are gaps that require immediate action and this justifies the idea of my being transferred to the hotel. I will come up with sound strategies of ensuring that I live up to the high expectations Remington hotel has on me. In my opinion, some of the strategies that I can put in place include educating the employees of the hotel on how to deal with guests and attending to their needs effectively.
The employees are the people who are in direct contact with the guests and are crucial in either painting a good or a bad image of the hotel. I will also hold regular meetings with heads of various departments to get reports on how the employees are performing their duties. Such close monitoring will keep employees on toes and facilitate rectification of areas where there might be anomalies. This will ensure that there are no complaints from guests like the ones Madeline faced on her first day in Remington.
Conclusion
This report has focused on a case study of service delivery at Remington Hotel. The hotel is taken as a crucial point of providing services at the airport. As a newly posted manager in the hotel from my past sterling performance elsewhere, I can immensely assist in improving the service quality at Remington hotel. From the previously collected data, a lot needs to be done making the task of improving the service quality a challenging one.
References
Hoffman, D., & Bateson, J. (2010). Services Marketing:Concepts,Strategies & Caases. Australia: Cengage Learning.
Kandampully, J., & Mok, C. (2001). Service quality management in hospitality, tourism, and leisure. New York: Routledge.