Operational Strategies in the Hospitality Industry
Discuss about the Organization Management of Stamford Resorts for Services.
In this report, the focus will be on the operational issues faced by Australia’s one of the largest and independent owner-operator of luxury hotels and resorts, Stamford. Although they have engaged themselves into property investments in key cities of Australia, as well as their hospitality business venture, Stamford hotels and resorts, has gained immense success since the day of its debut in this country back in the year of 1995. Since then, the organization is delivering quality services and has earned the reputation gradually around major cities of Australia. Here, the report includes issues of operational and location strategies in the era of globalization, managing the product and services, assumption of demand and resources, managing the quality of the services, and designing the job profile of employees. This report presents the newly discovered issues, operational challenges and trends among hospitality industry, along with that some recommendations will be included to recover from all the issues faced by the management of operations.
The Stamford Company, resort owner and operator, though have a positive impact on their customers, in this era of globalization the management has started to confront with several operational issues while executing their traditional strategies. On this context, they have developed a committee of consultants comprised of their efficient employees to achieve the organizational goals (Goetsch and Davis 2014). In order to incorporate new ideas into their plans, some efficient trainees have been included in that committee as well because new generation is more updated with the current market trends of hospitality industry. On the behalf of the same committee, this report has been presented to provide effective solution against those organizational management issues. The following report will discuss the operational issues with Stamford and in which way they can overcome this critical phase.
The entire concept of operational strategy (Baumgartner 2014) revolves around determining a long-term success rate of a business organisation. There is a constant need for developing the operational strategies to produce and deliver premium quality services to the customers. Before creating operational strategies, the current situation of the company should be critically analysed. The motto of setting the strategy is not only to serve better service yet to sustain in the market as a strong enterprise. After acknowledging the gaps and defects while executing regular services, the management of Stamford hotels and resorts has made their mind to adopt a framework of strategic decisions and actions, which will determine the role and objective of the employees to execute regular operations efficiently. Constant flow of negative feedbacks for last one month regarding facilities and atmosphere of the resorts has compelled the management to consider the matter under serious supervision and they have appointed the consultant committee to evaluate and rebuild the existing procedure. Since 1995, the company has been going through several difficulties; however, the management has felt to make a global approach while framing strategies for future operations as globalization enables the potential customers to choose from a wide variety of options. Therefore, Stamford should understand the necessary needs to maintain the competitive advantage in the resort industry. This concept does not only concentrate on processes but also deals with material and human resources. The objective is to form an extensive degree of compatibility between the resources and the long-term corporate strategy within the organisation.
Issues Faced by Stamford Hotels and Resorts
Instead of operating the service and business in a traditional way, it has been has decided that Stamford is going to incorporate several changes by including new management strategies in order to make the organisation acceptable globally (Lock 2017). There is a requirement of a future management that is capable of adapting rapid transformation from its traditional ideology to handle the complexity of capital movement, technology issues, security issues of the customers and managing the capacity of the resorts. In this era of globalisation, the complications are increasing in the relationship between customers and employees. Moreover, considering the dominant effects of technology the resort company has to shape their human resource accordingly. One of the difficulties faced by this industry is a large amount of low paid and low skilled personnel who are unable to understand the requirements of premium customers and bridge the cultural gap. Implementation of new operation will be possible when the resort company will realise the necessity of HR development and appointing highly skilled executives who have clear understanding of cultural and behavioural diversity among the employees and customers as well. Hospitality executives should enrich themselves with the concepts of every product and service of Stamford hotels and resorts to offer best service in order to impress the clients as they come with greater knowledge and experience of facilities and hospitality.
Because of the perishable quality of tourism products, forecasting is not that easy for industry managers and according to that allocate resources to meet the customer demand. There are several complains that had been lodged regarding accommodations and room services in Stamford as they were unaware of Traditional methods of forecasting which is mostly based on recorded data irrespective of dependant and independent variables. The forecasting of future prospects used to be done by evaluating population of the target market, balance of tourist income and tourism products depending on destination and festivals. In the recent years of technological advancement, internet is helping to develop an entire new category of data (Kato 2014) as it works as a travel planning and money transaction tool. It has enhanced the prediction power of the managers regarding this matter (Phillips et al. 2015). People generally book hotels and resorts online in advance. Therefore, Management can easily figure out the behaviour and consumption pattern of the potential customers and frame the upcoming agendas according to that. Stamford has to be tech friendly and they should appoint skilled executives who can follow all the online activities of the potential customers and balance the workload and resources with prior planning.
