“Whether needing to quickly replenish after a workout or wanting to toast the perfect sunset, 15-Minute Room Service provides quick and delicious meals for those who want it right away,” says Christopher Hunsberger, executive vice president, global product and innovation at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. “It’s also ideal for those who are on the go. Ideally, every meal would be enjoyed at leisure, but at times we really just need to grab a bite quickly – and there’s no reason that it can’t be freshly-made with quality ingredients, and entirely delicious.”

While the logistics of 15-minute room service may be difficult, the idea is terrific.  Many guests who order room service are on a tight schedule.  I can’t tell you how many times I tried to fit in a room service meal before a conference call… and how many times the meal was very late and I barely got a chance to eat!  Door knob hanger order forms have really helped out my breakfast routine, and this 15-minute room service program will be great for lunch and dinner, especially when arriving at a hotel later than expected and starving.  Also from the press release:

“At Four Seasons, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make the most of our guest’s time and enhance their experience. By putting ourselves in the place of our guests and imagining what could make their lives easier, we’re able to come up with new services, amenities and approaches to doing business on a regular basis. Putting guests first and delivering good quality food quickly is just the latest in a long history of innovations,” Hunsberger added.

Source:  Four Seasons Press Release

One of the biggest areas of struggle during our Service Experience Audits is the use of the guest name.  The use of the guest name is one of the most important tools you have to build loyalty with your guests.  Rather than providing your associates with general instructions such as ‘use the guest’s name during every interaction’, focus on the key areas of when the name should be used.  Our method is simple, but very effective.

Use the guest name once to open the conversation and once to close the conversation.

By doing this, it will become second nature to your associates.  They wont even have to think about using the guest name.  They will just do it.

Here are some examples for a few departments on how to use the guest name:

Phone Calls:  As soon as the phone rings, the PBX operator should pull up the guest’s information on the computer and get ready to use the name.  The PBX operator should immediately greet the guest by name.  After handling the call, the operator should end the call by using the guest name.

Check In & Check Out:  As soon as the guest gives the name or room number, the GSA should immediately use the name once.  The GSA should close the conversation with “have a great stay, Mr. Smith.”

In Room Dining:  The server should double check the name just prior to knocking on the door.  Once the analyst opens the door and invites them in, the server should greet the guest by name.  Then once the guest signs the check, the server should thank the analyst by name on their way out of the room.

Housekeeping & Engineering:  The associates should double check the name just prior to knocking on the door.  Once the analyst opens the door and invites them in, the server should greet the guest by name.  To close the conversation, the associate should say something like “enjoy the rest of your stay, Mr. Smith.”

The real key to successful use of the guest name is repetition.  If you require all associates to use the name once during the greeting and once during the closing it is very easy to monitor and it wont belong until everyone on your team is using guest names.

Check out this clip below.  John talks about the perfect one ounce pour, the power of suggestion, bar menu engineering, and why selling fruit drinks helps promote food sales.

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Bar Rescue airs on Spike on Sunday but they rerun episodes often.  Also, many clips and some full episodes are available on Spike’s website.  Check out this clip and meet John Taffer, the star of Bar Rescue.

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Links:

Spike’s Website for Bar Rescue

At my hotel, we have a very busy breakfast buffet (especially on the weekends).  Our hosts do a good job of seating guests in a timely manner but don’t add too much to our overall guest service.  What can you recommend?

Good question.  We often see hosts do a poor job on guest service.  Often they just stand behind the desk and wait for guests to approach them and then walk them to a table.  Then they go back to checking their text messages on their iPhone.

1.  First, be sure to check out our Breakfast Buffet Training Guide.  There is a great video on basic service steps

2.  The first goal of every host should be to greet every arriving guest a warm smile and a ‘Good Morning’.  Also, they should make sure to greet every departing guest with a warm smile and a sincere thank you.

3.  Hosts must know how to greet multiple guests at the same time.  Often when two parties arrive in the restaurant at the same time, the host will greet the first party and escort them to the table without saying a word to the second party.  The host must let the second party know that he/she will be back in a minute to seat them.

4.  When escorting guests to a table, the host should make sure to point out the buffet.  The goal is to get the guest excited about the breakfast they are about to have.  Make sure to be excited about the buffet and mention some of the great things such as the omelet chef.

5.  When the guest arrives at the table, the host must hand each guest a menu after they are seated.  Do not just place the menu on the table and walk away!

