Seeking to Succeed in Hospitality? Read Our Tongue-in-Cheek Guide to Failure!

Why do restaurants, hotels, housekeeping services, and other hospitality businesses fail? If you ask around you will get a multitude of answers, and if you look further and dig deeper you’ll get answers specific to every kind of hospitality business. In the end there are a lot of different reasons for failure, but some carry more weight than others. This how-to guide can help you tank any business. If, on the other hand, success is your preference, this is a warning of what to avoid and how to succeed.

If you want to fail…provide inconsistent service. 

Whether you’re running a restaurant or a hotel, the best way to ensure a lack of loyal customers is inconsistency. When customers attend establishments, they bring expectations with them about their experience. To attain success you must reach all high expectations and surpass low ones. Product and service consistency provides a competitive edge and allows for the building of a loyal customer base.

If you want to fail, do not set high expectations for employees and do not regularly check to ensure your team is consistently reaching these high standards. If you don’t want to fail, consider ensuring consistent expectations for employee-guest relationships and interactions, creating a feedback system within your business, and ensuring professionalism from every employee.

If you want to fail…don’t train your employees.

The belief that you can pull a new employee off the street and they will be effective without any kind of training is a recipe for failure. In fact, if you want to upset and lose customers it is important your employees lack any proper training.

On the other hand, success means employees who are working with food know how to do so safely, employees know how to ensure customer satisfaction, and team members know how to handle emergencies. When it comes down to it, training is the key to successfully, safely, and efficiently providing high quality service to customers. Employees should have training on using any systems they require for their job, providing high quality customer service, safety expectation, and security requirements. Each individual job results in different training needs and failure to train any employee will keep them from performing at their best. If you’re looking to fail, the easiest way is not guiding and coaching your employees. Effective training requires competent trainers. If you are making the decision to train your employees, ensure it is high quality.

If you want to fail… don’t take time to understand guest expectations.

What do your guests want? You don’t know and don’t bother to find out? Congrats, your business has failed. Understanding what guests want out of your business is vital to building a successful and sustainable business. If you don’t know what customers expect you will never be able to attain their satisfaction. Management in a company is responsible for figuring out what the focus of the company will be and fostering those expectations. Lead customers to believe your company provides the fastest service, has the best quality, or the nicest employees only if you plan on providing it to them. If customers expect fast service and are faced with waiting, they will be unlikely to return.

If you as a company are aware of customer expectations, train your employees, and provide consistent service, you will be three steps closer to happy customers and business success!