Internship Report: The Brandenburger Hof Hotel - Assignment Example

?Internship Report The Brandenburger Hof Hotel is located in the heart of Berlin at a distance of only few minutes of drive from the Memorial Church and the famous Kurfuerstendamm, and at a drive of only 15 minutes from the Tegel Airport. It is a 5-star hotel that hosts Die Quadriga, which is an award-winning restaurant, the Quadriga Lounge, and various spas. The Brandenburger Hof Hotel offers up to 72 suites and guestrooms, each having its own bathroom with stylish fixtures, SAT-TV, voice mail service, mini-bar, and air-conditioner. There is a fine gourmet cuisine that customers can enjoy in a personalized environment, a lounge with the piano bar where customers can enjoy different sorts of fine wines, and a variety of fruits brought from distant countries, a library, and a garden. In the summer of 2009, I saw a job advertisement from the hotel in the Sunday’s newspaper. The ad read, “We are looking for a highly talented Revenue Manager Assistant in our branch in the Brandenburger Hof Hotel. Interested candidates should have excellent strategic and analytical skills and be capable of delivering best under pressure. The Revenue Manager Assistant will assist the boss with daily activities that include revenue management, reservations, and sales, and will ensure that the efforts are directed at maximizing the revenue of every room that is occupied. In compensation for his efforts, the hotel offers attractive salary, benefits, and numerous opportunities of career development.” The ad included the email address where interested candidates were supposed to post their curriculum vitae. Revenue management in a hotel is essentially a process of business directed at enlarging the hotel’s revenue by means of pricing and availability management. As I was not yet graduate yet, I could only apply for the internship. I emailed my CV stating that I was willing to serve as an intern for some months if the company allowed. I was not very sure that my request would be entertained since the ad was for the interested employees not interns, but contrary to my expectations, I received an email from the hotel in response to mine, stating that the hotel would like to grant this opportunity to me. The email mentioned the time, date, and location of the interview. I arrived at the location at the exact time, gave the interview, and got selected as the intern. The company did not offer me any compensation for the first month, though the manager said that if he found my performance to be good, he would give me $2000 a month for my services till the time I would like to continue as an intern. I agreed since working as a Revenue Manager Assistant in such a prestigious hotel was a wonderful opportunity. I also had this in my mind that perhaps, I would be able to create a good reputation in the company so that when I apply later for the actual job, my chances of selection would be enhanced. Owing to certain legal formalities, I am not able to disclose all of the facts and information about the hotel. Even then, it is a comprehensive report and offers sufficient insight into my experience of internship with the Brandenburger Hof Hotel. On my first day on job, I underwent an orientation session in which I was briefly introduced to all departments and the concerned staff of the hotel. This was very helpful as it eradicated all confusions and answered all questions that the staff and I had about each other. Not many companies formally introduce a new employee to all departments, leaving it to the employee to do it on his/her own which is not very good as it takes a lot of time for the employee to understand and integrate into the system this way. The Revenue Manager thrust me into the first task, that was handling phone calls to record the reservations. This duty included noting the time of and recording all incoming and outgoing phone calls. Initially, I thought that this activity was too simple for me to spend my time mastering it, but as I actually started doing it, I found that things were a little more complicated than I had anticipated. As I attended the phone calls, I realized that I was in immediate need of learning minute details about the hotel and all of its departments, and memorizing the extensions of all departments since the hotel did not allow the employees to reference some directory while the calls were transferred. Fortunately, it only took me few days to acquire the required knowledge, and so I was comfortable doing the activity. A complicated part of this task was to ensure that the maximum rooms are occupied at all times. It used to be particularly challenging when a customer did not show up as expected and another customer could not be granted the room because of the reservation made by the absent customer. Every time it happened, I had to make a call to the next customers making them aware of the rooms’ availability. After working on this activity for some two months, I was assigned the responsibility of revenue management, particularly the analytical aspects of the job. As the Revenue Manager Assistant at the Brandenburger Hof Hotel, I had a lot of responsibilities. I was supposed to analyze the performance of the hotel services and packages of the previous years and propose the pricing levels, product type, and capacities for the targeted categories. I was required to place the capacities found into the tariff model so that the upcoming year’s Budget Tariff income could be established. As the Revenue Manager Assistant, a significant portion of my responsibilities were related to analytic skills. Such duties included but were not limited to budgeting the model after defining the prices, monitoring the inventory loaded through inventory reports, tracking and forecasting the budget on the basis of business flows channel by channel, and conducting discount analysis to analyze the offers’ success. The main focus of my job of Revenue Manager Assistant was analysis of the business that required me to make informed decisions on the basis of statistical trends. There always remains a crystal ball part to it since there is always lack of certainty about what the future has in store for one. Revenue Manager Assistants use statistics to improve their decision making process. The process of hotel revenue management includes controlling different distribution channels, the revenue management system and the online reservation systems. To achieve perfection, one needs to understand these systems in the best way possible. Skills and competencies required of a Revenue Manager Assistant include but are not limited to expertise in the use of MS Excel, and knowledge of such programming languages as SAS and SQL. The individual should be capable of maximizing the revenue across the product range by increasing both the sales prices and the sale volumes. This is achieved by conducting a detailed analysis of the trends, sales, availability of product, and competitor pricing. After conducting the detailed analysis, the Revenue Manager Assistant needs to make informed decisions quickly to adjust the prices on the basis of the facts identified. As a Revenue Manager Assistant, it takes a lot of motivation to win as it is hard to excel unless one has an intrinsic desire to outperform others and improve one’s score. Presently, a lot of hotels are relying on the use of in-house expertise for all kinds of works and the