Excellence is within your team: Find out how to release it

The secret to achieving this success lies beyond a hotel’s walls or its tech stack; it sits within your team. However, the industry currently faces two stiff challenges - finding great staff who are enthusiastic about customer service, and retaining them.

With the sector experiencing the highest staff turnover of any industry in the UK at 35% (CIPD) and a YouGov survey highlighting that 42% of hospitality staff leave their roles within 90 days, something must change.

We need to inspire change in all staff and reignite the passion for hospitality in order to safeguard the future of the industry.

The staffing challenge is exacerbated by the ever-increasing daily, habitual and time-consuming tasks which starve a team of the time to do the job they want - providing exceptional one-to-one, highly personal services that leave a positive lasting impression on guests.

Many hotels are stuck with a myriad of processes where their team are performing outdated administrative practices, leaving them as trance-like characters in a zombie movie - where mindless repetition takes over, and creativity and passion are left behind.

With the need to constantly manage and update data, staff have become automatons constantly spending time doing the mundane, disenfranchising them from hospitality and disconnecting them from the guest.

This monotonous routine leaves staff uninspired and with low morale, in turn impacting on their guest interactions. We need to free staff of laborious admin tasks, empower them to be autonomous and give them the opportunity to contribute to the team and shine for your business, and themselves.

The volume and scale of engagement required to fulfil guest expectations is constantly growing, and guest demands require staff to have the capability to be more responsive.

Frontline teams are working hard juggling a number of unconnected software and systems to process arrivals and departures, reserve tables or book extra experiences and activities on behalf of guests. Therefore, there is a growing need to equip hotel teams with the right tools to perform tasks quickly and efficiently, releasing more time to provide exceptional and memorable guest experiences.

It's not just Front of House that needs reinvigorating. Finance, sales, marketing and revenue teams can benefit from greater automation and more intuitive software that allows them to focus on analysis and decision making.

With the right technology, standard functions like payment processing, revenue management, bill consolidation, housekeeping and maintenance, rota management and operational workflows become streamlined and aligned to business goals and objectives.

Instead of counting stock or guesstimating staff needs, F&B managers should be focusing on the quality of the food and drink reaching the table, and elevating customer satisfaction, working with technology that gives them the insights of profitability, resource management, procurement and inventory control.

Bringing order to chaos will free staff for more creative thinking. And making their roles more innovative and dynamic will contribute to leaner and smarter hotel management, helping drive revenue and manage costs.

Technology should assist your staff in eradicating everyday repetition, so they can focus on the exceptional and personalised.

We’ve taken the time to build a toolkit that provides everything a hotel needs. Much more than a PMS, our solutions create efficiencies in day-to-day tasks, empowering your team to go the extra mile. From distribution solutions to advanced payment processing and guest management tools, with your systems all centrally connected sharing data, your staff are able to be responsive to emerging guests’ needs and capable of responding to market changes.

Hayley Sneddon, Reception Manager, Duck Bay Hotel, pointed out: “As a hotel, we’re always looking to improve, streamlining work and making things as easy as possible for our staff and our guests; Guestline is helping us achieve that. Everything being linked makes the customer journey a whole lot smoother, and enables us to provide a more personal check-in experience. With Guestline, we can pick and choose what is going to help our business grow instead of being forced to pay for technology we don’t need.”

With a fully integrated tech stack, your team can give personalised upgrades, schedule spa sessions, make table reservations, book third-party experiences, easily manage room allocation, and instantly up- and cross-sell. Our portfolio of intuitive hospitality solutions comes with quality support and customer service that empower staff to eradicate the monotony and bring life back to every aspect of your business.

Katy Allen, Events Manager at Cromlix, noted that Advanced C&B “keeps our event sheets consistent. The chefs know where to find the latest information on dietary requirements. Event teams know where to see up-to-date guest numbers. And for sales, the system triggers us to remember potential upsells we can mention to the client, helping boost incremental revenue.”

As a business, we at Guestline are on a mission to support you to reignite the passion in your team. More than a PMS, we’ll help you smash the zombie culture and reinvigorate hospitality excellence.

If it needs to be done every day, Guestline has a better way. Discover how to reduce operational headaches and free your team to go above and beyond for your guests by visiting us at the upcoming Independent Hotel Show. We will be on stand 1320 on Tuesday 15th & Wednesday 16th October at Olympia London.