Globalization and Operational Challenges
When it comes to establish a hotel or resort, the location plays one of the most crucial roles for framing marketing strategies (Yang, Luo and Law 2014). Every tourist wants to enjoy a lavish experience along with scenic beauty. The location must have tourist interest or a place, which is clam and hardly explored can be the choice of establishing a hotel or resorts as well. In case the company is following a trend of the tourist, who are continuously choosing one particular place over other places, establishing resorts at that tourist spot apparently carries risk factors as many competitors are present in that location. While choosing location and quoting the tourism products the company should revise the earning of the potential tourists so that the management can estimate the sale and plan the future strategies. Although Stamford has resorts in major cities of Australia, the management should think about some exotic location to increase revenue in future.
While dealing with quality management one thing should always be kept in mind that business of hotels and resorts is competitive and the company should update itself according to the market needs at regular intervals. The industry demands regular improvements within limited budget and time because it increases competitive advantage in the market. The success of resort companies are highly based on the economic condition of that particular location or the income of their potential customers. Therefore, the socio-economic factors should be considered while quoting the tourism service and quality products. Otherwise, it may be possible that they lose their customers for the high price range. A perfect balance of quality and budget can lead the organisation towards handsome revenue. As in this industry, the executives are directly communicating and serving their customers, there are many scopes to gain the trust of them and give them reasons to come back again to enjoy the service. Employees are responsible for checking all the products whether it carries any defect or not, if yes then the whole service should be revised by the managers before providing them to the guest (Mok, Sparks, and Kadampully 2013). In Stamford, traditionally employees are not entertained if they want to point out some mistakes of the management due to hierarchical issues until the management figures it out. As a result, numerous cases of interruption in service have been reported. Again, designing business process in a proper way sustains the value of the services. There are several business process structures among them hotel business process can be divided into three parts, 1) operating process, 2) supporting process and 3) managerial process. Operating process is designed for creating producing and delivering products and it includes guest services like serving food and beverages, house-keeping etc. whether supporting service does all the planning according to which operations are performed such as, the unit understands the market trends and design service, market strategies accordingly. Managerial process supervise the product and service as well as manager’s work is to design job profile of the employees according to efficiency and motivate them towards betterment. The case what happened in Stamford was they barely realised the necessity of transforming the process following the market trends. Hence, they had to suffer from a series of unpleasant incidents. The perfect balance among all these three processes enables a resort company to achieve their objectives. Stamford Hotels and Resorts can prevent themselves from future casualties by adopting more reliable, technology-friendly supporting process, which can predict and control operating process well. Managers should understand and acknowledge every single detail of the entire resort process in order to maintain and develop quality (Pasian 2015). Moreover, to make the inventory management better again the advanced technology and efficient IT staffs can handle the records of the guests and tourism products without any hazard.
HR Development in the Hospitality Industry
It is the responsibility of the resort managers to design the job role according to employee’s expertise. The right amount of resource, assigned to right jobs at right time is the key to success (Schwiegelshohn 2014). Designing jobs carries greater responsibility as the managers have to keep faith over the employees to deliver the service flawlessly. Due to some miscommunication in managerial level (Jamaludin and Yusof 2013), the distribution of job roles went wrong and Stamford lost their face in front of their guests. In order to understand the employee ability HR managers should interact more with the workers and after gaining a distinct knowledge about the resources only they can design the job roles perfectly (Jong et al.2015).
Conclusion
After considering all the areas where Stamford needs to work on, it can be concluded that in this decade of globalization it is essential to adopt technology to operate the work procedure. Traditional methods are gradually losing its importance as the resort company has failed to satisfy the guests. Several issues regarding allocation of resources, the quality of the services have been raised. Stamford needs to focus on the design of all the processes so that they can provide premium service to their guests. The committee has evaluated related HRM theories on how to frame future assumptions and operations. It is expected, following the recommendation Stamford will recover its present crisis soon.
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