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A17
Monday 7 May 2018

Hotel Hustle

Column by: Shanella Pantophlet

Dare to compare

I am currently on vacation as I write this, over the course of the last
few days I’ve stayed in two hotels and as most of us in the business
do, I’ve made my way around the place keeping a running list in my
head of everything that has stood out to me about both places. It’s
something that’s been ingrained in me from since I was young going
on vacation with my mother, she would always point things out and
make comparisons between her workplace and the hotel we were
staying in. I didn’t really understand the compulsion until I started
working in a hotel.

It starts rather unconsciously at first just looking around at the layout
of the lobby and how the space is used, interacting with the staff and
seeing how they respond to you, going up to your room and giving
it a once over, not really looking for faults but being more acutely
aware of them. I hadn’t actually realized I was doing it until a friend
of mine pointed it out to me after I’d made various comments and
taken a copious amount of pictures of a place we had been staying
at. I hadn’t thought my behavior odd as whenever I go someplace
I usually take pictures of the room and send back to my mother with
comments attached about the size and the bed comfort and bath-
room etc.

The realization of what I had been doing dawned on me in that moment, especially when I noticed I’d taken pictures in order to have a reminder
of something to show my colleagues when I returned home. Usually something I liked about a place that I feel we could be using/doing at our
own resort to improve the guest experience. After that I started paying attention when the managers came back from their own vacation and
without fail each and every one of them came back with something, be it a picture, brochure, catalog of the place they’d been and finding the
idea interesting enough to propose as a new standard. Our general manager is very guilty of this, he’ll usually send the respective department
head a picture and a list of questions while still on vacation and we have to remind him of that fact.

Hotel executives/brand managers, will often stay in a competitor hotel to see what they are up to. It allows for fresh ideas to bloom, cost saving
measures and highlights areas where services can be improved. An example of this would be room keys, at my resort we changed over from the
swipe cards to RFID keys which can be held against the door to access your room they come in handy when your hands are full of bags, from
there someone suggested wristbands which can be reused every year, come in various colors and can be used for branding. The wristbands also
provide a cost saving since it means we have reduced the amount of times per year we have to re order our key stock.

At the end of the day we skulk around other hotels and make the staff nervous because they think we are secret shoppers, all so we can improve
our customer service and help our guests to have the best experience while staying with us.q

Aruban born and bred Shanella Pantophlet is passionate about tour-
ism. That is the world she studied and works in, so we might as well call
her a specialist. Luckily for Aruba Today Shanella also loves to write.
And together with the fact that the majority of our readers are tourists,
we found ourselves a perfect combination for a column: Hotel Hustle.