The hospitality industry is one of the oldest and largest industries in the world. Despite major crises like the Great Depression, economic recessions, the effects COVID-19 pandemic, and major terrorist incidents, hospitality appears to central practically every major economy on Earth. Accordingly, the hospitality industry (i.e., lodging, theme parks/attractions, food/beverage, events, casino/gaming, etc.) has had to implement innovative policies, practices, and other initiatives to adapt to local, societal, and global pressures. Assignment Your must search the internet, your collective knowledge/experiences in the hospitality industry, and/or other sources at your disposal to identify a specific hospitality organization that implemented an innovative policy, practice, or initiative within the past 10 years (the more recent the better). Then, you will need to put together a paragraph of the innovation that your group identified. In your presentation, your group must do each of the following: 1. Identify a specific hospitality organization and the sector of the hospitality industry that it fits into (i.e., lodging, theme parks/attractions, food/beverage, events, casino/gaming, etc.) 2. Describe which challenges, limitations, pressures, or other factors led this organization to seek innovative solutions. 3. Describe the innovation that this organization implemented. 4. Describe the results or outcomes of this innovative solution. 5. In what ways did effective leadership contribute to the identification of challenges, creation of innovative solutions, and/or implementation of this innovation solution? We choose a hotel from the Nordic Choice Hotel group in Norway, specifically a Quality Hotel. It has a small conference hotel with only 160 rooms and before the summer of 2021 the management team decided to implement an innovative practice to make the housekeeping department run more smoothly and efficiently. Before the summer of 2021 Norway had been closed and the occupancy of the hotel was very low, and the housekeeping department had little to do. Every morning the housekeeping staff would be given a list of rooms that needed to be cleaned, both occupied and empty. Since the staff was unaware of when guests checked out, they would have to wait with those rooms until noon when the check out would be. When they took their break at noon we would give them an updated list with the rooms that now were empty and needed to be cleaned. This worked during covid because of the low occupancy but the management team knew that occupancy would pick up in the summer because of covid restrictions being taken away and a partnership with an amusement park in the area. This partnership meant more families, more guests in one room, which meant extra beds and more work for the housekeeping staff. The management team knew that the housekeeping routine with the paper lists would not be effective with higher occupancy and more work. This meant that they had to look for a better and more efficient option for the housekeeping department, and that was Alice. As shown above, in order for the hotel to be more efficient at daily tasks and to improve communications between departments, the hotel has implemented a hospitality management app called ALICE. ALICE is used to maintain status of all hotel rooms, whether they are currently under maintenance, vacant, or whether the customer in the room requested a service. This allows receptionists, housekeeping, or any related hotel department to know exactly the status of the room through an app rather than through chain of command. For example, instead of waiting until check out time at noon to begin cleaning, the housekeeping staff could begin cleaning as soon as the ALICE shows the room being empty. ALICE assists hotel staff in acting as a team to provide consistently excellent service by bringing all hotel departments together with a single operations platform for internal communication and task management. Since the company was founded in 2013, ALICE has gained significant traction in the industry, working with more than 2,500 hotels and tens of thousands of hotel staff across many of the world’s leading brands, including Marriott International, Hilton Hotels & Resorts and The Leading Hotels of the World. What is Alice? Allows any related hotel department to know exactly the status of the room. Assists hotel staff in acting as a team to provide consistent service. Found in 2013 → gained significant traction in the industry. Working with 2,500 hotels; tens of thousands of hotel staff. Positive outcomes: Simple and fast to learn Improve communications Saves time Recorded accountability ⚫ Payroll ⚫ Inventory Everything is recorded in the app so if there is a delay, everyone knows why so it minimizes questions, which improves communication, saves time, and ensures accountability.
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