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:

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.

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.

We have seen a dramatic increase in internal theft while in the field and expect to see a continued increase in 2009, especially in employees who rely on tips for a large part of their salary.  Many hotels have been forced to dramatically reduce the number of hours as occupancy declines and many of the hotel restaurants have slowed down.  Many employees are now really struggling to make what they made in the past and most cannot afford to take a pay cut and still pay their monthly expenses.    

What can you do to make sure your employees don’t turn to theft to make up their lost tips?   

First, have a good long term forecast and reduce your staff accordingly.  Many hotels make the mistake of forecasting their labor week to week instead of quarter to quarter.  If you do a quarterly forecast, you can make better decisions.  Unfortunately, many hotels will be laying off employees over the next year.  If you evaluate your staff now based on forecasts, you can consider laying off a few employees now rather than just reducing everyone’s hours until moral really suffers.  Be upfront and honest with your associates and how the decreased business will impact their jobs.  For many employees, this is the first recession in their working lives. 

Second, make sure you are reviewing your internal controls.  One of the most important tools to have now is a system to track all employee’s sales and tips by day.  Be sure to compare each employees’ percentage of cash sales to other employees’ percentage and investigate any inconsistencies.  

Finally, continue to do what you have been doing in more successful times to keep theft out.  Many hotels are tempted to spend less hours reviewing internal controls or reducing mystery shopping to save money.  Don’t be short sighted.  Think long term.

Know Your Food Costs – It is surprising how little hotels actually know about their food costs.  Most hotels have a breakfast buffet, however, few hotels have any idea what their food cost is on the buffet.  Most just assume they are making a high profit because they were taught that buffets were always high profit.  Not true.  Spend the time to calculate your buffet cost.  You may be surprised to find out that your buffet food cost is 40 or 50 percent! 

Here is a simple way to find out the food cost for your buffet:  Have the kitchen log every single item that is used on the buffet during a 7 day period (10 cases of bacon, 22 cases of eggs, etc).  At the end of the week, add up the total food expense and divide it by the amount of revenue you posted for those days.  Be sure to do it for a whole week because you will find that your weekend food cost is very different than your weekday food cost.  Also, be sure to add in all items included with the buffet such as juice and coffee.

Re-engineer Your Menu – Hopefully, you are using a spreadsheet or computer program to monitor your menu engineering.  Be sure to re-evaluate your menu every single month.  For additional menu engineering help, check out this article.

Evaluate your menu prices – Now that you know your food cost and your menu engineering, be sure to evaluate your menu prices.  You will most likely have to raise prices.  However, don’t just raise all of the prices across the board, be very strategic.  Raise only the prices of the items that are the best sellers but do not have the best profit.  Keep the prices the same on the items that do not sell well but have a high profit.  Replace the items that do not sell well and do not have a high profit. 

Pressure Your Suppliers for Lower Prices – If the cost of a particular item has drastically increased, pressure your supplier for a lower price or a substitute item.  Let’s pretend the bacon that you use on your buffet increased 30 percent.  Switch to a lower cost bacon, there are tons of kinds of bacon available.  This is especially easy to do if you are using a big supplier such as Sysco and have an inside salesperson who handles your account.  Just pressure him/her to find substitute items for any items that have drastically increased. 

Decrease the Size of Your Portions – If you are like most restaurants, the size of your portions have become out of control in recent years.  Take a tip from the grocery stores.  You have probably already noticed that your box of Cheerios is now 21 ounces instead of 24 ounces, your Tropicana orange juice is now 58 ounces instead of 64 ounces, and a case of Coke now contains only 20 cans instead of 24.  Rather than raising prices, these brands all decided to decrease the portion size and keep the price the same.  This same strategy can work for your restaurant too!

Increase Your Profits by Up-Selling – Be sure to have a great up-selling training refresher course and a contest for average tickets.  For more tips on up-selling in room service, check out this article.

Whatever strategy you take, the most important thing is to know your numbers and be proactive.  If you have any other tips to share, please post them below in our comment section!

To visit our new Perpetual Beverage Inventory How-To Video Page, click here.

Surprisingly, many people that are in food and beverage management positions and even general management positions do not know how to calculate beverage costs, one of the most important costs in every hotel’s budget.  Don’t worry, we won’t tell!  We will help you keep that secret by showing you how beverage cost is calculated.  It is really quite simple.

Here is the way that most actual costs are calculated.  This is the cost that you usually try to get as low as possible in order to beat your budget.

First, you will need your bar’s total purchases (in dollars) for the period.  Remember, these should be liquor purchases only.  Second, you will need to know your change in liquor inventory (in dollars) for the period.  You will then subtract the total change in inventory from the total purchases (if total change in inventory is negative, keep it that way but still subtract it from total purchases).  We must take into account the inventory change because if you do not, purchasing more liquor to stock up would drive your liquor cost up, while lowering your inventory by purchasing less would lower your liquor cost.  If the liquor inventory is not considered, your liquor usage will not be properly seen in your cost calculation.  Lastly, you will need your bar’s total liquor revenues for the period.  Divide the first (purchases – inventory) number by the revenues.  That final number will be the cost percentage for the period.  A formula for those of you that need to see it visually is below.

Check back soon for more useful tips that just might make your job easier.