“Senior people in the hotel industry have an obligation to leave the industry in a better position than we found it because the industry has been very good to us,” said Tim Smith, managing partner of HVS Africa. “Part of that is educating people to understand every aspect of the business. Something that has been missing in Africa is a deep and detailed understanding of what people are doing, and why they’re doing it, and not just because their boss tells them to,” he added.
HVS recently hosted a breakfast briefing for the hotel industry, partnering with Travelling Mystery Guest, a customer experience improvement company,
Keynote speaker Guy Stehlik, CEO and founder of BON Hotels and Director of BON Hotels International West Africa, created BON Hotels as an "owner-staff-community-guest“ centric company. BON Hotels has a reputation in the industry for developing their people as much as their hotels. “There are certainly pockets of excellence when it comes to service in South Africa, particularly when it comes to our upmarket game lodges – those are some of the best service experiences you’ll have anywhere in the world. On the flip side, in terms of our mainstream hotels we have got a hell of a lot of work to do,” he says.
Stehlik says that the most important aspect of improving customer service is to constantly ask for feedback. “We have opened as many different feedback channels as possible to ask our guests to let us know how we’re doing. We should be using as many opportunities as we can to meet with our guests informally while they’re still with us, throughout their stay and not after they leave.”
Renate Engelbrecht, Managing Director of Travelling Mystery Guest, agrees. Regular customer journey evaluations are essential to provide hotel owners and management with quality assessments, measurement, and constructive feedback sessions, in order to meet and exceed guest expectations, she says. Customer loyalty means more guest returns which impact positively on profitability.
“The workshops we do for hotels include an interactive customer journey map, so the staff learns to walk the journey with the guest, putting themselves in the guest’s shoes,” she says.
