Resort Management - Case Study Example

Resort Management Introduction Resort management is one of the leading and fast growing industries within the hospitality and tourism sector. The coastal environment is a magnet for tourists although its role in leisure activities has changed in time and space, as coastal destinations have developed, waned, been redeveloped in the twentieth century. The coastal environment is a complex system which is utilized by the tourists for day trips, while juxtaposed to these visits are those made by the domestic and international tourist. The resort selected for analysis is Oceania Club located in Nea Moudania in Halkidiki. This is a new five-star resort which includes all possible services and recreational activities for tourists. Resort Overview The mission of Oceania Club is to provide customers with all-inclusive high-quality services in order ensure customers satisfaction and loyalty. Oceania Club sets out to create a range of high-quality serviced that are distinctive in type, and especially appealing to people who had acquired a taste for good holidays. Oceania Club guarantees the best room, the warmest atmosphere on average price. Oceania Club is aimed to achieve competitive advantage and sustainable competitive creating value for their customers, select markets where they can excel and present a moving target to their competitors by continually improving their position. Three of the most important factors are innovation, quality and inventory reduction. "Blessed with a rich flora blossoming, its amphitheatric setting, surrounded by pines, olive groves, cypress trees and a golden long sandy beach, makes Oceania the ideal place for a dreamy holiday" (Oceania Home Page 2007). The resort provides lodging and room facilities. The main lodging facilities include: lounge/tv rooms, conference/meeting facilities, business/internet center, outdoor pool, indoor pool, children playground, restaurant Piano, bar, nightclub/disco, fitness center, sauna, beauty salon. Room facilities are "A/C individual, heating, satellite/pay tv, safe box, direct phone line, terrace, etc. Also, Oceania proposes a wide range of sports and entertainment activities, children and football swimming pools and beaches" (Oceania Home Page 2007). Oceania Club market is very fragmented in terms of supply, with a large number of smaller operators being characteristic. Consolidation is an ongoing process in the sector. A frequent complaint is marketing's preoccupation with short- term thinking, and an almost total lack of 'strategic thinking', or considering the longer-term implications of external and internal influences on the organization (Hayes & Ninmeier 2003). Seasonality is one of the main weaknesses of this business. Economic strains do exist, however, and some of the most sensitive factors relate to seasonal variation in Greece. In order to attract tourist around the world, Oceania Club introduces special summer and winter offers. The price varies from $12,15 in winter to $251 in summer. This strategy helps Oceania Club to avoid empty hotels, carriers and tour operators with idle wheels, and employees jobless. Also, skillful marketing, expensive, but effective, helps Oceania Club overcome some of the problems associated with seasonality (Hayes & Ninmeier 2003). Resort Property A model building is one of the hallmarks of Oceania Club. Oceania Club is "built in a luxurious, contemporary Mediterranean style and inspired by the Greek architectural traditions" (Oceania Club Home Page 2007). Land-use zoning and the spatial separation of accommodation from the buildings increase resort carrying capacity in locations. This model distinguished between the resort which represented culture and the sea which represented nature. What emerged was a transitional zone between culture and nature, a zone of 'ambiguity' - the beach. Oceania Club has 1 building with 5 room wings, 297 rooms, 3 floors and 10 lifts. It proposes the following accommodations: double room, junior suit and deluxe junior suit, suit and deluxe suit (Introduction to Management 2002). Customer Target Customer target characteristics are base on measurable characteristics of populations such as income, population, age distribution, gender, education, and occupation. Psychographic analysis involves grouping people in terms of their attitudes, values, and lifestyles. Behavior segmentation focuses on whether or not people buy and use a product, as well as how often, and how much they use or consume (Rutherford 2001). The target audience of Oceania Club is middle income families who value luxury and quality of services. Usually, these customers spend their holidays with the whole family. They involve European and American, German and French, Russian and Poland customers (Oceania Club Home Page 2007). Property Operations The remarkable feature of all property operation exceptional quality of all services provided to customers. The main operation include: housekeeping, reservations, supervision, billing and collections, refurbishment's, timeshare accounting (Oceania Club Home Page 2007). Oceania customers trust in high services provided by the resort.. These two factors however are themselves determined by other factors. Service concepts are based on understanding the unique environment in which hotels operate. Service concepts include improvement of communication, and the environment composed of all the individual services used for implementation of the group communication primitives (Upchurch & Lashley 2006). Recent years, the major force for change affecting all aspects of modern life,, is information technology. Information technology reshapes the way the resort lives and works. Already the technology is being used extensively in the operations of operational management. Oceana Club is increasingly using the Internet and electronic commerce to market and sell as well as to share information and trained staff. With the information age comes the era of the knowledge worker. It is possible to say that management staff in Oceania can be characterized as knowledge workers, using information technology to create valuable tourism experiences for the customer (Upchurch & Lashley 2006). Thus, knowledge work is not immediately replaced the labourintensive nature of tourism. But it changes how work is done in the industry and, therefore, requires the resort workers to develop a whole range of new information and knowledge skills. Human Resource Management Oceania Club pays a special attention to HRM and skillful labor. Summer time, Oceania Club relies heavily on young and female labor. In terms of the former, for both females and males it may be their first entry into the world of work as students working part-time during the term and vacations. The ready availability of jobs and working hours that can be fitted around study time suggests there is a coincidence of needs between employers and students. The flexible nature of working hours may also be convenient to people with family or care obligations later in their