Case Study 1: Shortly before the end of 2001, Mr.

Andre Johnson, President of Sunset Hotels and Suites, Inc., heard through the company grapevine that several department and operational managers at the companys hotels in northern California were unhappy with their promotion prospects. Unwilling to risk losing these young managers, Johnson was contemplating how to help these men and womenmanage their careers, at the same time making staying with Sunset attractive and challenging. Sunset Hotels and Suites is a growingWest Coast chain with nine properties insouthern California, six in the San Francisco Bay area (northern California), and five in the Seattle-Portland region. The hotels in theBay area were the most recent acquisitions,and although fewer in number than the southern California region, boasted 20 percent more rooms and were more recently built. They also included the youngest management staff, many of who were retained from thestaffs of the acquired hotels. Sunset is a privately owned company, operated as an S-corporation, with all of the corporate officers and hotel GMs holding shares of thecompanys stock. Several of the unhappy managers had talked with their GMs and human resourceofficers about their frustrations. These included: Many of the GMs were young, in their thirties and forties, successful, and tending to not move. There are no regional managers, as Johnson prefers to run a fairly flat corporateorganization. Several felt locked into narrow specialties (convention services, catering sales, housekeeping management, and front office) without clear prospects for crosstraining to add breadth to their career. They were not particularly unhappy with salaries and the usual benefits, but some grumbled about the valuable stock options the GMs get, largely based on theperformance of the operating managers departments. Johnson called a meeting of the Bay are managers at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco (not a Sunset property) and invited all department managers from Sunset to be his guests for a two-day conference. Similarmeetings were announced and planned in the Pacific Northwest and southern California.

Case 2 THE NEW FOM After being transferred and promoted tofront office manager of a 600-room resort hotel in Miami from a smaller property of thesame chain, Jennifer Waters spent the first five or six months familiarizing herself with the hotels markets, the area, and the resorts facilities and amenities. She also spent a significant amount of time learning the job of front office manager and concluded that it issignificantly different from that of assistant front office manager in a smaller property. The front office staff are young, mostly students, who are in South Florida for the weather and the social amenities. Many want to become actors and are active in dinner theaters and small theater companies in the greater Miami area. For the most part, they are bright and attractive people, but they lack the professionalism that

comes from a solidcore of knowledge and training. Among thethings that concern Jennifer as FOM are the following: Several members of a national association board of directors complained of rude treatment while checking out of the hotel. Several times a week, after guests have checked in, they are escorted to rooms that are out of order, not clean, or already occupied. Four times over the last six weeks, cruel and demeaning practical jokes have been played on the front office assistant manager and the manager on duty during the evening. Guest complaints, either in person or by letter, about the hotel, its services, and its staff have more than doubled over previous years and are outpacing complimentary letters and comments by a ratio of two to one. Jennifer believes her relations with her staff are pretty good. Her relationships, however, with other managers in the hotel are strained, particularly with housekeeping and sales. As Jennifer seeks to understand the complexities of these problems, she decides to compile a list of their possible causes. What items might be on this list? What form could their potential solutions take? Be sure to include rationales for the solutions and a plan that will allow her to demonstrate to top management that the analysis and solutions are likely to result in resolutions of these difficulties

Case study ASE STUDY: HOUSEKEEPING, ENGINEERING, AND SECURITY INTERDISCIPLINARY SECURITY PLAN In 2001, as a regional manager for a hotel chain that operated three urban core hotels in a large eastern city, Denise Tomes was becoming concerned that the hotels for which she was responsible were increasingly vulnerable to threats of physical harm or financial loss to guests from a variety of criminals. She knew through news and media reports that the streets of the city her hotels operate in were becoming increasingly unsafe due to aggressive panhandling, street crime, muggings, physical and sexual assaults, and automobilerelated felonies. Because her hotels total in excess of 1,500 rooms and cater mainly to convention, corporate, and free independent traveler (FIT) markets, Tomes knew that at any given time a large number of her guests were on the streets of the city and that, additionally, due to the public nature of hotels in general, it was likely that criminals could enter the hotel properties seeking victims. These hotels were built during the late early 1980s and, although regularly redecorated and remodeled to continue to appeal to the upscale market, they still reflected the architectural and security consciousness of their era in operational terms. This meant that guest room door locks were still of the standard keyed variety; elevators, fire stairs, side hotel entrances and exits, parking structures were relatively obscure and unmonitored; and housekeeping, engineering, and guest services staff training had not, as yet, reflected the security concerns of the twenty first century. To help her deal with the potential problems presented by the current situation, Denise Tomes called a meeting of the heads of security, housekeeping, and engineering. She challenged them to come up with a plan to increase

