Final Group report

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

 

Beachside Hotel

Business case for “Leading People and Teams” Course- Final group report

 

The case

This is a case of two competing hotels, Sunrise Hotel and
Beachside Hotel that are both located in a medium sized, tourism based
town in the Northeast U.S. The hotels are both competing
for the same set of guests, as well as the same set of potential
employees. They are both budget hotels, right next door to
each other, with 60 guest rooms each and a view of the beach.
The occupancy during peak season for the Sunrise Hotel is
98%, but during the winter months goes down to 65%. The
Beachside Hotel has peak season occupancy of 90% and off peak
occupancy of 50%.

Joe is the General Manager of Sunrise Hotel and has been in
his current position for 5 years. He has been with Sunrise Hotel
for a total of 10 years. He worked his way up at Sunrise Hotel
from front desk agent to front desk supervisor, and finally to
Assistant General Manager before he became the General
Manager. He does a good job of screening potential employees
for his front desk area of the hotel because he realizes the
importance of that area of the hotel, especially in tourist areas.
He also has incentives set up for excellent performance of the
front desk agents and training and development programs
designed to give everyone information that will help them do
their job better. There is a sense of teamwork at Sunrise Hotel
and that helps everyone want to do a good job. His guest satisfaction
ratings for his hotel are overall excellent. On a rating
scale of 1–10, his hotel averages a 9.

The average length of tenure of his employees is 4 years,
and his current front desk supervisor was promoted from
within, along with his Assistant General Manager. Because of
the small size of the hotel, Joe is actually involved with all of
the hiring decisions and helps to give training programs himself,
along with his leadership team. The employee turnover
at the Sunrise Hotel is 25% overall and that is primarily when
hourly employees graduate high school or college and leave
the Sunrise Hotel for a career somewhere else.

Brian is the General Manager of the Beachside Hotel and
deals with a very different situation. Brian was brought in
from another hotel in the same hotel group about 6 months
ago. He was told by his boss that he needed to “fix” this hotel
so that it would start having better customer satisfaction ratings
and more return guests. Despite the fairly high occupancy
noted during peak seasons, the off peak season occupancy is
only 50%. Also noted by his boss, the occupancy should be as
good as the Sunrise Hotel. Brian has been with his hotel group
now for 2 years and he came out of the accounting and finance
department in his old hotel. He has a great understanding of
the numbers in the lodging industry, but has not been involved
with the human resource aspects of the job.

The turnover of hourly employees at Beachside Hotel is
120% and that means that Brian is constantly running the hotel
short handed and with new employees. The Beachside Hotel
has been doing the hiring through a human resource practitioner
in the hotel that was put in the position because she
really could not handle serving guests at the front desk very
well. Mary was promoted to human resources a year ago after
she had one too many altercations with the guests at the front
desk. The owner of the hotel wanted to make sure that she
would not make any of the other guests angry, so he promoted
her to a human resources practitioner. Since that time, she has
been busy trying to keep up with hiring and she has had no
time for training employees. Because she is so busy, paychecks
often come out to employees late, there are no policies written
down for employees to use as a guide for performance, customers
are treated badly by new and poorly trained employees,
and the departments of the hotel do not communicate
very effectively and therefore everyone blames everyone else
when things go wrong.

The average length of tenure of the front desk agents at the
Beachside Hotel is 3 months and the customer satisfaction rating
at the Beachside is a 6 out of a 10 possible rating. Most of
the front desk agents that are hired come from other hotels in
the area after they quit or are fired. Brian is not involved in the
hiring for the hotel at all, and does not get involved with training
and development. He spends most of his days looking at
the financial reports for the hotel and analyzing average daily
rate, occupancy rates, and REVPAR (Revenue per available room).

Brian knows that he has many problems to deal with and so
he goes to the Sunrise Hotel to observe things over there for
a while. He sees a happy crew and talks to Joe about how he
is making that happen. Joe is happy to help, but wants Brian
to go back and observe his employees first and come up with
ways that he specifically can help guide Brian.

 

Questions

Note: You don’t need to follow exactly these questions for your report. They can help to guide your analysis, but you can develop your own questions or structure for the case analysis and recommendations.

1. What systems should Brian implement in order to start
changing the organizational behavior and people practices in the Beachside
Hotel?

2. What could Brian learn from Joe in terms of the human
aspects of running a hotel?

3. How could training and development programs be implemented
in the Beachside Hotel in order to help with turnover
and occupancy rates at the hotel?

4. How could a return on investment perspective help or hurt
the Beachside Hotel in trying to compete with the Sunrise
Hotel?

5. What other Leading People and Teams initiatives could be undertaken
by either the Sunrise Hotel or Beachside Hotel in order
to help with the overall performance of their respective
organizations?