HOSPITALITY NOTES part 2 (Original non-fiction book - exclusive for steemit)
Welcome to the second chapter of the first part of the book. I would like to remind you that before I would like to publish this book I am posting it exclusively for steemit!
I am in collaboration with @poeticsnake for the 100% original cover, and hopefully it will be done in time for the third chapter. Meanwhile all images used, are sourced from the internet.
Welcome Notes
Part 1
Chapter 2
In this chapter we are going to discuss how to understand the guest and by what means you achieve a happy guest in your hotel or restaurant.
I think each one of us has either been to a hotel or a restaurant where the service was below what we expected. Often, small things like bad restaurant experience can place you in a bad mood or worse ruin the rest of your day if it happened to you in the morning hours.
Let’s pretend to be a businessman on a very important trip in a local B&B – you wake up at 6.30am, take a shower, and brush your teeth. Then you walk down the stairs of a nicely decorated B&B house. The smell of fresh pastry and the slight clinging of plates from the dining hall has you all shivered up as you walk.
As you get to the dining hall you take a seat, a waiter brings you a fresh newspaper and says:
“Good morning sir! Do you prefer orange juice or apple juice for breakfast?”
Within 5 minutes all your breakfast is on the table, you read the newspaper, eat and merely go on to the rest of your working day.
Now let us assume a second scenario. You are staying on the same business trip, but this time you are in a 5* hotel (and you have high expectations). When checking in, the girl at the reception desk asks if you would like to have breakfast brought to your room free of charge, you agree, and set a time for 6:45.
You wake up early and get yourself ready for breakfast while watching the morning news channel. As time passes by, you realize that its 7.00am already. A bit frustrated you call the reception desk… And oh dear, after a 5 minute conversation it turns out that the girl forgot to pass the correct room number to the restaurant.
You come down for breakfast, already feeling irritated and carry on straight to the restaurant. On the buffet line whilst choosing the food, the coffee machine seems to be broken and no one seems to be offering coffee from the bar until you ask for it by yourself…
Now in both situation you had breakfast and managed to get familiarized with your daily pick of news. But in which situation do you think the businessman would have a more successful and structured day? Of course in the first one!
So to put it down simply, when providing service to a guest, no matter what happens, place yourself in a field where you are the one getting served. Find the decisive moments when you do it and be sure to carry them on.
If you take an order, make sure you fully understand it. If you offer a guest something, make sure you did the correct things for it to work out later on.
When thinking about guests and our service line we must understand that whatever we do, we must never think of any prejudice based upon any criteria possible.
Prejudice can be thought about in many ways, for example when you see a group of young girls, you might assume that they will be ordering a tea for the whole company. Automatically you set yourself in the mood for behaving in a certain pattern when you think like that. Of course that will directly affect any service you can provide.
It can be in form of many examples, but always remember that by being prejudice towards someone, you are the one being the small person. Prejudice has no place in hospitality, and no place in our lives.
Now you might think that the next thing we will discuss is greeting the guest. And you are almost right! But first let’s discuss how to say goodbye to your guest. In my experience I found that this is the most overlooked criteria of all (!) in the field of providing quality service.
Often waiters or receptionists in hotels simply forget to say goodbye to a guest.
Now, let’s stop for a while and think about it. Do you like to feel as though you have been just a wallet with money? No. For that reason guests that are leaving the building have somewhat of the same importance as those that are entering.
Sure guest who is leaving has already received great service from your team. But do you think that by not “closing” the relationship with him at this point would benefit you? Once again, the answer is no.
So be sure to treat any leaving guest as if he was only coming into your building, make sure you say goodbye loud and clear. Make sure you tell him that you would love to see him once again. And if possible have him walked to the door. If you escort your guests as you welcome them, believe me they will remember you.
Of course first comes first, and to say goodbye to our guest we must learn to greet him! Now you may think that it’s simple and needs no explanations.
But how many times have you seen a half empty restaurant with stuff talking to each other rather than greeting guests at the entrance.
What can be more welcoming than a sincere smile and a “Welcome!” said by a waiter. More importantly what can be more warming then when it’s done sincerely?
I see a lot of restaurants try saving money on hosts, but are they correct? In my opinion they are wrong, they might think they just saved themselves a monthly wage, but they have to understand that have lost 10 -20 fold at the same moment.
Remember that greeting guests and escorting them out, is your key to success! When this small and simple feature is done properly, people will talk about your restaurant or hotel with a smile.
