New York Hospitality by Vijay Dandapani

Boosting productivity through "happiness"

The Wall Street Journal has a report on a relatively new practice among employers: boosting happiness at work via coaching as away to combat stress at work. The Journal notes that "happiness coaching is seeping into the workplace. A growing number of employers, including UBS, American Express, KPMG and the law firm Goodwin Procter, have hired trainers who draw on psychological research, ancient religious traditions or both to inspire workers to take a more positive attitude—or at least a neutral one. Happiness-at-work coaching is the theme of a crop of new business books and a growing number of MBA-school courses." 

As a topic of philosophic discussion, Happiness has been discussed for centuries and only recently has attracted the attention of behavioral and social scientists with reams of research  being produced over the last couple of decades along with a focus on how to measure it.Countries have employed a sort of "happiness quotient" to advance their national interest. In fact, Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness website while France too has promoted happiness as a new "currency".

However, the Journal report notes that critics see "positive thinking as just a way for companies to improve morale while they continue to burden employees with the threat of layoffs and an ever-increasing workload. Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book, "Bright-sided," blames "positive thinking" for enabling people to avoid confronting a wide range of serious problems in the economy and workplace."  Ehrenreich is a trenchant critic of the approach and has another book entitled "Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World." And yet positive thinking is just what many workers seem to want regardless of locale as this report from Korea attests. The survey from Seoul notes that the phrase employees want to hear most is "You are the best"!

For service industries such as hotels in a period of receding business, research showing that employees' "positive attitudes can be good for business" is more than  welcome. As the Journal report also notes "a 2004 study of 60 business teams in the journal American Behavioral Scientist found teams with buoyant moods who encouraged each earned higher profit and better customer-satisfaction ratings." One approach is to have employees ask themselves, 'What can I do to make my work more meaningful? What can I do to make myself happier?"' For employees in the hotel industry, particularly in front-line positions, that search for meaning can have tangible results visible in the responses they get in their daily interactions from guests.

Warming upto guests - literally.

A report in Britain's Sky.com notes that Holiday Inns has introduced a "Human Bed Warming" service for its hotels in the United Kingdom. It will be offered at it's London Kensington hotel throughout the following week as "a free five-minute "human bed warming service". The news item says that 'If requested, a willing member of hotel staff will jump in your bed, dressed head to foot in an all-in-one sleeper suit, until your nightly chamber warms up". A Holiday Inn spokewoman in the UK described it as akin to a ""having a giant hot water bottle in your bed"! The hotel chain even got physician sleep expert, Dr Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre in the UK, to endorse the idea saying that " who noted that the idea "could help people get off to sleep". Dr. Idzikowski also pointed out that "There's plenty of scientific evidence to show that sleep starts at the beginning of the night when body temperature starts to drop. A warm bed - approximately 20 to 24C (68-75F) - is a good way to start this process whereas a cold bed would inhibit sleep. Holiday Inn's new bed warmers service should help people achieve a good night's sleep especially as it's taking much longer for them to warm up when they come in from the snow." Probably true but one would hope that no accidents result given that a non-human bed-warmer could just as easily do the trick.

The cold chill brought on by the recession has resulted in other such marketing ideas to warm up the bottom line including bringing in "readers" for bed-time stories. Hyatt's Andaz in Liverpool in the UK offered to sate the bedtime story yearnings of hotel guests. The hotel brought in the somewhat quirky writer and journalist Damian Barr who observed that "Most people haven't been read to since they were children, and they don't bring a lot of books to hotels," he says. "I always pack a selection, because you get tired of being in the CNN world." The hotel noted that the "service is free, and no books are off-limits — even racy ones.". Barr responded to security concerns by saying that 'If somebody was perhaps responding to the reading in a way that was inappropriate, I would try to stay in the safe confines of my armchair. And hotel security is always on standby." Perhaps, but since its introduction a year ago it was not emulated elsewhere.

Within the US unorthodox marketing ideas include the Valentine's day promotion offer from Harrah's in Atlantic City. A Wall Street Journal report  notes that the resort is "bringing gambling lovers performances by Air Supply - quite possibly the world record holder for number of songs written with the word “love” in the title - BB King and Buddy Guy, as well as a chocolate tasting hosted by Jacques Torres and, presumably for the singles looking for love, a champagne and lingerie party at a bar." The offerings also include a "crash course in love".

All a far cry from uses anticipated by the architects of the Statler chain of hotels at the turn of the last century when they expected a hotel, among other things, to be "a place where a traveler can obtain shelter and rest... and the atmosphere of its public lobbies and dining rooms should be such as will neither offend nor repel the woman guest.

