Hospitality for Service Businesses

Discuss about the Report for Hospitality for Service Businesses.

The Grand Hyatt Shanghai is one of the service businesses that takes the nature of any service industry and therefore consists of all the characteristics of a service business. First, the business involves intangible performances such as provision of guest rooms, wireless internet to guests, and restaurant and bar services despite the fact that sometimes they include some tangible elements. Serving special foods by hotel attendants and provision of accommodation to tourists visiting Shanghai China are among other the intangible aspects that form the nature of the hospitality and tourism sector. The hospitality and tourism sector is also characterized by both heterogeneity and/or variability (Johns, 1999). This is the case for the Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel as its services are experiential and therefore their performance involves people who are either customers or employees. According to Johns (1999), performing a service is inconsistent and relies on the service deliverer and the receiver of the particular service.

The services offered by the hotel are inseparable from the staff. Their production and consumption occurs in real time and remain interconnected. For instance, the hotel provides event venues among others services within Shanghai, which the customers must be present in order to receive. The staff provide restaurant and bar services including meals and entertainment and at the same time, they are consumed. Delivery of services therefore involves combining of production, distribution, and consumption at the same time (Johns, 1999). Services are perishable as they are performed in real-time. Therefore, proper management of service supply & demand is necessary for the hospitality and tourism sector. Having entered in the World’s Guinness Book of Records as the highest Hotel in the world, the Grand Hyatt Shanghai remains one of the most attractive local and international tourist destinations in China.

There are two main risks that the Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel faces and these are related to the SERVQUAL factors highlighted by Kandampully (2007). The first risk that the Grand-Hyatt-Shanghai Hotel faces today and related to the SERVQUAL factor-reliability, is the possible fluctuation in demand for services.  There are different times when there are extreme fluctuations in demand in that at one point high numbers of customers arrive for services and at another time, the customer turn out is low (Prentice, 2013).  Reliability in a service industry as such, involves the need to provide services accurately, and very dependably. Further, there is need for consistency in service quality delivery. Poor service that does not consider reliability as a crucial approach in service industry management risks extensive fluctuations in the flow of tourists and/or guests. Unreliability affects the customer’s impression of quality negatively (Prentice, 2013).  Being a world-class hotel the Grand-Hyatt-Shanghai risks being avoided by customers in case a group of workers provide a poor service to a section of loyal and new customers. In the world where information spreads very first through social media,   it is risky to offer poor services as potential visitors may hear of the same and avoid the hotel. There are however strategies that can be used to abate this risk. These include for instance, emphasizing work group efficiency, changing operational layout, acquiring more skilled and specialized workers among other measures. The management can embark on thoroughness in service provision through rolling on-job capacity building so that workers adapt to visitors’ needs and preferences This will boost the quality of every service within Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel. Secondly, the company can just boost demand for the service through massive promotion campaigns.

Secondly, related to the fourth ERVQUAL factor-assurances, the Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel faces the risk of having a section of staff being non-assuring to customers.  It is renowned within the service industry that being assuring indicates a staff member’s knowledge, courtesy, trustworthiness and confidence to the customers. These aspects influence the customers' view of workers as competent, qualified, skilled, polite, courteous, credible and honest individuals. While the Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel in China consist of some of the most skilled hospitality and tourism experts, the possibility of finding a few who are non-assuring to customers cannot be brushed off(Lovelock, 1998).  The company therefore needs to ensure that it hires experienced and highly trained hospitable individuals who directly deal with guests within the hotel.  Capacity building remains a major option in boosting the performance of the workers and thus positively changing the customer impression of service quality within the Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel.

