Research Paper on HarbourSide Hotel

Abstract

In 1998, the HarbourSide hotel was gripping with many profits and was among the successful hotels around Sydney. It was managed by SoSo whose management worked efficiently and effectively until the late nineteen-nineties where the benefits began decreasing. It led to immediate termination of SoSo's contract which had been managing the hotel for more than ten years. Land Owners In cooperated Management took over believing they could improve the profitability of the hotel to its formers successful status. However, the Land Owners Incorporated Management did not have the necessary proficiency of running and managing the hotel but were optimistic that the hotel would increase its sales despite the lack of enough expertise.

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Unfortunately, since the termination of its former management team, the profitability of the hotel still did not improve. It raised a lot of questions to the new management members as they had to find the significant setbacks that were making the hotel not to achieve its ultimate goal of reaching its nineteen ninety-eight successful status. The owners of the hotel called for an immediate meeting to find out the problems that the hotel was facing, during the meeting, the Land Owners Incorporated Management was required to come up with a project plan to identify all the issues and come up with a solution that would help improve the profitability of the hotel.

The owners of the hotel had agreed to sell the hotel if the new management failed to restore the profitability of the business. After the submission of the project plan to the hotel directors, the Land Owners Incorporated management would be given two years so that the impact of the project plan can be seen. In this situation, it is essential to employ useful business analysis, tools, concepts, and techniques to identify the critical problems that are preventing the hotel from reaching its goals. Therefore, since the Land Owners Incorporated Management lacks experts of management in their work, I would like to advise the chairman of the hotel to eliminate all the non-professional individuals in the management team. Saks (2012, p. 2) states that a lack of proficiency in business leads typically too low productivity in an organization. The other alternative is to adequately train the employees and provide them with the necessary knowledge to handle management tasks efficiently. No one is fit for any job, and thus maximum training is what the employees require to carry out their responsibilities wellAlYahya & Norsiah 2010, p. 15).

Introduction

Since the HarbourSide hotel has been underperforming ever since the shift of its management, there is a need to come up with a project report to identify the problems that cause low profitability in the hotel. For that reason, this report has identified and covered business strategies and tools necessary to determine the setbacks and the measures that can be adopted to ensure the hotel improves on its profitability. The report has also come up with findings of the identified problems that were affecting the business. Additionally, solutions and recommendations are included in the report on how best the hotel can be managed to realize its full potential profits.

Business Strategy Approaches

Auditing Resources

Resource auditing is very useful to every business that wants to identify problems that are inside the company. Auditing resources include human resources, financial resources, and physical resources. The external auditors carefully analyze the employees who are not doing well in their work and identify the skilled and unskilled workers in the business. Financial auditing is vital as well to determine the flowing of cash, loans to be repaid and the ability of the hotel to raise some new funds.

On the other hand, physical resources which include the hotel property like furniture and computers should also be audited so that the hotel owners would know the lost items that were used to increase the hotel's profits and replace them with new ones. Auditing is an essential technique to find out whether the company is utilizing its resources (Sirois & Simunic 2011). HarbourSide hotel is an extensive business which has three hundred and forty rooms and different luxurious facilities like the gymnasium. Therefore, it is vital to carry out the auditing in the hotel by using effective use of auditing approach like analytical procedures which evaluates the consistency of business financial statements. It would assist the auditor in understanding the various economic changes that have been occurring in the HarbourSide hotel.

Technology

Nowadays, many hotels are adopting the technology, when hotel owners were establishing HarbourSide, technology was not advanced, and few people knew little about it. At that time, if the hotel had implemented the use of technology, they would be unique from their competitors because their customers would not have had a difficult time of physically going to the HarbourSide offices to book reservations. Initially, the hotel had its reservations office in one of the rooms inside the hotels which customers could use but was later taken outside the hotel. Moreover, the office was located in a very remote area such that the number of reservation started decreasing leading to losses in the business. If technology were employed, all these setbacks would not have occurred. Technology is one of the best strategies for every business to market itself, products or its services (Kaplan et al., 2010). Through research technique like observation, it was clear that HarbourSide hotel did not even have a website.

Increasing Point-of-Sale to Income Opportunities

When selling additional services to consumers, the business should consider investing in other ventures like renting out car parks or using the business front desks to sell out reservations tickets. The industry can also develop branded products like sweaters or t-shirts and sell them to their customers. Many big businesses, especially hotels, have partnered with the people who rent out concert venues to enable the hotels to sell out their products to the concert goers. Additionally, some hotels have expanded their conference facilities to allow musicians to perform to a large crowd of people. Hotels have realized that musicians play a massive role in marketing products of a company.

Consequently, when a hotel invites an influential artist, many people will flock in the hotel and would purchase many products that the hotel has to offer. As a result, the sales of the hotel would drastically increase. However, through interviewing the management team, it was clear that they had little knowledge about the increasing point of sale to increase income opportunities.

Hosting Special Events

For a hotel business to increase its profitability, it is essential for it to add its space to host special events like birthday parties, conference meetings wedding ceremonies, family reunions, valentine's ceremonies, and Hot tub gateways during the winter months. These additional services in hotels attract a lot of potentials customers thereby increasing the sales of the company. Moreover, these amenities would help the business get a variety of new customers and build good relationships between the customers and the employees of the market. Hosting these events would also boost or increase the number of bookings because some customers may want to know how the rooms look like and decide to spend the night. About Litvin (2013) hosting unique special events increases the market awareness of the hotels particularly to the local society. By using client inquiry process, it was evident that the hotel did not provide customers with such deluxe events.

Business Consulting Tools

Benchmarking

It includes the process of comparing two competitive companies in terms of revenues, costs of production and the employee turnover. Benchmarking is an essential form of consultation to identify the areas that need improvements (Gauri 2013). However, the benchmarking process should be done in businesses that offer or produce similar products or services. Many large companies have made benchmarking as part of their culture to break down variables to identify the underperforming factors that are dragging the productivity of a company. Another critical aspect of benchmarking is that it reflects the business its current position and the position it wants to be in the future. Moreover, benchmarking should not be used to measure competitive intelligence among businesses. After interviewing the management team, it was found that the HarbourSide hotel has never carried out any benchmarking process ever since it was established.

Balanced Scorecards

It is a metric performance that improves the internal operations of a business which determines the external outcomes of the organization. Many companies that consult their issues using the balanced scorecards have been known to outdo their competitors in the market (Jelenic 2011). Balanced scorecards help the management of a business to strategically plan for its operations and avoid any threats that may arise in the company. It also improves the communication approach among the employees, thus improving employee engagement. When employees are committed in their work productivity in the workplace will gradually improve by a considerable margin. In the long run, balanced scorecards help an organization to be in line with their objectives and identify financial risks that may be present in the financial statements thereby promoting efficiency in the workplace. Through internal auditing, it was found out that HarbourSide hotel did not use their balanced scorecards in carrying out their operations.

Porter's Five Forces

Porter's five forces were developed by Michael Porter, a professor from the Harvard school of business to assess the attractiveness of a company and increase its productivity. Ever since it was established, Porter's five forces have become one of the best widely known business strategy tools to employ in a business (Dobbs 2014). It analyses the strength and attractiveness of the competitors, for instance, if a competitor is selling its products at high prices then my business should aggressively interfere in the market by selling the similar products at a meager price thus attracting new customers. If the other competitors cannot be able t...