security for the hotels and their guests without building armed fortresses. The first task of the directors of security, housekeeping, and engineering was to set forth for Tomes an analysis of the potential risks. The second is to produce a range of alternative suggestions about how those risks might be managed through the efforts of their departments and respective staffs, combined with specific recommendations for equipment and facility upgrades. Case study 4 CASE STUDY: CRISIS IN THE FOOD COURT Nancy Swanger Morgan Black is the director of operations of an on-property food court made up of five branded quick-service restaurant concepts and one full-service casual dining outlet. The resort hotel, of which the food court is a part, attracts affluent guests who are traveling withtheir families. The food court is located in acommon area not far from some of the resorts most po pular, kid friendly recreationalactivities. It also attracts local guests who arenot staying at the resort, but just visiting. One Sunday afternoon, when the hotels 2,500 rooms and suites were nearly at full occupancy, an incident occurred at the brandedsandwich shop that was both bizarre and frightening to those involved.As was typical of the property, lunchtime in the common restaurant area was busy and extended well into the afternoon as families arrived for weeklong stays. A father and sonapproached the counter of the sandwich shop to order a bite to eat. They were nearing the register to pay for their meal when the son suddenly collapsed and fell to the floor, hitting his head on the glass window separatingthe customers from the sandwich preparation area. The boy, who was wearing short pants, fell into a puddle of his own bloody feces as he hit the floor. As it all happened so suddenly, those who were witnesses said it was like the boy must have voided as he was collapsing, as there were no signs of any problem prior to the actual fall. As one might expect, the scene caused quite a stir among guests in the area. One of the shops employees promptly called 911 for an ambulance. Within a very short period, paramedics arrived to care for the boy. It was several minutes before he was stable enough to transport, as they could not get the bleeding to stop. Morgan, who was on property, arrived just as the boy was being transported to the local hospital for treatment. Of course, a crowd had gathered, and talk 1327.ch06 12/19/05 9:32 AM Page 298of the tragedy was spreading rapidly throughout the property. The store was immediately closed and the area around the sandwich shop cordoned off. In trying to assess the situation, Morgan discovered the following: 1. When the young boy hit the floor, the puddle of bloody excrement splattered everywhereeven hitting other guests who were in line. 2. One of the employees, who probably reacted without thinking, began to clean upthe mess with her bare hands. 3. The identities of the father and son were not known. 4. A reporter from the local newspaper was a guest at the food court that day and wanted comments on what happened. Suggest a plan for Morgans handling of the situation. Points to Consider Involvement of the health department? Notification of the brands corporate office?

 Condition of the boy? Clean-up process? Treatment of contaminated items? Handling affected guests and employees? Methods to reassure resort guests? When to reopen and resume business as usual? Implications of what happenedshortand long term? Role of the resorts crisis team? Training gaps?

Case study 5

CASE STUDY: OUTSIDE THE BOX IN THE FOOD AND BEVERAGE DIVISION The Corporate Food and Beverage Committee, through its executive director, has ordered each hotel in the SunRise Hospitality chain (11 medium-size, full-service hotels situated in the Southeast, South, and Southwest) to submit a plan to completely rethink one restaurant in each hotel. SunRise Hospitality specializes in catering to the upscale business traveler and, increasingly, the high-tech companies that are now moving to the South from California, the Seattle region, and the Northeast. Their average room rates are consistently in the top 15 percent of all hotels in their market areas. Historically, though, this has been a fairly conservative and risk-averse hotel company. The corporate office wants to change this and, in the process, to involve each hotel in decision making. The executive director of F&B wants to evaluate plans from each hotels food and beverage director that think outside the box. Among the ideas floating around the company on the F&B directors grapevine are the following: Feature menus that emphasize local or regional cuisine. The idea here is to utilize fresh ingredients and local meat, produce,and seafood, and to feature the ethnic and cultural diversity of each hotels local market area. One goal of this plan is to make the hotel restaurant appeal to local clientele in addition to its guests. Outsource one restaurant to a wellestablished regional independent operator. Outsource one restaurant to a national chain. Hire a celebrity chef to bring prestige and favorable publicity to the hotel. These are only a few of the possibilities. As food and beverage director, you have brought this plan to a meeting of your staff for purposes of general background discussion and ideas about how to proceed. Included in this meeting are the executive chef and chief steward, the manager and assistant manager of your formal French-service dining room, the wine steward, and the director of purchasing. After presenting the corporate plan, you ask for ideas and comments. The chef, who is French, is absolutely devastated and seems tobe treating the corporate directive as a personal insult. He walks out in a huff, threatening to pack up his knives and recipes and go back to France. The restaurant manager is interested in the corporate idea but says she has just spent the last five months hiring and training about half of her restaurant staff in

tableside preparation and service of the French menu. She is worried that switching menus this fast may cause her operation to suffer, at least in the short term. The wine steward considers the challenge somewhat ambiguous because, depending on what eventually is decided, he will have to choose a complementary wine list to enhance the new concept or lose his job to an outsider. The director of purchasing is intrigued by the idea of exploring new local markets. However, he too worries that some of the options may diminish his responsibilities.Your job as director of food and beverageis to help each department head to develop aplan that will satisfy his or her concerns while following the dictates of corporate policy. Case 6

Language Barriers

Language barriers are often a major problem in hotel housekeeping. Because hotel housekeeping jobs are physical labor positions that can easily be filled by women, many hotel housekeepers are Latin women who only speak Spanish, according to Hotel World Network. This can be a burden when they need to communicate with English-speaking guests and employers. A short-term solution to language barriers between employees can be to establish a color-coding system. For example, if a cleaning chemical is especially toxic it may be wise to tag the bottle with a red marker to indicate caution or danger. Use particular colors to designate certain tools or equipment as safe or dangerous as well. Color-coordinate cleaning rags with relevant cleaning chemicals can also be helpful in keeping employees knowledgeable, efficient and safe.
Case 7