Measured advice for the hospitality fraternity.
– Game changer – The tests of time , which show if someone has had the commercial success after a set of quality consultants are hired, is particularly important for a number of reasons. A Hotel or a Restaurant owner has put in the best financial thinking cap and gone down the usual borrowing path: someone has whispered in his ears do business with loan money & not with own money.
Budgets created are eventually, for handing out so-called “immunity passports”, although how economically useful those would be once the actual building work commences & how every attempt is made to always bring the Budget under control is questionable. The biggest impact, however, may well come from making it much easier to get a proper picture of how the success of the hospitality product will pan out.
Before starting the project there is a real need to create a activity chart which follows the PERT style of creating tasks and with dates to ensure a faster – not speedy (speed thrills but kills) project completion.
– Moving on from educated guesswork – It would always wise for The Project Management team to create a financial model
and present this to the Owner. There will always be number of issues, among them the huge uncertainty that financial modelers have to deal with.
One must clearly understand that modelling is a tool that is open to misuse and misunderstanding, particularly when its findings are being communicated to non-scientifically trained teams. The key issue is the rules used by a model and the data put into it. We should never be “having to do it by making educated guesswork” because of a lack of live data and knowledge about how the nearby competition is strategizing. That’s not to say that the advice is bad, but it is limited. Getting that data and that information, for which the product is very well researched to have a longer shelf life & be a part of a commercial success could be hugely beneficial. The Project Management team or the finance team should make the modelling more accurate and allow a more nuanced approach to the business to be taken. Today & for the next few months there would be plenty of discussions of what the “new normal” will be like for the period in which the virus is under relative control and in low prevalence, but not yet tamed by a vaccine or effective treatment. Yet little of it based on anything more than speculation and one has to rely on the “pundits of the hospitality business” to recognize, relate & regulate the design & approach. – A more sophisticated approach – A larger question to before embarking on measuring of the affected or not affected customer would require a more subtle & a much sophisticated set of tools which are not in the face. Should a customer want to see these equipment or processes one must allow them to see this. Gone are the days when operators would refuse to allow customers in their restaurant or hotel kitchens. If need be take the customer inside and hopefully expect that this action would spread within the customers socially distanced circle by word of mouth rather than rely on hard core advertising.
That has implications for how future, pan out should suddenly another localized lockdown gets activated. The single or a set of actions would be forever imprinted on the customers mind ensuring that your Hotel or restaurant would be the one from where even the delivery model could work.
When many countries enforced national lockdowns, a little under two months ago, it was done with very little information. Many Hoteliers and Restaurateurs lacked the capabilities to create the infrastructure with the highest benchmarked standards of HACCP, Hygiene & Sanitation. To be able to hit the reset button with newer & better data another lockdown should it ever happen in the near future would buy the Hospitality Fraternity the chance to build a much more sophisticated approach.