Movement is life. This principle is true for business as well. Every business must develop otherwise it will fail sooner or later. Loss of competitive advantage results in loss of customers. There is a tough competition in all markets, and customers of free to choose any products they like. If a customer is not buying from you it will most certainly buy from your competitor. This is true for all businesses, including hotel business. This industry is highly competitive as there are hundreds of hotels in every country. When high season comes hotel top managers do everything possible to attract customers and make them stay in their hotels. Of course, they do not only promise high quality services but the actually offer them. Hotel is not just a place where you spend the night. Some people want to feel at home in a hotel. This is possible in case you come to a top quality hotel.
In order to improve hotel services owners and managers of our hotel need to know where to start from. In other words they have to be aware of current performance in order to make plans for the future. Until recently performance evaluation was about measurement of financial indicators for the past periods. Such approach is not perfect since it misses nonfinancial indicators that are extremely important in any industry. It is not enough just to announce implementation of new plans and improvements in hotel. A real work begins when these improvements are implemented and measured.
For example, if a new service, say, WiFi connection in all rooms is introduced the hotel spends a certain amount of money to buy equipment and maintain network. Then, the quality of Wireless Network has to be evaluated. However, what is more important is the attitude of customers towards this new service and the way they use it. If it turns out that only 10% of hotel guests actually use wireless network and only half of them really require high speed Internet there is probably no point in spending huge money for super speedy Internet. If most of hotel guests are business people for whom high speed Internet is necessity than well established wireless connection is a must.
If improvements concern reception service top management of a hotel needs to understand who their guests are and why they come to their hotel. If most of them are tourists than it would be reasonable to introduce new services like offering information on sightseeing tours, contact details of various Entertainment Services, taxi phone numbers etc. As time passes by, efficiency of these improvements needs to be tested in order to introduce amendments if necessary.
Such evaluation of improvements can be performed with the help of Balanced Scorecard which is a very efficient performance evaluation and strategic management system. Balanced Scorecard will coordinate efforts of all services and business units of a hotel and align strategies of different departments, for example restaurants and hairdressers service. This is a flexible system which means changes can be easily introduced.