Development of Service Guarantee of the Strand Palace - Assignment Example

?Marketing of services Table of Contents Introduction 3 The Strand Palace 4 Evaluation of the services 4 Development of service guarantee 6 Benefits that Strand Palace will be enjoying 8 Reference List 10 Introduction The hospitality industry is most rapidly changing and diversified industry. Starting from lodging to gaming and entertainment the hospitality industry uses various channels to discern the guests with memorable experiences. This is done in order to provide a pleasing experience to the customers so that they in turn can provide referrals to other potential customers and can themselves provide repeated visits. In today’s uncertain and competitive environment the travels whether leisure or business looks for maximization of the value they receive for the money they have paid. At the same time the service providers in the hospitality industry are looking at optimisation of working capital, faster flow of cash and increase the revenue they earn from each room (Genpact Limited, 2012). In this context the paper focuses on the marketing of their service, service guarantee and how to improve the same. Figure 1 (Source: Genpact Limited, 2012) The Strand Palace Strand Palace is the hotel that is located at London. This hotel is considered to be catering to every visitor such as visitors on a city break, foreign tour group and business travellers. The hotel consists of eleven meeting rooms and this is the major venue for organizing events and conferences. The prime locations of London that a tourist wishes to visit are all near to this hotel such as the theatres, restaurants and shops of the Covent Garden lies in the north with the Thames, Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridge on the south (Strand Palace Hotel, 2013a; 2013b; Tisdall, 2013). Thus, this makes it attractive to the visitors who have planned for partying and sightseeing. This hotel started its operations in the year 1909 and was an art deco gem of that time. The treasure and glamour of the hotel is still prevalent and is preserved in V&A museum as a memento. The hotel has got nine floors that comprises of total 758 rooms. These rooms are constructed around the inner courtyard. The hotel is quite big where the visitors can consider themselves as on another planet separated from the rest of the world. Evaluation of the services In the hotel industry service quality occupies a very important place as it has high level of contact with the customers. In order to evaluate the service quality of the hotel, five dimensions are required to be considered. They are as follows: Tangibles refer to the appearance of the personal who is interacting with the customer or providing services, physical facilities of the hotel and the equipments that is related to the delivery of service. Reliability: This indicates the ability of the hotel staff to perform or provide the promised service in an accurate and dependable manner. Responsiveness: This indicates the willingness of the staff to provide services to the customers and the promptness in their service delivery. Assurance: This indicates the courtesy and knowledge of the employees that provides them the confidence and trust to deliver properly. Empathy: This signifies the caring and individualised attention towards the customer’s requirement (Antony, Antony and Ghosh, 2004). Service evaluation is highly important in a hospitality industry. The main reason behind this is that it reveals the weakness and the drawbacks that are present in the services delivery of the hotel. The management of the hotel can consider these drawbacks and weakness carefully such that they can take preventive and serious measures to eradicate these problems. For a hospitality industry, the service quality directly impacts the customer’s satisfaction, which in turn impacts the profitability and the business performance. If the service quality is good, then the customers are satisfied and loyal and this loyalty is measured in form of customer retention and business performance. Therefore, in the evaluation of the service quality of the Strand Palace the five dimensions are considered. The hotel is attractive to many visitors from all over the world. Therefore many of the reviews say that in the busy hours the customers had to wait in a queue at the reception. However, the hotel provides satisfactory room services, business centres and concierge desk. The concierge service provided by the hotel includes impartial advice for travel and ticket arrangement, theatre tickets, river cruise, shopping and travel advice, airport transfer and foreign exchange, which is very important for the international tourists (Tisdall, 2013). The next important aspect in the hospitality industry is the room. The customers are highly concerned about this aspect. The Strand Palace is really concerned about their rooms and has refurnished their rooms and is now working on the exterior of the building. The style that the hotel follows is light and contemporary. There are two categories of room for the guests like the Executive room and the Club Rooms. In the Club Rooms the visitors get some additional services like free movies, mineral water and bathrobes. The hotel also has some single rooms. The Covent Garden is a great place where the visitors can go for eating and drinking. The British menu is served in the Johnston’s Restaurant is also a place of attraction for the customers. Strand Carvery is available that provides cold buffet and roasted meat (Tisdall, 2013). The Lounge Bar serves the afternoon tea and Mask Bar serves cocktails to the visitors. Thus, the hotel serves a wide variety of foods to their customers. Wi-Fi is free in the hotel. Therefore, the overall analysis if done from the perspective of the five dimensions is overall satisfactory. The tangibles of the hotel are quite attractive and are of good quality. Moreover, the hotel authority takes good care of their physical appearance. The assurance, empathy and