The preferred answer would be to do both since these are the two key components of the guest satisfaction equation. Unfortunately, in today's climate of credit crunch and limited funds doing both at the same time may not be feasible, at least not in the short term.

Successful operators are often choosing to enhance guest service while delaying or scaling back physical renovations. Please note that I say 'enhancing' guest services, I do not say 'expanding'. I see a major difference between the two. Perhaps I can best illustrate by giving a specific example.

A property is already providing room service delivery which is basically the 'drop and run' variety, there is also a complementary daily newspaper placed at the guestroom door.

Hotels.com has surveyed over 1,000 members of match.com, the UK's most popular online dating site, revealing that four out of five women (84%) expect their partner to pay the full cost of their first mini break away, even though 73% of women still expected to decide when and where they go.

The survey found that the average man is left with a bill of £351 for a romantic away-break while women almost equal that, spending £322 buying underwear, make up and new outfits to look the part. Hotels.com also revealed that, when planning their first trip away, 32% of men are fearful of running out of things to say to their date while 18% of women are concerned about their partner seeing them first thing in the morning.

Here's a riddle for you: They are hitchhikers you would never want to pick up. To them, we look like Big Macs on stilts. If they reproduced as fast as rabbits, we would all be better off. What are they? Bedbugs.

They are spreading like wildfire across the country, with hot spots in New York City and states such as Florida, Texas and Ohio. They are also living large in the Southwest. One motel owner in New Mexico is paying $63,000 to get rid of them. How bad is it in New York? Last year, there were almost 7,000 bedbug complaints. The number of complaints in 2005: 1,839. In 2006: 4,500. Of course those were not all hotel related but hotels and motels have most definitely been hit hard.

'A lot of hotels don't want to admit they have a problem,' says Bruce Brenner, chief operating officer for RMB Group, LLC, the maker of Rest Easy, a natural bedbug killer and repellant. 'Roughly 75 percent of all hotels and motels have or will soon have a problem with bedbugs. That estimate may be low.'

When AmericInn executives decided to get word out that their hotels offered a substantially quieter environment than that found in many other hotels, they realized they were going to have to make a bit of noise about it.

“We knew we had a room environment that was significantly quieter and that it was important to guests,” said CEO Arnold Angeloni. “The bad news is that, relative to other brands, we barely got any credit for our quiet room environment, even though ‘A Quiet Night’s Rest Assured’ was our tagline. People thought it was a quaint saying but didn’t know it was tied into our room environment.”

So, about four years ago, the AmericInn hired an agency “and we said, ‘you have to change this.’ “

If you have to get sick, a good prescription is to do it while you are a guest of the historic Mendocino Hotel in Northern California. You can expect a house call from the owner, who is a medical doctor.

“I don’t regularly practice anymore but I happen to be a licensed doctor who used to run and operate ER’s (emergency clinics),” says Tom Kravis, who bought the inn from an ailing relative in 1989.

Kravis knows of no other doctor who owns hotels but the hotel doctor, while an ailing profession, is not dead yet.

Kravis points out, however, that it is often financially impractical for a doctor to make hotel house calls.

“The problem is you have to go to a hotel, see the patient, write up what you found, make notes, then perhaps arrange follow-up lab tests… so you may end spending at least two hours on each patient,” he says. That means in an eight-hour day, a hotel doctor might see only six patients. “So it’s not an easy business,” he says.

A key principle for finding personal fulfillment in our journey to hospitality service excellence is realizing that when we bring out the best in others, we simultaneously bring out the best in ourselves every day, every shift, and with just about every guest we encounter. 

An awful lot has been written in recent years about how today’s customers are more demanding, increasingly unreasonable, and generally to harder deal with.  One of our the hospitality industry’s top research experts, Peter Yesawich, Ph.D. has even been quoted as saying “This is the decade of the vigilante consumer.”  