Completing those tasks we move on to a subject for some reason forgotten by today’s hospitality teachers.
The name of our guests. We all have regular guests, and even when we don’t, we all use credit card terminals and more often we hear the guest’s name.
It’s an old psychological trick, but by using a person’s name at least twice during the conversation, you bond with him to a greater extent. Do it! Use the guests name and see what comes out.
Try to be attentive and understand your guest, watch what he does, how he takes a seat, look at his habits when he is walking into the elevator. Understanding our guests is not easy, but it can be done on an early stage and also on the latter.
What is important is that you listen to your guest and try to understand him at all, rather than not do it.
Guest often speak and tell you what they want (or hint on it) by themselves. Learn to catch those phrases and use them to your own advantage, so you can provide that great service, be it checking him in or making his coffee in the morning.
If you see a guest gets upset about anything, try to calm him or her down. Don’t do it to subtle. If you have a chance to ask what is wrong, go ahead and do it. But don’t be precise if the guest doesn’t wish to answer. Maybe offer your guest something on the house if possible.
If a guest gets upset because of us then by all means our job is not to argue with him and calm him down, help him to understand that the situation will be solved and that you fully comprehend with him. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t your fault. If the guest got upset because of actions took in your hotel then it is everyone’s fault. So be sure to be attentive.
Providing extra service to our guests can sound like a simple task or can sound like a burden to some. Both interpretations are wrong. Extra service that we can provide should always come as our pleasure and its not always as simple as it might seem.
Often the most obvious things are just ahead of us but we don’t see them.
If it’s as simple as a barmen offering a glass of water to a guest on a hot summers day before he even sits down. Or whether it’s a waiter who offers to take a photograph to the guests that take photos of each other. But why stop here? Can only waiters offer such service? Anyone can and should!
Any hospitality worker can provide that something extra that wasn’t promised but it changes the guest perception of us forever. It can be a warm blanket on a cruise brought by an attendant of the ships floor or it can be the yard cleaner who cleaned a cars window in a small parking of a boutique hotel.
Simply put this is your wild card. Providing extra service to a guest makes you in his eyes his best friend and makes you feel great for doing so.
Anyone can think of when and what it should be, but in any situation it has a place to exist. You just need to think with what we begun with “What would I want now”
No country or society exists without a simple set of rules that help others to get along by. So is the field of hospitality, a simple set of standards in each field of work and separate for each deed will help you to bring the best form standards (we will discuss standards in much more details in later chapters).
But setting those standards is not enough, you need to teach your staff those standards and constantly make sure they are fulfilled by your stuff and yourself.
Standards help us to fulfill expectations that we set to ourselves, by making them clear, easy and understandable you will be one step close to fulfilling them.
You may say that everyone has standards, and you will be absolutely correct. The key is not to set them and fulfill them. The key to great service is exceeding those standards.
A guest who came to your hotel and knows the standards will be much more surprised if his expectations are exceeded.
But that doesn’t apply to standards only. Exceeding expectations is a goal that we have to set ourselves daily. Think how we can overcome ourselves and bring something which will be different and make the guest smile.
How can you exceed those expectations if you don’t know the guest? Well the answer to that is simple but at the same time as difficult to grasp as anything in this field of work can get.
One has to learn to guess those expectations without assumptions. How can we guess expectations, well simply by placing ourselves in the shoes of the guests! It is as simple as that.
To overcome this we can also try to guess what the guess can wish for and only expect of us. This is what really makes the difference between a good and great service.
You will never have a better advertisement for your restaurant and no better marketing strategy can be thought of, than that of a satisfied guest.
You have to understand and remember as a rule that a satisfied guest instantly becomes your lifetime advert. He will remember you for days, months and even years to come. Be sure not to spend millions on advertising in magazines, but make sure you know how to guess the wish of your guests and to satisfy them.
In the next chapter we will speak about how to train your stuff and how to make your stuff successful.
We will learn how to pick professionals for your team and how to be an example to them.
Interesting post. I think your pointing out that a host to escort guest in and out is important. I agree as people want to be made feel important especially when they are a guest or customer.
Thank you for posting this
Like your approach on writing about hospitality.
Will check out more chapters of your book. :)
Glad you liked it
Having worked it the trade for a long time I have to say you are spot on about saying goodbye to your guests, it's always important to let them know you would like to see them again.
Glad you agree