Technology is quite beneficial to the Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel just as it is to other tourism and hospitality institutions. First, technology is used to advertise different services offered by the hotel in different countries. Computer technologies including the use of the social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram among others are useful tools in advertising and promoting organizational services (Crawford, 2013). The hotel management relies on customer feedback on social media to ensure that they fully satisfy their needs and attract more potential customers. Secondly, technology is crucial as it enables communication and management of different departments within the institution.  Computer technology enables such institutions to utilize management information systems that enable a real time generation, retrieval, processing and storage of crucial information regarding the industry (Pizam et al., 2016).  For instance, online hotel booking, flight ticket purchases and data on departmental inventories can be processed and generated within a short time and thus saving on time and resources.

The use of the internet today has transformed the hospitality and tourism sector. This is because it enables individuals to send real-time information from one part of the world to the other.   The Grand Hyatt hotel provides free wireless internet services to its customers within their rooms and serves as part of the incentives that attract them to the hotel. Hospitality institutions are able to make online orders for goods needed within a given period from suppliers, so that service quantity and quality is maintained (Khan & Khan, 2009). Mobile phone technologies are also being utilized by the Grand Hyatt Shanghai hotel to communicate special information to a wider audience.

One of the emerging issues for the Grand Hyatt Shanghai Hotel is the service speed and delivery efficiency. Service businesses in this sector are obliged to honour not only their social responsibility and ethical conduct but also to ensure that the services offered within are served in time with speed to display a caring aspect to stakeholders (Solnet, 2011). Today service businesses like the Grand Hyatt would like to show that they are not just out to make profits and be productive but to offer services efficiently with speed. Service managers need to focus on boosting the speed of service delivery within the premises and beyond. Today, majority of service institutions emphasize speed and efficiency and instruct their employees to keep the pace and or increase it just to boost the confidence of customer’s towards the bag.

Service business including the Hyatt Hotel today are bound by national and international legal provisions that provide list of ethical behaviour that is expected of all officers and institutions operating within different international territories. Service managers need to develop and embrace an ethical culture in their businesses and make sure that customers see ethics faster service delivery to be fundamental bedrock in their business model of management (Solnet, 2011). While most business institutions including the Grand Hyatt are focusing on boosting ethical culture within their employees, studies indicate that perhaps managers cannot maintain fulltime morality especially when they have to act on behalf of owners. In this regard, to maintain high efficiency and profits, managers are obliged to viewing people as instruments and objects that need manipulation just like other resources. Ethics however remain an imperative area in business management including in both service and non-service industries (Kandampully, 2007). Moral virtues are becoming the major values up to which most institutions are looking. These values must be taught and/or instilled both slowly and fast.  This is a similar case for Grand Hyatt, which is committed to quality service provision to its customers. Generally, in the service businesses where institutions might handle people from different parts of the world such as tourists, there need to be ethical measures to be followed by staff (Kandampully, 2007). Even further, a need for a management department that only focuses on ensuring compliance to integrity and ethical measures within service business premises is credible.

References

Crawford, A. (2013). Hospitality operators’ understanding of service: a qualitative approach. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 65–81.

Johns, N. (1999). What is this thing called service? European Journal of Marketing, vol. 33, no. 9/10, pp. 958–973

Kandampully, J. (2007). Chapter 3, in Services Management: The New Paradigm in Hospitality, 2nd edn, Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest, pp. 94–102.

Khan, A. & Khan, M. (2009). How technological innovations extend services outreach to customers: The changing shape of hospitality services taxonomy. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 21 no. 5, pp. 509–522.

Lovelock, C.H., Patterson, P.H. & Walker, R.H. (1998). Chapter 10, in Principles of Services Marketing Australia and New Zealand, Prentice-Hall, Riverwood NSW.

Pizam, A., Shapoval, V. & Ellis, T. (2016). Customer satisfaction and its measurement in hospitality enterprises: a revisit and update. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 28, no.1, pp. 2–35 **

Prentice, C. (2013). Service quality perceptions and customer loyalty in casinos. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 49–64

Solnet, D. (2011). Tourism and Service Management. Contemporary Tourism Reviews, Goodfellow Publishers Ltd, Oxford.