HAT303 Accommodation Management : Enhancing Customer Experiences

Introduction:

Accommodation management refers to the proper managing of the facilities offered by an accommodation or hotel. The term takes into account the maintenance of the cleanliness, standards and other necessary facilities that are being offered by a hotel to make the consumers happy and satisfied (Mok, Sparks and Kadampully 2013). The business of a hotel depends largely on how it manages its accommodation. The report is going to focus on a particular hotel named Macquarie and how it can enhance its accommodating qualities to draw more customers.

Task One:

Inclusion of Modern Systems within the Hotel Facility:

The new owner of the Macquarie hotel has been keen on improving the existing facilities of the hotel. He is also interested in introducing and incorporating new systems within the hotel facility that will help them serve the customers in a better way. Given the fact that the consumers of today’s world are very conscious about their safety, the hotel can work on enhancing their safety management. They can introduce smart locks in their rooms that will allow the customers to lock their rooms using their fingerprints while they go out (Ho et al. 2016). This will ensure that while they are out no one will be able to break in as it happens in case of using traditional key and lock. Introducing smart locks will help the consumers feel safer and secure which will definitely have a positive effect on the business of the company. Another facility that the hotel can introduce is the usage of smart menu cards. The smart menus will allow the boarders to choose their food with the touch of their fingertips (Law, Buhalis and Cobanoglu 2014). The entire system of ordering and receiving food will be digitalised in this way. The introduction of smart menus will also ensure that the customer gets a preview of the food he is going to be served. In this era of technology, the smart locks and smart menus are bound to attract more customers as it will make their stay at the hotel hassle free and a lot safer. The hotel can also enhance its Wi-Fi facilities so the boarders can always keep themselves connected to the internet. Enhancing the hotel in technological terms will definitely help them to draw more customers and gain profit (Hemsley et al. 2016). The smart locks will ensure that the customers would not get worried about the safety of the belongings of their rooms while going out. The smart menus will help them order in a better way.

Enhancing Customer Experiences:

The introduction of the new technologies is bound to enhance the experience of the customers who are going to board the Macquarie hotel. In addition, with the smart fingerprint locking system the company can also introduce smart room servicing system that will allow the customers get their rooms cleaned even at the middle of the night. This will help the customers to get a clean room, no matter what time they return to it. Moreover, the hotel can also revise their booking and cancellation policy in order to get more customer satisfaction (Xiang, Magnini and Fesenmaier 2015). They can introduce online cancellation and may not apply high cancellation fees if the customer cancels the booking five days earlier the booked date. This will draw more customers and with properly provided service, the hotel can make a permanent customer basis. The introduction of the smart menus will also make the customers happy, as they will be able to order from the comfort of their bed without even making an effort to call the restaurant. In addition to the smart menus, the managing group shall also work on their serving time, as customers generally do not like waiting to much after ordering the food (Mok, Sparks and Kadampully 2013). Working on these issues and following the strategies will help the Macquarie hotel team enhance their customer experiences.

Task Two:

Various Customer Sectors:

The tourists who visit Sydney and make their stay at the hotel Macquarie can be divided into certain groups. The first group can be said to contain families that come together to spend a vacation, their sole aim remains having a good time, relaxing and visiting the tourist spots. The next group contains corporate people who visit the place with business requirements only. Their main concern remains to do their job only and they do not pay much attention to either having a good time or enjoying the beauty of the visited place. International tourists can be considered as the third group who visit Sydney. Their main goal inevitably remains to visit most of the famous places of the country and enjoy as much as they can. They also remain keen on having the local cuisine and tasting the different kinds of food that the country offers. The last group can be said to contain guests who have come to visit the country simply to spend a leisurely time. This group can contain individuals as well as people with families and friends. They mainly want to spend a peaceful time and often end up spending their holidays in the hotel only, relaxing.

Services to be provided to the Different Sectors of Visitors:

The First and Second Sector: 

The hotel group of Macquarie must understand that the requirements of the different groups of tourists who come to visit Sydney remain essentially different (Macquarie-hotel 2017). They cannot satisfy the needs of all the groups by providing the same kind of service. They must adapt different strategies to meet the requirements put forward by the different groups. Generally, the requirements of the first group i.e. the group that has come to spend a family remains simple and basic. They want the hotel to provide them with the basic accommodations in a proper way. The Thehotel managing group can make them happy simply by providing a clean room, good food and good services. The hotel management should have efficient staff who will be able to provide the boarders with proper room service of food and of their other requirements (Molina-Azorín 2015). The requirements of the second group, that consists of corporate professionals remain extremely business like. Given the fact that they come completely for business purposes the hotel should be careful about providing them a room that is equipped with proper internet facility (Nieves and Segarra-Ciprés 2015). This will ensure that the professional will not face any interruption while doing his work. This will help the company to gain good reputation as well as satisfy the customer needs.

The Third and Fourth Sector:

The third group, i.e. the group that consists of international tourists is the group that requires the most attention. Given the fact that these tourists are coming from different continents, their hopes about visited foreign land remains high. They expect outstanding quality of service and reception. The Macquarie hotel can use this in their benefit by providing the best quality service to the international tourists. They should remain alert about the requirements of these tourists and act according to them. The international tourists, though they generally like to taste the cuisines offered by the visited country they can also have demands for their local cuisine. The company should be careful enough to keep that in mind and keep provision for both kinds of foods (Trivedi 2017). The requirements of the last group remains more or less same like the first group and the management simply needs to keep their basic services roper in order to keep the customers satisfied.

Conclusion:

The report can thus be concluded by saying that the Macquarie hotel, which has been doing god business over the last twenty years, will be able to make their business more profitable by incorporating certain new services and following particular strategies. The management company of the hotel must keep in mind that they have strong competitors in the Sydney market and if they want to remain strong in their business they should focus mainly on customer satisfaction.

References:

Hemsley, B., Dahm, M., Georgiou, A., Bryant, L., Balandin, S. and Hill, S., 2016. Health documentation in Idd supported accommodation: A conceptual review and proposed consumer informatics model for health information management. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 60(7), p.680.

Ho, G., Leung, D., Mishra, P., Hosseini, A., Song, D. and Wagner, D., 2016, May. Smart locks: Lessons for securing commodity internet of things devices. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 461-472). ACM.

Law, R., Buhalis, D. and Cobanoglu, C., 2014. Progress on information and communication technologies in hospitality and tourism. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 26(5), pp.727-750.

Macquarie-hotel.com.au. (2017). Home -. [online] Available at: https://www.macquarie-hotel.com.au [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].

Mok, C., Sparks, B. and Kadampully, J., 2013. Service quality management in hospitality, tourism, and leisure. Routledge.

Molina-Azorín, J.F., Tarí, J.J., Pereira-Moliner, J., López-Gamero, M.D. and Pertusa-Ortega, E.M., 2015. The effects of quality and environmental management on competitive advantage: A mixed methods study in the hotel industry. Tourism Management, 50, pp.41-54.

Nieves, J. and Segarra-Ciprés, M., 2015. Management innovation in the hotel industry. Tourism Management, 46, pp.51-58.

Pearson, C.J., 2014. Customer Types and the Empathetic Response. The Reference Librarian, 55(3), pp.256-261.

Trivedi, H., 2017. Survey on Food Ordering System. International Journal Of Emerging Technology and Computer Science, 2(3).

Xiang, Z., Magnini, V.P. and Fesenmaier, D.R., 2015. Information technology and consumer behavior in travel and tourism: Insights from travel planning using the internet. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 22, pp.244-249.