lives, which tend to be women. The proportion of women in Oceania Club is estimated at 46 per cent. Most occupy the lower levels of the occupational structure and, consequently, many are low paid. Students are clearly an important and growing segment of the Greece youth labor force. One-quarter of all employees in Oceania Club are full-time students. Hospitality work is generally regarded as semi-skilled and unskilled, but in practice presents a more complex picture than its common descriptor of low skills would suggest. Hence skilled work derives from an association with male apprenticeships entailing a period of several years' training and on-job experience, whereas unskilled work is a job that a typically female worker would naturally know how to do, such as cooking and cleaning. By defining many hospitality and tourism jobs as unskilled 'women's work' employers have been able to keep their costs low (Mill 2001). On the other hand, Oceania Club pays a special attention to senior management staff. It recognizes that the management of the resort requires a different set of skills and competencies of the manager than 5 years ago. The 'new' manager requires new leadership and motivational skills - team leadership and team building skills, relationship management skills, knowledge management skills, as well as strategic thinking skills. The 'new' manager is expected to be more of a generalist than a specialist, performing several functions with the aid of available technology. Most of all he or she is expected to add value to the organization in strategic, visionary and entrepreneurial ways. As in the case of the 'new' worker, these new skills and competencies of the new manager will require a different approach to management education and development (Oceania Club Home Page 2007). Strong leadership and effective management is another feature of Oceania Club. The old routines of central planning and negotiating inputs from might have gone, but there remained the assumption that some other agency would solve the problems: an assumption the CEO himself appeared to share. All of this was taking place within a structure which remained hierarchical, with little involvement of junior management or the workforce, who believed that their product could only sell locally and clung to the assumption that they could sell everything they could produce (Mill 2001). In terms of group dynamics three interconnected and often overlapping aims are considered: first, the effectiveness with which groups operate (team building), second, self-understanding and awareness of social processes and, third, interactive skills which enable people to function more effectively in groups. Group training also helps in modifying individual attitudes and values. Group dynamics programs emphasize one of these aims more than the others, and they come in a number. Ethics and SCR Within the context of an increasingly competitive world, the next generation of resort workers will need to have an appreciation of the ethical and environmental issues. Working with diverse customer, resort workers need both the technical and conceptual skills to work in these emerging areas. Environmental protection, impact assessment, capacity control and policy formulation are just some of the skills that will have to be developed or honed if Oceania Club is to be sustained for future generations (Mill 2001). The ethical and environmental issues associated with the resort require particular attention in the development of the future tourism workforce. Ethical issues and social corporate responsibility are the main priorities for all employees. Also, managers need to have a range of conceptual skills such as systems thinking, environmental scanning, visioning and "futuring" - seeing the future before it happens (Davidson 2003). Financial Management Effective financial management allows Oceania Club to monitor and control financial performance of the organization and apply effective tools and methods to keep the organization profitable financially. A major advantage of financial management is that it accelerates the decision-making and planning process as it allows the effects of various alternatives to be evaluated very quickly and the optimum solution found. In this case, financial management information system (IS) helps to avoid mistakes and determine the most effective use of resources (DeFranco & Noriega 1999). In some situation, financial management IS is used for strategic purposes to calculate the level of risk and uncertainty about future outcomes, and the greater the degree of managerial judgment that has to be applied. One more purpose of financial management is to improve service delivery including billing, electronic payments, transactions between hospitals and other financial and healthcare institutions. In Oceania Club, financial management works by examining each incoming order and trying to match this with an order already on the central electronic order/service book. The IS maintains continuously updated prices and the best bid and offer prices are highlighted on screens (DeFranco & Noriega 1999). The advantages of moving to the IS are a faster, cheaper, more efficient and more transparent financial management. The typical set of financial applications include collecting payments, ordering suppliers, different financial transactions (employees' salaries, materials management, fixed asset management, etc.) (Oceania Club Home Page 2007). Conclusion The growth and profitability of Oceania Club depends upon different factors including effective use of information resources and new approaches to treatment, HR and guests satisfaction initiatives. Within these trends, service delivery and support become key performance indicators for successful management. With control a prediction is made of what outputs are expected at some time in the future. This is concerned with how the different component parts of the organization (its resources, its processes, its people) at the financial level are coordinated and combined in the most effective way to contribute to the other levels of strategy and to effectively deliver the organization's overall or corporate strategic direction Bibliography Davidson, M. C.G. 2003, Does organizational climate add to service quality in hotels International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. vol. 15, iss. 4 pp. 206 -213. DeFranco A., Noriega P. 1999, Cost Control in the Hospitality Industry. Prentice Hall; 1 edition. Mill, R. 2001, Resorts: Management and Operation. Willey. Hayes D.K. Ninmeier J.D. 2003, Hotel Operations Management Prentice Hall; 1st edition. Introduction to Management in the Hospitality Industry, 2002, Seventh Edition and NRAEF Student Workbook Package, Wiley. Oceania Club Home Page 2007, Available at: http://www.ellada.net/sani/oceania-club-resort/index.php Rutherford D.G. 2001, Hotel Management and Operations, 3rd Edition. Wiley, 3 edition. Upchurch, R. Lashley, C. 2006, Timeshare Resort Operations: A Guide to Management Practice. Butterworth-Heinemann. Read More