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| Hospitality Magazine column The perils of a slow media day A quiet day in the media over the summer holidays can sometimes take a page five story to the front page. Such was the case for the Quay West Hotel when the wrong person was given a room key and the theft of property belonging to international tourists followed. Yes this was a very unfortunate breach of security and an unfortunate experience for any tourists to suffer but did it warrant the torrent of media coverage and the baying for blood on talk back? I do not think so. What this highlights is the ongoing challenge the industry has in providing a quality customer service and getting it right on every occasion. This time things went wrong, but let’s consider how often guests lose their keys and request replacements. This is a daily occurrence in almost every large accommodation hotel and it’s reasonably likely that on many of these occasions the guest may well have indulged in a few beverages. In most cases the grateful guest is issued with a key and gets back into their room without fuss or issues arising. Calls for more security in hotels ignore the reality that New Zealand hotels generally deal with these sometimes challenging situations adeptly and professionally. This requires hotels to have effective procedures in place to ensure appropriate checks are made before additional keys are issued. Training staff to carry out these procedures while delicately managing the balance between unnecessarily interrogating legitimate guests and being so lax that situations like the recent one or worse occur is also crucial. Any over reaction could well result in a story about a genuine guest who locked themselves out of their room in their dressing gown and could not establish their identity, because their wallet was in their locked room, so was forced to spend the night in the hotel foyer, particularly if it is a quiet day on the news front! So are there any real lessons from this media beat up? The major one is that it is difficult to get everything right all of the time so it’s essential business practice to regularly review procedures, remind staff of the importance of following them on a regular basis and ensure they are well equipped with the necessary customer service skills to deal with difficult customers. The second one is that how a business responds to a problem is almost as important as the issue itself. Even on a slow media day a rapid ‘front foot’ response can do much to take the heat out of an issue and possibly turn negative publicity into at least a neutral or ideally a positive outcome. Bruce H Robertson |
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