The niche of hospitality management is important and, at the same time, challenging. Most owners want their hotels to work clockwise and bring profit, and it can be quite surprising when an establishment they invested a top dollar in becomes bankrupt. Are there any secrets which can help to scale up hospitality management and make it work tip-top?
We decided to show you one of these success keys used by top-notch hoteliers, a special hotel scheduling software. Let’s consider what is it and how it can improve the operation of a hotel or a hospitality network.
What is Hotel Management?
The concept of hotel or hospitality management is to maintain constant oversight of the whole list of operations provided in the hotel area to reduce costs and improve the levels of customer service, thus, making the hotel bring profit. Effective hotel management ensures the establishment’s economic success while providing exceptional guest experiences, it works with all the areas of operation including marketing and promotion, customer service, event management, supply management, cleaning service, kitchen, and security service. Responsibilities of a hotel manager include:
- Event management
- Overseeing front desk operations
- Creating employee schedules
- Ensuring smooth team communication
- Monitoring housekeeping
- Supervising food and beverage services
- Marketing and sales efforts to promote the establishment
- Financial oversight to maintain profitability
- Human resources management to recruit, train, and oversee staff
Coping with this can be difficult when you operate simply with your brain and some documents. Thus, automation comes to the rescue. A huge part of all these duties can be automated and delegated to employee management software hotels.
Hotel vs. Hospitality Management: What’s the Difference?
Some may be a bit confused about what hotel management is and how it differs from hospitality management.
Typically, both these jobs are closely related but refer to different scopes of the service industry. Hotel management is focused on the oversight and administration of hotel operations, encompassing areas such as front office operations, housekeeping, food and beverage services, and financial management within the hotel setting.
Hospitality management includes all the tasks of hotel management but goes further as it refers to lots of other hospitality industry processes like restaurants, event planning, cruise lines, and even food trucks.
While hotel management can be seen as a subset of hospitality management, the latter encompasses a wider range of establishments and services dedicated to ensuring guest satisfaction and memorable experiences in a number of settings.
Effective Hotel Management Tips
Managing a hotel means that you need to be involved in all processes occurring in the establishment and regulate them to improve performance and avoid drawbacks. The effectiveness of hotel management can be evaluated by several features:
- Levels of customer satisfaction;
- Levels of returning clients;
- Overall income;
- Positive feedback from customers.
To make all these features improved constantly, a hotel manager can use our special tips and add some automation in the form of hotel scheduling software. Let’s start with the last option.
Use the right hotel management software
Automation makes miracles and frees your hands. Times when hotel management was provided using only paper and pen are past gone, and it is quite natural to use hotel scheduling software to track, assign, check, and exchange tasks which are required for flawless work of the establishment.
Shifton hotel scheduling software, for example, is an all-in-one employee mobile app for hotels that automates all aspects of team management, from scheduling to payroll. Your employees have direct access to the app from their phones, too, so they can clock in, view their schedules, and access all relevant information in one place.
Of course, even except Shifton, hotels typically use some software products, but when you need all of them to be used at once, it can be messy. Instead, Shifton offers a unified environment for hotel managers and their employees to operate and communicate.
Automate shift schedules for your hotel staff
The next tip comes from the previous one. Hospitality services are provided by people, and you need your staff to work according to a certain schedule to guarantee that all tasks will be done timely. Your task is to reduce time for keeping hotels by thoughtfully scheduling your staff.
Having hotel scheduling software in your hand for this task is a must. With it, you achieve the following goals:
- No delays or drawbacks in hotel operation.
- No missed tasks or badly performed tasks.
- Your employees get a clear vision of how many hours and shifts they have to work.
- In case of emergencies or extra situations, you can exchange shifts, weekends, and sick days online.
- You can motivate your staff and communicate with them instantly in the app.
Communicate effectively
As we mentioned communication, let’s talk about it. Do you know that miscommunication in the workplace leads to mistakes, lack of oversight, and decreased team morale? When you do not hear your team, or they lack your guidance, it leads to bad operations. Besides, communication increases loyalty, strengthens the engagement of the staff, and improves the attitude to their duties.
So, the environment of open communication for a hotel manager and employees is also a key to success. That way, managers can assign tasks, create and send schedules, solve problems, and answer questions. It will also allow employees to create more personal connections at work, even for people who work in different shifts, departments, or locations. Of course, there are lots of communication channels which you can use starting from phone calls or regular team meetings, up to email, SMS, or instant messenger communication, but they are dispersed and provide fewer guarantees that the process of communication will be streamlined and effective. Shifton, as an example of employee management software for hotels, copes with these troubles impeccably. It provides you with an environment for communication with your team and besides, you can add some templates of reports, checklists, or forms to get relevant information about assignments and tasks you delegate to each employee. And you can motivate your staff greatly by cheering them up for good work right in the app.
Motivate your employees with overtime bonuses
Motivation is a cornerstone in hospitality management. Employees who are motivated to work effectively can turn mountains. When they know and see that their overtime work will be rewarded, they put effort into doing it flawlessly. In the Shifton app for scheduling hotels, they can track their overtime and understand how much they will be paid for them. For you, it is also a great idea because you can automate payroll calculation and adjust it to your hotel’s specifics by adding automatically calculated bonuses and penalties.
The core idea of hotel and hospitality management is to work with the staff efficiently to make them do their jobs with no problems. Automation of some routines, logical and flexible scheduling of hotels’ operation, and instant communication with the staff are the main keys to success in this mission. With the help of the Shifton hotel scheduling software, you can ease these tasks for you, as a manager, and improve the whole operation of your hotel.
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