This comment by Donald Kiley was posted on the opinion piece by Gustav Pieterse, Has the hospitality industry’s ‘good enough’ standard slipped.
The real problem with “standards” is not that hoteliers or hotel staff suddenly forgot what good service looks like.
Come on, we know better than that.
The problem is that many hotels learnt from COVID that they could run with fewer staff and, for a while, everyone thought: “Look at us, same job done with fewer people.”
Except it was not the same job. It was survival mode.
Then, instead of rebuilding the teams properly, the thinking became “Why bring everyone back when we can just give one person a few extra bucks and let them carry three jobs?”
That may make the bottom line look clever for a while. But guests are not stupid. Staff are not machines. And service does not magically happen because a spreadsheet says payroll looks better.
Yes, maybe some hotels were payroll heavy before. Fair enough. But then we forgot about days off, leave, sickness, training, supervision, backup teams and the small detail that people get tired.
That is where it starts falling apart.
When there is no second team to cover the first, managers start scrambling for a “body” to fill a shift. Then the cracks show, standards drop, guests notice, staff burn out and suddenly everyone wants to know why the reviews are slipping.
We know why.
So maybe the question owners and GMs should be asking is simple: “Do we want a bottom line figure that looks cute for a few months or do we want real service that brings guests back?”
There are many ways to improve hotel profit. Cutting staff until the wheels come off is not one of them.
