How long ' is a few minutes' in the hospitality industry? (Part 1)
You’ve just settled in your hotel room when you realise that the air conditioner in the room is faulty and the room that looked so invitingly nice when you arrived, is beginning to feel stuffy. You then call the hotel’s telephone operator and ask that it be rectified immediately. The operator informs you that he will report it to the Engineering department and have someone take care of it ‘in a few minutes’. You wait and the minutes tick by whilst your patience takes a dive.
One room service story making the rounds involves a guest who called to complain that his breakfast was 20 minutes late. The order-taker apologized and promised that it would arrive within 5 minutes. It did not, and when the guest called room service again, he was told that his breakfast was ‘on the way’. The guest checked out of the hotel and drove for 30 minutes to another hotel. From his new room there, he called back to the first hotel and asked the order taker why his breakfast had still not arrived. ‘Sorry, Sir,’ said the order taker. ‘It would be there any minute now’. So, how long is ‘a few minutes’ in the hospitality industry?
Waiting is a complicated experience to which guests often react emotionally. When it consumes a great deal of time - it can cause annoyance leading to anger. Think of the countless hours you spent during the past year in check out lines in hotels or when waiting to be served in a restaurant or how restless you got when waiting to settle your bill. Usually, most delays in the service delivery process are caused by the inability to produce or do something without wasting time, energy or materials.
However, waiting in some situations is seemingly unavoidable. For example, restaurant customers do not arrive at equal interval order of times but rather in a less predictable manner. Another situation that cannot be controlled by managers is where some customers monopolise service time more than others. Yet, even in these situations, a ‘knowledgeable’ service provider may be able to mitigate the negative effects of such delays if he or she understands the myriad situational factors that influence customers’ reactions to delay.
A visit to a restaurant is like going to a cinema to watch a trilogy of the ‘Godfather’ films. The Godfather is a film series consisting of three feature-length crime films (Part 1, 2 & 3), based upon the novel by Italian American author Mario Puzo. A trilogy is a set of three works of art that are connected, and that can be seen either as a single work or as three individual works. Likewise, a customer’s visit to a restaurant can be separated into three comparatively distinct episodes: an initial process episode from a customer’s arrival at the restaurant until he or she orders the meal; a mid- process episode that includes placing orders and having the meal, and an end-process episode from paying the bill until the customer leaves the restaurant.
To be continued |
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