6.  Have the host introduce the server with a phrase such as ‘John will be taking care of you this morning and will be right over to offer you coffee and juice’.

7.  Finally, make sure the host closes the conversation.  We often just see hosts walk away from the table without saying anything.  Have the host at least say ‘have a great breakfast!’

Have any tips of your own?  Post them below!  Have a question that you would like answered?  Post it below or send it to us via the contact page.

I can’t seem to get our liquor costs under budget.  What is the best control for measuring the bartender’s pours?

Good question!  There are a few different methods for pouring alcohol such as free pour, jigger, or measured spout.  Which one works best depends on your bar.

Typical lobby lounge – If your bar is typically slow, usually a measured jigger works best.  Just be sure to have plenty of jiggers on hand so the bartender always has one within reach.  We like the measured jigger because it is easy for your supervisors to monitor from across the bar.  Also, customers are accepting of a jigger in most cases.  Of course, the down side is that it is easy for the bartender to overpour using the jigger.  Most bartenders we see using a jigger like to run a tail with each pour.  Here is a good video on basic jigger techniques:

High volume bar – If your bar gets pretty busy and the bartenders need to crank out drinks fast, we like the measured spout.  The ball bearings in the spout automatically pour the exact amount and then stop.  The bartender would have to tilt the bottle back a second time to be able to overpour with these spouts.  Here is a good video of how the Precision Pours work:

Free Pouring Method – We really do not like any bars to use the free pour method.  It is both dangerous to your profits and to your customers.  Our mystery shoppers have reported time after time instances where they were poured a drink that had over 4 ounces of alcohol when a bartender free poured.  You can easily see how pouring 3 times the correct amount can be very dangerous.  But if you must free pour, at least have a good counting system in place and a system to test the bartender’s pouring skills.  Here is a good video:

I am the In Room Dining Manager of a large hotel.  Our In Room Dining sales have really dropped over the last year.  Our service scores are also suffering.  Where do a start?

Great question!  Many hotels are reporting a drastic decrease in F&B sales per occupied room.  The In Room Dining sales have taken the biggest hit during these tough times.  Guests are really cutting back on the more expensive amenities of the hotels and room service is usually at the top.  Here are our recommendations:

1.  Revisit your menu and specifically your menu prices.  Many hotels dramatically increased their room service menu prices over the restaurant prices.  We recommend that the prices are similar, especially if your hotel is near many other restaurants…  especially if they are within walking distance.  Guests typically look at the room service prices and assume they are the same as in the restaurant.  If a guest feels they are too high, you have lost them as a customer in both room service and the restaurant.  Guests will grab breakfast from a quick mart and eat dinner at the restaurant next door. 

2.  Review the basics of room service selling with your Room Service Operators.  Now more than ever, they need to maximize the revenue on every call they receive.  Check out this article on how to increase your room service sales by as much as 50 percent!

3.  For help on improving your service, check out this article on how to deliver room service orders the right way!

Have any tips of your own?  Post them below!  Have a question that you would like answered?  Post it below or send it to us via the contact page.

Here are the top complaints:

1. Noise (reported in 26% of visits)
2. Poor Service (18%)
3. Cleanliness Issues (10%)
4. Food Quality (7%)

Most people would automatically assume that food quality issues would be the top complaint in a restaurant.  Keep in mind that this study covered restaurants from Denny’s all the way up to Morton’s Steakhouse.  You probably spend a lot of time working on your menu and your food quality.  Keep in mind that this is the area that the fewest people complain.  Where should you focus most?  First, hopefully your hotel restaurant does not have a noise problem. Very few of the restaurants our mystery shoppers visit have any sort of noise problem.  However, many of the hotel restaurants have both a service problem and some cleanliness issues.

Service problems are the biggest problem areas during our mystery shopper’s visits.  Surprisingly, the biggest problems are the most basic service standards.  Many servers struggle to do basic standards such as taking orders, pre-bussing tables, and delivering the check correctly.  Schedule a mystery shop today to see how your service ranks.

We also see a few cleanliness issues during our visits.  The main culprits?  Buffets and bathrooms.  Bathroom cleanliness was also a complaint in the Consumer Reports study.  Have a messy bathroom in your restaurant is probably the quickest way to scare a guest.  The buffet problems we report are issues such as dirty plates in the plate rack and messes left on the buffet from other guests.  Be sure that dishes are inspected after they come out of the dishwasher and before they are put on the buffet.  Also, be sure you have someone monitoring the buffet to clean up the mess left by guests who don’t know how to operatate a set of tongs.

