Great Hospitality Stories

Manish Gupta

We aim to inspire, educate, and shape the perspective of hospitality industry by sharing wonderful stories of hospitality leaders from diverse backgrounds.

Episodes

  1. COMMUNICATION TIPS FOR GUEST SERVICE CONTACT ASSOCIATES BY SHARMILA CHAND

    10/31/2020

    COMMUNICATION TIPS FOR GUEST SERVICE CONTACT ASSOCIATES BY SHARMILA CHAND

    In this Article – Sharmila will be giving communication tips for the front office team in the hospitality industry. As a guest contact point, every professional in the hospitality industry or guest contact point should be an expert in communications. I want to start with the first point and the first would be communication at the moment the guest enters the hotel. how do you greet the guest now when a guest enters the hotel his luggage is taken care of and the first thing he does is that he walks towards the front of his desk. This is the point where you have to be very careful to make eye contact.  We have seen from my own experience 90 percent of the time the person who attends the guest is looking at his computer screen, which is the biggest blunder. hotel Front office associates should give a break and look up, give a smile, and greet the guest. The second communication tips for the hospitality Front office staff is to come out of their counter and come and stand next to the guest. The front office associate should know the name of the guest and try to use the surname of the guest with the correct title. Now, this is a very very important communication tool, when the moment you use the surname and the title, it gives a personal touch. It leads to personal engagement and you will see how nicely the guest will reciprocate. there is the third point now instead of asking the guest to do the check-in formality straight away you can give him an unexpected offer and what is that offer you tell the guest come let’s go to the restaurant and have a cup of coffee or why don’t you order something and have something to eat and on the side we will do your signing for the check-in formality believe me this will work wonders in uh big cities and five-star hotels normally they have started doing this but in tier two cities it matters a lot.

    40 min
  2. 10/08/2020

    Learnings from a 40 Years experience of Hospitality career in 40 Minutes

    Unedited Discussion with Mr Sajid, who is an accomplished hotelier highlighting his lifetime experiences. okay uh if i want to ask you let's say in the 40 years of experience how you what are your key learnings if you say okay these are my five or top learnings in the hospitality industry where things normally go wrong and people need to be careful from hotels perspective and also from the employee perspective means for their career advancement so let's start with the hotel first see as far as the hotel is concerned one very big learning biggest learning a hotel is a place where a lot of coordinated activity takes place yeah there is no other place where so much of action takes place in such a small geographical areas of different kinds so coordinated working coordinated working yeah this is the most important thing to tell now look at the different kind of people that are working there you have mbas working in your sales and marketing people you have child accountants working in your finance department you have and highly qualified engineers working in your engineering department yeah you have you have the kitchen it's not an easy place yeah there's highly experienced people working in the kitchen in fnb in the front office and they are of all grades you know like like while you have very sophisticated people on one side then you go to the house on the other side the security guards on the other side yes and all that happens in a very limited geographical area so coordination working in coordination working as a team is the most important thing for uh the success of any hotel yeah yeah the youngsters i'll say that you have to keep on learning learning learning because if you want to be good at coordination you better know what happens on the other side so there's other challenges is equally important it's very important because how do you coordinate with them how does a front office person put pressure on housekeeping yeah to turn around homes fast if they do not know how sleeping functions yeah correct if they do not know how engine engineering functions so they need to know that well in in little of my experience i see sometimes the front office or the gms or the operational ssr marketing especially sometimes they they commit things to the guests which uh operational departments uh specifically the housekeeping and security and the bellman's the front office team the consumer's team are not just able to deliver because uh they don't have enough capabilities and also the equipment that they are required and if the sales peoples and uh the operational the person who is selling and committing to the guest does not understand their own hotels let alone the processes okay the process is there maybe you understand but if they don't understand within the capabilities of the hotels the other departments they may generally overcome it yeah you see i often tell them that in any product in any product hotel or anything then now let me talk as a sales person say

    45 min

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We aim to inspire, educate, and shape the perspective of hospitality industry by sharing wonderful stories of hospitality leaders from diverse backgrounds.