Introduction: The Ritz-Carlton Hotels was primarily a management company operating 38 hotels and resorts across the globe by the end of 2000. The primary growth strategy for the Ritz-Carlton Hotels is to obtain management contracts for new hotels and resorts around the world. One of the important processes of the new hotel opening process is to staff the hotel. In order to hire the right person for their company and hotel, they have specific selecting process.
After selecting process, the Seven Day Countdown events start to orient and train the employee. The assignment is to analyze the Seven Day Countdown events in order to find out that whether seven days is enough for the new employee. The financial implication is also taking into consideration.Question 1: Service & Selling – Based on the service philosophy, the Ritz-Carlton Hotels is not about selling rooms, food or selling the bar. They do all those things incidentally, but their business is to sell service.
Their commitment to their customers is excellent service. For example, in order to attract business travelers, they introduced the “Technology Butler” which impressed a staff of technicians available for 24 hours to helping guests to solve problem.Question 2: Ladies and Gentleman – The Ritz-Carlton Hotels create “Ladies and Gentleman” feelings for their staff by telling them a story and using a motto. The story tells that: “You are not servants. We are not servants. Your profession is service.
If you do what you do right, you will become as important as your guests. We are also Ladies and Gentleman. We should be respected as well. In addition, the motto of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels is: “We are ladies and gentleman serving ladies and gentleman.
This is also deeply believed and demand by all the staff.Question 3: Lengthen 7 days Countdown Based on my analysis, I do not think it is necessary for the hotel to lengthen seven days countdown. There are two reasons that under concern. First of all, based on the past experience of the hotel, there is only one way of teaching – the self-teaching.
So even though the new staffs get more training days, the first month occupancy of the hotel may not raise dramatically. Secondly, more training days will cause more investment. But whether high investment will get high return or high service level during the first several months is still doubtable.Question 4: Change Currently, Collins questioned that the seven-day time frame limited the hotel’s ability to open at a higher occupancy rate and to reach 80% occupancy at shorter amount of time.
So the staffing process of the opening process might be changed. Before making the final decision of new staff, more practice test should be added instead on normal question interview. They could also ask some old experienced Ritz-Carlton Hotels employees to join the new hotels that can help the new employee to increase their capacity and service level.Question 5: Financial Implication The current total orientation and training cost is 75,000. If the Ritz-Carlton Hotels extends the training days for their employee, the current training cost will increase. The total financial cost will increased as well.
But the return and profits from extending the training days is difficult to forecast. So it is risky to increase the investment for extending the training days. However, if there are enough evidence shows that it will be worthy to invest more on the training events, more investment should be used for extending the training days.