Keep focused on the basics to improve your guest satisfaction scores!

I am a food and beverage manager at a hotel with two bars.  Can you tell me some ways that we can increase our revenues?  We are obviously a little bit slower lately, but is there anything that we can do to help?

The selling area of a bartender’s service is always overlooked. These selling standards are extremely important to generating higher revenues. Bartenders can come across as uncaring and unfriendly if they just approach and ask guests, “What can I get for you?” They also will not sell much more than the minimum guest order. Most hotel bars are not like the bars or nightclubs that stand alone. People usually expect more from a hotel bar. The service of a bartender should be similar to that provided by servers to a table of guests that are eating. There are many selling standards that should be in place for each time a guest arrives at the bar. This includes practices such as offering your drink menu to guests whether they know what they want or not, providing a food menu, suggesting any specialty drinks, offering more beverages, and offering bar snacks. Each of these practices has its own effect and benefit on your bartender’s guest service as well as revenues. Here is a breakdown.

Providing Food or Drink Menus

Having a menu in front of a guest makes it more likely that he or she will order something in addition to their normal order. Something on your menu may catch their eye and the guest might try it, giving you more revenues. They may not have been extremely hungry at the time, but just hungry enough to order that shrimp cocktail appetizer. They would not have known about it if a menu was not given to them. This can be done by simply asking the guest if he or she will be eating and providing them with a menu regardless of their answer. It is surprising how few bartenders do this even if the guests are sitting next to other guests that are eating. You cannot wait for a guest to ask for a menu.

Suggesting Specialty Drinks

Most hotel bars have their own special drink creations. Usually, by placing these drinks on your menu, you feel that they are tasty and charge a premium for them. Why then, would bartenders not try to sell them? In addition to providing a menu upon greeting the guest, bartenders need to offer a specialty drink or two by name. Most guests have their own predetermined drinks, but may try certain things on a bartender’s suggestion and recommendation. Why let the guest order an $8 vodka tonic when you can attempt to pour them a $13 special martini. This makes the bar more revenues and the bartender higher tips.

Offering Bar Snacks

Offering bar snacks to the guests will show that you are being attentive to them. There has been many times where our mystery shoppers sit at the bar and watch other guests eat their bar snacks without being offered any. Yes, most guests will ask for them but why make your guests ask. Provide them along with every drink that is served. Bar snacks also make your guests a little thirstier and can make them order more drinks. It is a small cost to pay to make your guests stay at your bar longer and order more drinks.

Up-selling To Premium Liquor

Many bartenders will just pour the bar’s well liquor if a guest asks for a generic beverage such as a vodka tonic. It only takes an extra second to ask if the guest would like Grey Goose, Belvedere, or Ketel One. This provides a choice of premium vodkas to the guest, earning your bar those extra few dollars in revenue. Instead of making your well brands the standard, why not make your premiums the standard and your well brands a second choice? If the guest asks what other vodkas your bar has, then you can tell them all your brands. It is pretty uncommon for bar guests to ask directly for the cheapest vodka you have.

Offering a Second (or Third) Drink

Before the guest is finished with the beverage in front of them, make sure that your bartender is offering them another one.  By doing so, you are attempting to keep the guest there longer and ordering more drinks.  They may not have stayed but by asking if the guest wants another beverage frequently causes the guest to quickly finish up their current one and agree to another one.  Everyone knows why guests go to your bar, so you have got to keep them ordering before they think they have had enough.  Obviously, remember your TIPS training and do not overdo it.

To make sure that your bartenders are consistently hitting these selling standards, continue to do regular mystery shopping.  You will see your revenues start to climb up in no time.

Have any tips of your own?  Post them below!  Have a question that you would like answered?  Post it below or send it to us via the contact page.

