The critical success factors in the hotel industry have been changing over time, driven by global competition and increasingly high customer expectations. Hotels are focusing on quality management to attract new customers and earn repeat business.

Quality management is multifaceted and goes beyond the concept of customer service to include additional factors such as employee satisfaction and involvement. A single random interaction with a hotel employee can make the difference between a satisfied customer, an impressed customer or a customer who goes online and writes a bad review about his hotel experience. By concentrating on employee satisfaction as well as customer service, a hotel can increase the likelihood that all its employees will provide excellent customer service as well.

Flexibility is a key factor in quality management as well as being a critical success factor for the hotel and catering industries. Customers can have completely different expectations, so managers need to be given the authority to make decisions to accommodate them when possible. A manager hampered by an inflexible set of policies may be unable to fix a customer problem and earn that customer’s loyalty and good word of mouth in the future. A manager with the authority to make exceptions when appropriate is in a much better position to turn a situation around and earn a good reputation for customer service and high quality.

IHE can create a framework in which management can put flexible procedures, policies and practices in place to safeguard quality management. We can train and educate managers on how to add innovation into the offered services, how to exceed customer expectations, how to create repeated clientele, how to make their establishment stand out from competition.