responsiveness of the hotel staff are also satisfactory. However, there is problem with the reception where the visitors are seen to line up in a queue and wait for the service deliverance (Tisdall, 2013). Development of service guarantee In a hypercompetitive global market for gaining market leadership the firms are required not only innovate with their services and products but also to provide service guarantee. Service guarantee is an effective marketing tool that is used to distinguish between the services offered, provide a signal of service quality, minimization of the perception of risk among customers, service recovery and internal management of the customer’s complaints (Collier and Evans, 2011; Klassen and Menor, 2006). In simple words it is a guarantee regarding the delivery of the promised services to the customers. The Strand Palace has a problem with delay in their service delivery (Donlin, 2013). Therefore, in order to eradicate the problem the following recommendations are made: The management should make the hotel staff to understand the importance of service delivered in correct manner and on correct time. They should clearly understand what the customers want and should provide them the service they are expecting. This will help them in generating satisfaction among the customers who in turn will eventually turn loyal towards the organization. The management of the hotel should prepare some tagline that speaks about their guarantee and shows that rendering proper service with quality is their first priority. If the reception has some extra pressure or workload during the peak seasons then they should employ extra workforce who would be handling their job with seriousness and great care. This is incorporate to ensure that the service guaranteed is delivered in an optimum manner. The management should incorporate proper communication among the staff of the hotel so that each one of them are aware of the service that the organization is guaranteeing to their customers and try to meet the expectation of the customers. The management should ensure that the service that they are guaranteeing is not dependent on the customers but on the service provider. There should not be any condition applied to the deliverance of the service guaranteed by the organization. The guarantee that the hotel is offering should be made believable and realistic. The physical evidence plays a major role in the case of service guarantee. The hotel should improve their appearance along with the attitude of the staff towards the customers so that they feel comfortable in choosing their service and become convinced regarding their guarantee. A hotel with unattractive physical appearance fails to draw customer since they do not feel convinced about the services offered by the hotel. Benefits that Strand Palace will be enjoying Whether it is a new or an existing service, the customers faces higher amount of risk while choosing a service that is intangible in nature as a service cannot be tested, returned or reworked; a service once rendered cannot be taken back. This implies that the customers faces higher amount of risk while purchasing services in the hospitality and tourism industry. In order to attract perspective customers service guarantee has occupied significant place and gained enough recognition (Sarkar, 2012; Prideaux, Moscardo, and Laws, 2006). The benefits that the organization will enjoy by offering service guarantee are: Reinforces the promised service Improves customer feedbacks. Helps in identification of the weaknesses. Reduces perceived risk among the customers Enhances customer satisfaction Service-oriented culture is developed Communicates commitment towards consistent quality of service offered. The physical evidence of the hotel plays a major role in making the service guarantee conveyed to the customers. The physical evidence will convey expectation and influences the perception of the customers. From the perspective of the customers a service guarantee has a huge potential to help the organization manage both its external and internal factors in an effective manner. It has been seen that the organizations that has provided service guarantee to their customers has gained significant amount of market share. The service guarantee will also help Strand Palace to enhance their value offered and gain premium price for the service they are offering. The hotel will successfully communicate their priority towards service quality through service guarantee. Reference List Antony, J., Antony, F.J. and Ghosh, S., 2004. Evaluating service quality in a UK hotel chain: a case study. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 16(6). pp. 380-384. Collier, D.A., and Evans, J.R., 2011. Operations management. Connecticut: Cengage Learning. Donlin, K., 2013. How to Create a Winning Guarantee [online] Available at : < http://www.lunareclipse.net/guaranteed.htm> [Accessed 13 December 2013]. Genpact Limited, 2012. Hospitality Industry Services [pdf] Genpact Limited. Available at: < http://www.genpact.com/docs/resource-/genpact_brochure_hospitality_industry_overview> [Accessed 13 December 2013]. Klassen, R.D. and Menor, L.J., 2006. Cases in operations management: building customer value through world-class operations. London: SAGE. Prideaux, B., Moscardo, G., and Laws, E., 2006. Managing tourism and hospitality services: theory and international applications. Cambridge: CABI. Sarkar, D., 2012. Lessons in lean management. Chennai: Westland. Strand Palace Hotel, 2013a. A Welcoming Stay in the Heart of Central London [online] Available at: < http://www.strandpalacehotel.co.uk/> [Accessed 13 December 2013]. Strand Palace Hotel, 2013b. Making the Most of Your Stay & Enjoying Every Minute [online] Available at: [Accessed 13 December 2013]. Tisdall, N., 2013. Strand Palace Hotel, Strand, London: review. The Telegraph [online] Available at: < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/hotel/67770/Strand-Palace-Hotel-Strand-London-review.html> [Accessed 13 December 2013]. Read More