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Properties everywhere want to save time and money and improve the guest experience— but achieving operational excellence is easier said than done. From managing multi-property locations to the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic amongst the hospitality industry, it's becoming harder and harder to streamline operations and grow.
That’s why we’re looking at what exactly operational excellence means and where to start. We’ll explore strategies for improving operations, some challenges you may face along the way, and the key to true property operational success.
Anyone who works within the hospitality industry knows that above all else, the guest experience is what matters the most. You want guests to leave happy— so happy, in fact, that they would stay again.
But there are always guests who wouldn’t rate their experience as 5-star… Fortunately, operational excellence embraces the not-so-perfect feedback from both guests, employees, partners, and even vendors. It’s these areas of dissatisfaction that give you the opportunity to dig deeper and ask, “why aren’t these processes, services, or products operating at a gold standard? And how can I fix it?”.
Operational excellence digs into the issues causing the dissatisfaction, exploring any and all bottlenecks. Things like culture, innovation and technology, demand creation, profit improvement, and guest interaction are analyzed and critiqued— looking for ways to make them even better. Oftentimes, these improvements not only make guests happier but also save you valuable time and money.
How could your product (your rooms, cabins, campsites etc.) and your services (room services, amenities, activities etc.) be drastically improved? Working towards operational excellence means taking a hard look at your offerings and looking for ways to make them better for both the employee and guest experience and, in turn, profitability. Because changes to your property and services don’t happen overnight, this often ties heavily in with other continuous improvements and strategic business planning— explained below.
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The hospitality industry often relies on a long list of technology and tools to operate; however, sometimes these products can work against you instead of for you. When working towards operational excellence, properties should audit their current tool stack and look for ways to fully utilize their tech and consolidate platforms to their advantage. The right tools often utilize automation to save valuable time and money so that staff can focus their efforts on the guest experience and business growth.
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To improve operational excellence, properties can look at their current sales and marketing efforts for how they’re fueling their revenue pipeline. Oftentimes this involves looking at the three “D’s” of demand creation: defining, developing, and distributing campaigns and plans for targeting and closing new guests. This is the opportunity for properties to look at their current demand gen model and make important changes to improve efficiency and success. This often involves looking at customer service and support as well and seeking solutions for improving the guest experience.
It’s important to think of the big picture or to strategize the long-term future of your business. Pursuing business continuity plans or undergoing strategic planning to forecast success to come can help drive a vision for the “end goal” of operational excellence. For example, you can run a SWOT analysis— an acronym and framework for analyzing your property’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This helps to see what your business is excelling at, where things could be improved, risks that could be mitigated, and how you may grow.
To improve the guest experience, you’ll want to consider prioritizing online guest communication. Guests want to feel attended to, even when they aren’t physically at your property.
Multi-property operations face complex challenges trying to achieve business success because they must compile insights of all problems across all sites. It's about streamlining your processes, services, and— of course — your product, across all locations. Businesses with multiple properties must compile insights and work towards making both the staff and guest experience repeatable and scalable.
The international COVID-19 pandemic brought with it many changes across the hospitality industry. From the demand for contactless paying options to two-way messaging where guests don't need to interact face-to-face with staff for inquiries, the modern-day guest has a new idea of what the ideal guest experience looks like. The hospitality industry is now being challenged to think of ways to adjust processes, services, and products to keep up with the changing times. From new room cleanliness and sanitation methods to social distance-friendly communal spaces, the standard for operational excellence is evolving with the growing demands of guests and staff alike.
When staying at a hotel, campground or RV park, the guest enjoys their experience at that very moment. Unlike a product that can be taken home and enjoyed over and over again, the pleasure of the stay diminishes quickly after checking out. After all, once a night has passed, that time is lost. For rooms and sites that were booked, once a guest has come and gone, that stay is irrevocable. For those accommodations that remained unbooked once that night is gone, and that room sits empty, you cannot get it back nor the revenue that would have come with it were it booked.
This perishability serves as a challenge for the hospitality industry at large, forcing managers to focus on marketing and nurturing efforts to keep travel top of mind.
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The modern guest always does their research online before booking accommodations. Beyond writing and designing an attractive, user-friendly website, you also need to be aware of your online presence beyond your property’s personal web domain. Hospitality businesses must maintain a digital image on various booking websites, review platforms, and let's not forget your social media outlets. For multi-property locations, managing your online presence can require multiple full-time staff. In some cases, it may even require an entire internal marketing department or outsourced vendor. But much like the vastness of the internet itself, maintaining this presence can become cumbersome. Between managing passwords and cyber security to developing content itself there are a slew of operational hurdles that come with being relevant online.
Some properties don't have detailed or accurate reporting measures to track operations. Without this added visibility it can be hard to see where improvements can be made to save valuable time and money as well as improve the guest experience. Some property management systems come out-of-the-box with extensive tracking and reporting, while others don't. Properties benefit from insights into both their sales and marketing efforts operationally, but could end up investing valuable time and training into setting up proper analytics in tools that don’t give them the holistic view they need. This translates into wasted time you cannot get back and lack of visibility into the areas of data that will enhance your business operations.
While some properties may have the visibility to see some issues and opportunities to improve their operational excellence, not all businesses have the resources they need to make improvements. Whether finances don’t allow or proper scalability is timebound, some properties have to stretch or adjust their goals based on their situation and resource capabilities. Many reservation and property management systems don’t automate crucial processes with “set it and forget it” features like dynamic pricing that sets automated pricing rules designed to optimize occupancy or yield, automated reporting that collects and analyzes data across the business, and triggered correspondence that sends emails or text messages at specific points of the guest experience that can save hours of staff time every day.
With RMS, for example, your property management solution includes:
That’s right! All tools are accessed by a single login.
