The main problem that hotels and restaurants face is a constant and costly battle with their competitors. This problem, which is in fact caused by the hotels and restaurants themselves, and its solution, I will briefly and easily understand within the framework of this article.
Blaming difficult market conditions due to strong competition for disappointing revenue and earnings is easy and may sound good. However, when you look at this more closely and put it bluntly, it’s actually a clear display of incompetence on the part of those executives who should help solve the problem of not being better than their competitors.
In other words, saying ‘We are not making higher profits (if any) because we face strong competition’ means ‘We are not good enough to be better than our competitors’. Why else would they continually complain about competitors and spend a lot of time and money on competitive analysis in the hope (mostly in vain) of finding something that would give them a decisive competitive advantage over their competitors? This leaves us with the question of why these companies, despite all their efforts, are not better than their competition. Why don’t they see their true strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, even though everyone does one SWOT analysis after another? The answer is ‘because they are like their competitors thinking wrongly’. So what does it take to make things right?
Both identifying and solving real business problems in the hospitality industry require, first and foremost, good knowledge (and the skills to expertly turn this knowledge into powerful competitive advantages) in an area that is (although most important to success in the hospitality industry) in for example, hotel management schools are practically not touched at all or at best only marginally touched; psychology. This fact is reflected in the result of a recent survey conducted by a major global portal providing the latest hospitality industry news and insights to hospitality professionals according to which: “GM’s number one focus is NOT the guest” . Hotels whose General Managers do not put their guests at the center of what they do? That says it all and requires no further elaboration!
The lack of knowing how the human being works is the main source of the problems of most hotels and restaurants. Not knowing why humans act and react the way they do, not knowing the main driving forces of their hosts (actual and potential), and consequently not knowing what they really need, makes it impossible to plan, properly implement and manage a successful hospitality industry. business. After all, hospitality is all about people, and as mentioned above, hotel GMs not only don’t know enough (if at all) about human beings (yes, guests are human beings). ), but also do not focus on them. Actually, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. In hospitality schools, etc. You are taught to run and manage the administrative parts of a hotel or restaurant once it is operational, which requires non-hospitality skills efficiently. Regarding the operational areas in the training centers and in hotels or restaurants, they teach to serve (deliver) food and drinks, to cook, to clean, etc. This leads to the problems detailed below.
The main root cause of competition in the industry is simply ‘not knowing how to do better than the competition’, something for which the hospitality industry serves as a prime example. Taking a look at the hotels and restaurants makes it immediately apparent that they are suffering from a serious identity crisis called ‘equality’; they are ‘me-too-business’.
For as long as humanity has existed, there have been ‘hotels’ and since then, despite superficial changes during the development process from the first resting place to the hotel as it is known today, nothing much has changed. Now, as always, hotels mainly offer their guests something very simple; the opportunity to rest/accommodate, eat and drink, i.e. rooms, food and drinks (restaurants only food and drinks). Even if you add to this facilities for events, swimming pools, saunas and gyms this does not change anything at all. To cut a long story short, at the heart of this traditional understanding of ‘hospitality’ was and still is the satisfaction of bodily needs, which are lower order human needs. Since hotels and/or restaurants continue to operate within the narrow confines of meeting material needs, their chances of becoming truly unique are slim, to say the least. The result: too many companies in the hospitality industry are fighting to share too little with the same inappropriate weapons on the same wrong battlefield.
Thinking and acting the same way as everyone else leads to exactly the same mistakes they make and to uniformity instead of distinction. That being said, the big question is why would a potential guest prefer one stereotype over another stereotype of the hotel or restaurant category? Where is the distinguishing mark? All hotels and restaurants claim to be the best but in reality none of them are because they say the same thing, show the same thing and offer the same thing in the same way. Just take a look at their advertising. Yes, there are rather superficial category-specific differences (reflected in the pricing!!!), but it’s basically the same within and across categories. Each category is filled with companies striving for greater uniformity, and none of them have a competitive advantage over the other. In this context, it becomes clear that getting into established prospect consideration for reasons of being better than others is practically impossible. From this it follows that the remaining selection criteria are price and location because the prospect does not expect to get anything better than what hotels offer: a place to sleep and something to eat and drink, that is, ordinary things you can get in almost every corner in good quality and at reasonable prices. This is what Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting, said: “Unless a company has a unique advantage over its rivals, it has no reason to exist.”
How can a hotel or restaurant gain and maintain a unique advantage over its rivals? Here is the short and sweet answer: when they learn about the human being (your guests!), they change their philosophy and put, ideally at the beginning of the planning, the goal of being a hotel or restaurant and it begins to be an exciting experience. with the guest as an integral part of it. It is the guests and the satisfaction of their general needs (with an emphasis on immaterial values that are much more valuable than material values) that should be front and center and not what hotels generally provide, i.e. rooms , food and drinks and rather basic services Once this is understood by the owners and administrators and translated into actions, the respective ‘hotels’ and/or ‘restaurants’ will remain pending; until then, they’re just ordinary, at best, and have, to borrow Bruce Henderson’s words, “There’s no reason to exist.”