On one level I’m tempted to agree with them, since it seems obvious that the over-stuff, over-scheduled, multi-tasking lives most of us lead today can cause us to have shorter fuses on our anger time-bombs.  But honestly, I don’t ever recall a time when customer service was easy.  Whether working as a bellhop for Marriott in 1981, or managing the front desk and reservations in the late 1980’s, I can’t say I ever recall an era when what is now collectively called “customer service” was an easy profession, especially in the hotel business where nerves can be frayed to their very last strands by the time the guest arrives at the front desk at the end of their long day of travel.

Over the years I’ve learned that customers don’t usually set-out to complain, harass, or upset service providers, although I have to admit the lesson took some time for me to learn.  I remember well how I would stand there in the lobby some days, looking around at our beautiful atrium with flowing water and indoor gardens; looking at the stone walls built from sandstone rocks mined right from our own landscaping, wondering to myself, “How can guests be so darned cranky when they are lucky enough to stay in a place like this tonight?” At that time in my life the chance to check-in at any resort as nice as this would put me in a good mood for weeks both before and after!  

Years later, when the tables were turned and I have stood literally thousands of times on the other side of the front desk at check-in, admittedly sometimes being one of those cranky guests myself, I have a whole new level of understanding for the fellow human beings we call customers. 

One activity I’ve done with my hotel hospitality training workshops is to encourage them to think about the types of experiences that guests might have encountered while they were en route to the hotel.  

First of all, on the day of travel most people’s alarm clocks go off extra early in the morning, especially in these days of heightened security and advance check-in requirements, not to mention over-crowded airport  parking.  So your alarm clock is going off at like 3am to make that 7am wheels-up flight time. 

On a good day you actually do find a parking spot, whisk through security with only a 30 minute wait, and find that your flight is actually on time.  But once seated on the plane, you’re sure to encounter at least a few challenges.  Forget that the airplane seats and the space between (pitch) actually are shrinking, let’s think about the passengers.  Have you ever been seated next to the excessive talker?  “Hello, my name is Barbara Blabs.  What do you do? Oh, how interesting.  Now let me tell you about me for the rest of this flight….”  Or Randy Overshoulder? He’s the guy who can’t see wasting 50 cents for his own paper when he can read yours; besides, he’s a quick reader and usually finishes before his seatmates change the page so he rarely has to ask them to wait. 

Let’s say it’s still a good day, and when your checked luggage actually arrives on the same flight you are one!  All you have to do now is pick-up the rental car.  So you saunter on over to Brand Excellence Rental Car counter, your wife en tow on your arm, eager to pick-up the sporty little coupe reserved for the romance getaway weekend.  Being a “platinum” premier level renter club your confidence was high as you said.  “Hello, I’m here to pick-up the sporty little Chrysler Sebring convertible I’d reserved last month.”  Upon which you heard  the rental agent exclaim:  “Good news!  Since the car you’d requested wasn’t available, we’ve upgraded you to the Chrysler Town & Country Minivan, which usually rents for $20 more a day!”   

What about the guests who prefer to drive on their vacations?   They have it easier because they don’t have to deal with those airports, right?  I can only speak from my own experiences.  Our parents gave us many gifts growing-up as one of four kids in the Kennedy household, but perhaps one of the greatest gift we all share to this day is a love of travel, which we now call the Kennedy wanderlust.  We were always going somewhere, although it was usually to a state park campground or National Park.  In those days we were traveling in our 1969 Dodge Monaco wood-paneled station wagon, usually fighting over who got to sit in the third row seat because it faced backwards and we could make faces out the back window.

Granted, the vehicle of choice has changed to a minivan over the years, but what mom and dad hear from the backseat is exactly the same:

“Are we there yet?”  Or “I have to go to the potty.”  Or “Dad, he’s looking at me again.”  Or “Mom, he’s on my side again.”