Brandenburger Hof Hotel is no different from others in this respect. The Revenue Manager whom I was assisting as the Revenue Manager Assistant had acquired most of the experience in the reservations management and had little to no experience in the revenue management. Perhaps that was one reason the hotel required somebody to assist him with the revenue management process. Although keeping the same manager for the management of both reservations and revenues helps the hotel save the costs associated with recruiting and retaining a new employee, yet the fact stays as such that it takes a different set of skills to be a good reservations manager than it takes to be a good revenue manage. The scope of work and the types of competencies required differ between the two. Reservation is essentially a sales department whereas the management of revenue is primarily concerned with the business analytics, which makes the two differ from each other significantly. However, this does not imply that a good reservations manager is not able to perform well as a revenue manager or vice versa. Many certainly can, but the top management needs to provide them with adequate training to develop and customize their skills as per the requirements of the new job so that the business plans can be made effective for the hotel. The manager under whom I was working was more incompetent than I in revenue management. Sometimes, he would ask me to find some time to teach him the basics of revenue management, which I did. It played an important role in developing rapport between us, and we were able to work together as partners. Since it was 2009 when I had started working with the Brandenburger Hof Hotel, which was when the world was freshly hit by the financial crises. The global financial crises also had an impact on our hotel as the revenue managers and the Revenue Management frequently fought with one another because of the decline in demand and the change happening in the marketplace. However, near the end of my journey at the hotel, conditions had started to improve because of the rising demand and the recovery of the markets from the global financial crises. Another challenge that our hotel faced was that of the parity of rates over the Internet. The hoteliers were unable to keep it in the Internet despite the unavailability of the online travel portal offers or the flash sales sites. The fundamental causal factor of this is lack of understanding of the way to control the parity of rate over the different channels as well as lack of expertise in its management. The Internet’s transparency and the awareness of the customers’ awareness of the lack of rate parity in the hotels have made the deal-seeking a tradition in the travel purchasing. My position of Revenue Manager Assistant at the Brandenburger Hof Hotel derived its importance from this risk and other daily challenges in addition to the opportunities to enlarge the hotel’s revenues. Although the supply and demand was always a prime concern of the hotel industry, yet the need of a greater focus over the models of revenue management and pricing has increased over the years as they help in dealing with the market changes and the customers’ behavior. The Brandenburger Hof Hotel’s marketing strategies are very innovative. Currently, the hotel has started a project to improve the systems as well as improve the information’s automation to enhance the decision making process. This project is expected to take the efficiency of the system to the next level. The business culture is casual and informal. Self-motivation of the employees is very important since the hotel expects all of its employees to explore their abilities and do their best to make a difference rather than constantly awaiting instructions by the top management. Even when I was assigned the responsibilities of the Revenue Manager Assistant, the top management had a very subjective idea of my job responsibilities, and to a large extent, they had left it to me to explore my duties myself. But that in a way made it even more complicated because anybody could add to my work scope at any time, though I managed to take the pressure since it was primarily a learning phase for me. By the time my internship period was about to over, I had made a Group Revenue Management Tool. Basically, it was a simple spreadsheet containing the monthly budget of the group rooms. I was able to enter the parameters of the group into the spreadsheet. This made it very convenient and simple for the sales’ people to assess the impact of the rooms at the proposed rate upon the revenue of the rooms of the entire hotel. It was a very sophisticated software which could be used to measure a group’s revenue on all of the profit centers. Normally, such computer programs can be made in different kinds of forms and are frequently included with the system of sales contact management. One of such systems is offered by Delphi. Now, it is for the concerned people working at the hotel to use my spreadsheet program. The future of the sales of the hotel depends primarily upon the hotel’s ability to locate the groups that are consistent with the strategy of revenue management. I placed the foot in my practical life by doing internship at the Brandenburger Hof Hotel. Having worked as an intern in the Brandenburger Hof Hotel for six months, I have got a comprehensive insight into the set of skills and competencies required by an individual to perform his/her duties successfully as a Revenue Manager Assistant at a hotel of this large magnitude as of the Brandenburger Hof Hotel. The internship provided me with an insight into my own weaknesses and deficiencies which I was unable to realize without being a part of a hotel practically. I particularly found how important it is for me to have an extraordinary control and expertise in the use of software particularly the spreadsheets. As an internee offering the services of Revenue Manager Assistant, I was frequently required to use spreadsheet applications or MS Excel to compile the data into legible graphs. When I had joined the hotel as the internee, I was only able to make basic formulae of developing the dynamic or pivot tables. By the end of my experience in the hotel, I could develop dynamic graphs, macros, data filters, lookup references, and conditional formatting. I particularly learnt the importance of acquiring good social and group skills in the way of becoming a good Revenue Manager Assistant. The nature of work in this job is such that the individual is required to frequently interact with others including both seniors and subordinates to collect information from them and seek guidance from them over different matters. To be able to achieve this, one needs to carry oneself with dignity and professionalism, that reflects both in the way one is dressed and the way one socializes with others. As I got along with more people that I had to work with on daily basis, I could feel an improvement in my social skills and confidence day by day. The staff of the Brandenburger Hof Hotel has been very cooperative and friendly with me throughout the tenure of my friendship. My tenure at the Brandenburger Hof Hotel has been a very enlightening experience. My experience of internship has acquainted me with a lot of knowledge and has helped me become well equipped with such a valuable experience that would be very helpful in my professional career after my graduation. Read More