Service DNA

Singapore's national newspaper the Straits Times quotes the country's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong as lamenting that Singaporeans "generally lacked what he called the service DNA". The Minister called on retailers and those in the hospitality sector to pay more attention to raising service standards and said that merely being polite and gracious is not adequate.

Whether countries and cultures have inherent strengths or weaknesses on service issues is, perhaps, a matter for anthropologists. However, hospitality (and other service industry) customers have general needs of service with specific service expectations dictated by the way service is delivered at the point of delivery. In other words, how the guest is greeted and taken to her/his room is probably more important than the physical plant on offer; something which sets apart one hostelry from another.

A couple of essential ingredients of "service DNA" are empathy and enthusiasm for the guests' needs. And unlike its biological version these are not something that cannot be acquired by staff.  Both empathy and enthusiasm for guests are "teachable" and have long been part of most training programs best manifested by a welcome phrase delivered with a smile. 

Along with the foregoing it helps to be resilient and adaptive to minimize negative encounters with guests. While it is considered axiomatic that "the customer is always right" any front-line customer service rep is likely to have scores of anecdotes when it is explicitly not so.  In many instances, customer ire is caused by real or perceived service lacuna is directed at the face or voice in front of them while in fact the guest has arrived at that point owing to a service gap they encountered elsewhere be it at an airport or a taxi en-route to the hotel. That is when resiliency and adaptability qualities come in handy by not viewing the negative encounter as personally directed and offering palliatives through either words and actions (as in an upgrade) or even both. Other qualities that go to make up Service DNA include taking responsibility as in ownership of a situation. That of course implies devolution and empowerment from top down so as to reach early resolution of potentially troubling situations. 

Ultimately, Service DNA is a function of what each institution's guest's really want from its service and is, to a large extent, dependent on the service platform on tap. Being aware of the dynamic needs of one's customers can go a long way towards establishing a resilient strain of Service DNA.

Rating the stars

The Washington Post has a well researched article on a subject of enduring, if mild, controversy in the industry: the uniformity and consistency of rating systems embodied by stars, diamonds etc, by different reviewers. Entitled " Ranking the hotels: Five Top Reviewers" the report lays out in matrix format the top five - in the Post's estimation - reviewing systems with a brief background on each along with the number of hotels in each's "database" along with the inspection mechanism employed by each. Along with long-running systems like AAA, Forbes (erstwhile Mobil) and Northstar Travel Media are Expedia and recent entrant Oyster.

The grand-daddy of the lot is AAA (in existence since 1917 with a whopping 37,000 hotels) and widely recognized in the US, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean but with limited, if any, recognition in Europe, Asia and the Far East. AAA decides hotels "are eligible for a diamond rating only after passing a preliminary screening with its own set of requirements. Inspectors arrive unannounced, asking to see several rooms and to tour the property."  More comprehensive geographically and with a considerably larger repertoire of hotels is Northstar Travel Media begun in 1939 as the Hotel and Travel Index which in its non-virtual form was and arguably still is, a must have for any travel agency worth its salt. The index covers an astounding 52,000 hotels worldwide with stratification that uses both crowns and stars. The Washington Post article notes that the process is "overseen by HTI editors, takes into account the full hotel experience. The process combines a thorough review of the hotel's services, facilities, amenities, etc."

Expedia needs no introduction to anyone has thought of travel much less actually done so and features and though launched a mere 15 years ago has an unmatched 100,000 hotels in its database. The Post notes that Expedia uses "uses its own star system based on secondhand data. (Inspectors visit properties that have changed drastically or raise concerns.) For foreign lodgings, it uses a given country's standardized system." Expedia also controls Tripadvisor, the de-rigueur UGC site for hotel reviews. Tripadvisor, as most users know ranks across hotel classes and a high score on its popularity index does not necessarily indicate a high-end hotel.

Rookie reviewer Oyster is no neophyte and employs "professional journalists (who) anonymously critique the properties using 70 "dimensions," such as location and level of service" and already has over a 1000 hotels in its roster.

While some hotels anoint themselves with more stars than are on tap as in the over-the-top, literally and metaphorically,  "seven star" Burj-al-Arab of Jumeirah hotels, the decades long rating system is clearly here to stay with owners, public and private, paying close attention to the stars. Recently, an entire nation, France, embarked on "polishing up its hotel star ratings and introducing a new luxury five-star category to help travellers know what to expect."  Going beyond the principal reviewers noted here, the government of France stated that "under the new criteria, stars will be attributed for a period of five years by accredited auditors instead of a government agency. The prefect or state official for a department will however have the final word on granting stars." Perhaps it is an opportunity for a wannabe Michelin guide for hotels in France.