Intern as Revenue Manager Assistant from March 2009 to August 2009 At The Grand City Hotel, Berlin - Coursework Example

 Intern as Revenue Manager Assistant from March 2009 to August 2009 At The Grand City Hotel, Berlin Executive summary of the internship The internship helped me develop group skills as well as various technical skills including the use of software and computer programs related to Revenue Management. I placed the foot in my practical life by doing internship at the Grand City Hotel in Berlin, Germany. Having worked as an intern in the Grand City 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 Grand City 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. I also learnt group skills. I found considerable difference between academic learning and professional learning. My experience of internship has acquainted me with a lot of knowledge and skills that I could not learn in the college. Over six months, I have grown as a professional and have learnt how to apply theoretical learning in practical situations. The internship helped me become well equipped with such a valuable experience that would be very helpful in my professional career after my graduation. My tenure at the Grand City Hotel has been a very enlightening experience. Table of Contents Contents Page No. Executive Summary 2 Introduction 4 - 6 a) About the Grand City Hotel b) Location of the Grand City Hotel c) Attractions for the guests d) Environment of the Grand City Hotel e) Services at the Grand City Hotel f) Objectives for the internship Description and Analysis 7 - 10 a) Methodology b) Results c) Recommendations to the company Learning experience 10 - 12 a) Personal development b) Challenges and Solutions c) Academic Learning vs Professional Learning Conclusion 13 References 14 Introduction a) About the Grand City Hotel The Grand City Hotel chain comprises more than 100 hotels all across Europe. The hotels guarantee memorable experience at best price. The location, attractions, environment, and services provided by the Grand City Hotel far outweigh the prices charged from the guests. b) Location of the Grand City Hotel The Grand City Hotel in Berlin is an exquisite resort for the travelers from all over the world who want to discover the German Main content and have some quality time on weekends or holidays. One of the main attractions of the Grand City Hotel in Berlin Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf is its location and surroundings. The Grand City Hotel is centrally located in Berlin and is at a short distance to many of the famous attractions that German has to offer, including the Messe Berlin, the renowned Kurfurstendamm, and the ICC (Grand City Hotels, n.d.). c) Attractions for the guests The Grand City Hotel Berlin provides the guests with easy access to the Berlin Zoo, galleries and shops, the German Opera Berlin, the KaDeWe department store, and the Kurfurstendamm. There is a variety of restaurants, clubs, and cafes near the Grand City Hotel in Berlin to satiate the cravings of the Night owls. The countless cultural attractions of Berlin make the Grand City Hotel a perfect resort for a longer stay. Among all cities of Germany, Berlin has probably the most to offer the tourists and visitors ranging from the Reichstag and the Brandenburger Tor to the variety of attractions in the local neighborhoods. Some of the most famous landmarks of Germany are located in the heart of Berlin and the guests can have them on walking distance from the Grand City Hotel. The guests can turn the clock back to the Golden Twenties in the wonderful even location “Bar jeder Vernunft”, and delve into the colorful and entertainment world of the musicals at the “Theater des Westens”. d) Environment of the Grand City Hotel The Grand City Hotel in Berlin provides the guests with a soothing ambience where they can relax and unwind after an exhilarating visit to Berlin. The guests can enjoy the calm and quiet urban environment on the gorgeous garden patio of the hotel, and replenish their energies in the hotel’s sauna. The modern hotel lobby captures a plethora of natural light to promise the guests a refreshing start of the day with exquisite breakfast and a homelike environment. The Grand City Hotel is a non-smoking hotel in its entirety. e) Services at the Grand City Hotel The services at the Grand City Hotel include but are not limited to availability of WiFi, car parking facility at the hotel, availability of rooms for complete family including children less than 12 years of age, and availability of option to keep pets. Guests may be charged a fee for the Wifi and the car parking facility whereas children less than 12 years of age in the parents’ room are not charged for. In addition to that, the Grand City Hotel provides the guests with a well-equipped gym, and fitness training (Grand City Hotels GmbH, n.d.). The new gym is best for the hotel guests who want to avoid complications while achieving fitness. f) Objectives for the internship 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 of the Grand City Hotel in Berlin. 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. My personal objectives for accepting this offer was to have experience of working as a Revenue Manager Assistant in a prestigious hotel for a good start to my professional career. 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. Moreover, this internship was a good opportunity for me to have a detailed insight into the job of a Revenue Manager Assistant because this is the position in which I intent to work after my graduation. Owing to certain legal formalities, I am not able to disclose all of the facts and information about the hotel, though I have tried my best to compile a comprehensive report that offers sufficient insight into my experience of internship with the Grand City Hotel. Description and Analysis a) Methodology 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. 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 Grand City 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. b) Results 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. c) Recommendations to the company Presently, a lot of hotels are relying on the use of in-house expertise for all kinds of works and the Grand City 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. Learning experience a) Personal development 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 Grand City Hotel has been very cooperative and friendly with me throughout the tenure of my friendship. My tenure at the Grand City Hotel has been a very enlightening experience. b) Challenges and Solutions Since it was 2009 when I had started working with the Grand City 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 Grand City 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. 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. c) Academic Learning vs Professional Learning 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. Conclusion I worked at the Grand City Hotel from March 2009 to August 2009. In these six months, I learnt most of what it takes to be a good Assistant Revenue Manager from attending phone calls and revenue management to analytical work. The experience helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses. During this period, I improved my technical skills as well as social skills. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the team of Grand City Hotel in Berlin for allowing me work as an internee. It was a very informative and skill developing period. Having worked in the Grand City Hotel as an Assistant Revenue Manager, my plans to pursue this field in my professional life have solidified. References: Grand City Hotels n.d., Grand City Hotel Belrin Kudamm, [Online] Available at http://www.grandcity-hotel-berlin-kudamm.de/ [accessed: 7 October 2012]. Grand City Hotels GmbH n.d., Wellness, [Online] Available at http://www.grandcity-hotel-berlin-zentrum.de/en/wellness [accessed: 7 October 2012]. Read More