First, a brief overview of how we see the bussperson position. Bussers are the key to a restaurant’s cleanliness.  They are relatively inexpensive to have on the floor during busy times.  However, they can really hamper good guest service.  Restaurants tend to use bussers to help the servers serve guests by doing things such as offering beverages and pre-bussing.  The problem is that guests cannot tell the difference between a server and a busser.  It does not matter if their uniforms are different.  When an employee approaches a guest’s table and offers a beverage, the guest expects that person is going to serve them.  Unfortunately, they do not always speak English and are not trained to properly serve the guest.  Many guest’s questions are answered with a blank stare or with, “I’ll get the server”.  Servers should serve.  They should be the first to greet the guest when they are seated.  They should take the drink orders and deliver them.  They should pre-buss and should deliver the checks.  A busser should never go to a guest’s table while there is a guest present.  If a busser is doing any of these tasks out of necessity, your server probably is unable to handle the number of tables he/she has been assigned.  You should reduce his/her table count until his/her service improves.

What should a busser do? A busser should be bussing tables, cleaning tables, and resetting them.  They should be focused entirely on the cleanliness of the restaurant and not on guest service.  Unless you specifically train your bussers to serve guests at certain moments of their meals, as most high end fancy restaurants do, make sure the busser’s job description clear.

So, when do you need a busser on duty? Only during high volume times, when the restaurant is at least 75 percent full.  We think bussers are a necessity during breakfast hours if you have a buffet, because of the fast paced environment.  This is the same for lunch, if you do a lot of lunch business and have a buffet.  The busser has extra duties during a buffet service like stocking the buffet and cleaning the buffet area that wiill continue to keep him/her busy.  Bussers are usually not needed during a hotel restaurant’s dinner service.  Dinner is much slower paced and it shoudl be easier for the servers to keep up.  You may need to schedule a few additional hours to do some of the deep cleaning of the restaurant each day.

If you are a small or medium sized hotel, you may only need one busser for a few hours each morning.  Try borrowing someone from another department instead of having a dedicated busser.  For deep cleaning, work together with housekeeping to keep the restaurant looking perfect in between meal periods.  Cutting costs effectively means using each of your departments efficiently.

While you are making the changes, schedule an extra server or two and shrink each server’s section.  It will take the servers some time to adjust to their new responsibilities.  The good thing about extra servers is that they always want to go home early if there are not enough guests and tips to be made, unlike bussers who stay for the full 8 hours and usually get paid more than servers.  Just make sure everybody is completing their checklists and sidework prior to going home.

If you are really brave, have the F&B Manager be the busser for a day or two.  Have them track what times the busser is needed and schedule an employee to perform the duties for those times.  Do not forget to merge your busser’s daily checklist with your server’s daily checklist to make sure that no tasks are missed.

There are many hotels that tell us, “We are doing well in our guest service scores, so we do not need any mystery shopping!” To those hotels, we say, “Congratulations!” But think of it this way; who fills out those comment cards that you regularly base your success on? The guests that take the time to fill out the comment cards are almost always either the guests that had a wonderful visit or the guests that had a completely terrible visit. This probably accounts for only 1% of your total guests. What you are essentially saying is that you do not care about how any of the guests in between feel; a good 99% of them. You are risking the loyalty of the guests that you provided below-average service to, who did not feel like filling out your comment cards. How would your corporate office respond to that? Comment cards are like a crapshoot; you hope that you get “good” guests this month and that they give favorable scores. Why not turn that crapshoot into a sure thing? Mystery shopping provides an unbiased, objective look at your service at any given time. Managers are then able focus on keeping service consistently high by pinpointing and correcting any service deficiencies instead of waiting for a guest to comment on them. Unfortunately, they probably will have chosen another hotel by then.

Another benefit of Mystery Shopping (especially outlet shopping) is that it continues to keep your employees honest. With the internal control observations in every report, you can strengthen any vulnerabilities and weed out dishonest employees. Just knowing that any guest can be a potential mystery shopper will lower the chance that employees will steal. A rather fortunate side effect of this is that it will probably raise your revenues as theft goes down. Even if you turn down the idea of mystery shopping, please do not be naïve enough to say what some managers have said to us, “We have tight internal controls and we know that we have no theft.” Some of us have learned the hard way.

One last thing that we hear quite often is the ever popular, “It is not in our budget” or “We cannot afford it right now.” We know all too well the pressures of saving money and cutting costs to have a better bottom line. Unfortunately, the short-sightedness of this tactic is what really bothers us. The proper way to cut costs is to achieve efficiency, but it seems that most hotels cross the line of efficiency into effectiveness. We assume that your hotel’s mission is to improve guest service, increase customer loyalty, and thereby increasing revenues. With the significant service improvements and revenue increases that your company can achieve by properly utilizing mystery shopping, it should be a necessity to your hotel rather than a luxury.