To top it off, the night before they went on vacation, mom worked on e-mails until 10pm and then after that finished the laundry and packing, and dad worked even later but still had to bring some documents to read for his job.  

What was once at the start of the journey a “Come on kids, we’re off to our vacation today!” attitude has turned into “If I hear that one more time I’m going to have to stop this car…” along the road. 

And so we have two choices in the hospitality industry and elsewhere in the field of customer service.  We can continue to react to each customer’s individual attitudes and behaviors; to treat them just like they are treating us; to feed their negativity right back to them.  We can stand safely on our side of the front desk or reception counter, passing out judgment on everyone we encounter: “She was rude. He was a jerk.”  In other words, we can perpetuate the culture of negativity.  

Or, we can make the choice right here and right now to make it our job to turn things around.  To bring out the best side of even the most negative person.

The consensus is great among seasoned hospitality professionals; more often than not we do have the ability to turn things around, even for the most negative guests.  And we do so, it not only brings out the best in them but also the best in ourselves, as we spend our day interacting with more happy and satisfied guests than ever before.
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Doug Kennedy, President of the Kennedy Training Network, has been a fixture on the hospitality and tourism industry conference circuit since 1989, having presented over 1,000 conference keynote sessions, educational break-out seminars, or customized, on-premise training workshops for diverse audiences representing every segment of the lodging industry. Ee-mail Doug at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

. . Contact: Doug Kennedy, President
Kennedy Training Network
www.KennedyTrainingNetwork.com
Phone: (954)981.7689 

High expectations are the key to everything.
Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

Sam Walton is best known for his fierce commitment to offering value and consistency through carefully watched costs and to innovation in retailing.  The hospitality industry has parallel features to retailing, as noted by a reader of one of the recent columns on STRATEGIES FOR HOTEL RESTAURANT MANAGERS.   John Spomer, Vice President & Managing Director of Destination Hotels' Driskill Hotel in Austin, Texas  (http://www.driskillhotel.com/) shared the following insights

We all start to hum and tap our feet to the Beach Boy's paean to teenage angst and dreams. But, we in the industry share the same emotions, whether we are in Lodging, Restaurants, Attractions, Recreation or Retail. We aim to meet Guest/Visitor expectations, exceed usual Customer Satisfaction indices, frame an overall Experience which is memorable and make some money while we are at it.

Our landscape has changed dramatically. Consumer demands are volatile, our economy shudders daily, the price of food and energy rockets, our labor force is constricted and dwindling, standards run amok - the cost of doing business becomes a very shaky affair. In Oregon, the Tourism Commission tackled many of these issues head-on, they created the Q Care Program.

They have to know how much you care
before they care how much you know.
- Unknown

It's easy to forget that you and your groups are coming from entirely different perspectives. To you, they're just a small part of a single day. But to them, the visit to your museum is a BIG deal.

Even when group leaders first call to book a tour, they're not calling the place you work at every day -- the place with the broken air conditioner and the two-day-old banana peels in the wastebasket. They don't know that you just got staples caught in the copy machine or that you have your shoes kicked off under your desk. Heck, they wouldn't believe it even if they did know. After all, they're calling a museum. A big, famous, intimidating museum. Regardless of how they come across, they're a bit nervous. And when tour day finally arrives and the coach pulls up to your door, the whole group is feeling that same way.

ALL ABOARD! Interviews are complete. New employees are hired. Orientations are scheduled. Training is about to begin. How does your organization view and define the training experience before it takes place or before it leaves the station? Who are your lead engines and how will they fuel the service attitudes and disposition that will be a lasting foundation for new employees? What criteria and guidelines should be used for trainers and those who teach the examples that will be translated into real results for guests?

Training employees can be a whole service excellence experience before training is even implemented. Trainers are role models who not only instruct service skills but instill service attitudes. Most trainers deliver procedural information that is critical to job success and show employees exactly how to perform their jobs but how many view the training function as an opportunity to also create a service excellence experience for those same employees?