As sustainability is becoming a trend in the hotel industry, many hotels are trying to be environmentally friendly and save energy and resources. In doing so, the involvement of employees and guests plays a big role as they use energy and resources in hotels. This paper looks at the ways to involve them in saving energy and resources and potential benefits and barriers to implementing it. By training the employees and rewarding the guests, the hotels can better involve the both parties and gain financial benefits
The hotels need to successfully engage the both parties in helping save the energy and resources so that they can maximize the profit and lower operational costs. With quality training and reward programs for the employees and the guests, the hotels will be able to reach where they want to be in terms of costs and profits.
Introduction
In managing a hotel, labour costs are a big chunk, yet since the nature of the business is to provide quality service to its guests that they can be satisfied with. This means that the staff to guest ratio is quite inflexible. In the case of Ritz-Carlton ins UK, the ratio is 0.5:1 (Ritz-Carlton, 2010). The ratio may vary depending on the size and type of the hotel, but the ratio stays around the given number. Al Maha located in Dubai is “a luxury collection desert resort & spa” and is also known to boast its high 3:1 ratio (Al Maha, 2010).
With rather inflexibility over the labour cost, the area where a hotel can reduce under its operational cost is limited to utilities. In addition, the growing importance of being sustainable has played a big role. Big hotel chains such as Hilton, Intercontinental, and Starwood have employed some of the means such as Green Engage, Starwood Global Development and Sustainable Meetings to be sustainable and lower their bottom lines.
When successfully implemented, they will ensure that hotels save resources and energy. The implementation of environmental policies and practices by the employees and guests will also bring about cost savings(Hotel Business, 2009). Thus, this paper aims to recognize the importance of employees’ involvement and how it can lead to guests’ involvement as well. In addition, possible benefits of getting both parties involvement and limitations as well.
Importance of Employees and Guests Involvement
Installing latest technology to save resources and energy in individual hotels is not easy as it usually requires a large startup cost. However, the success of implementation and maximizing the financial benefits of them highly depends on the employees at individual hotels. Thus, their active involvement is reflected in how much energy and resources the hotel saves.
Also, it takes time for employees to learn and gain the same knowledge. However, when they do reach the top of having the knowledge, both the managers who trained the employees and the employees themselves will be not only knowledgeable but also confident about how the hotel is saving energy (Hansel, 2009). If the hotel succeeded in getting the guests involved and the guests choose to act on the suggestions provided by the hotel, they will likely cooperate better with the hotel on saving energy and resources.
Well trained employees can try their best to lower the bottom line. However, it is the guests that are using the most part of the hotel and thus determine how much the hotel will pay for the energy and resources usage. Nonetheless, if the customer simply does not care enough to do what is asked of them, there is nothing the hotel can do to a paying guest. The growing concern for the environment well represent how general public is seeing energy saving as a way to help save earth.
Benefits
With the active and full involvement of the both parties in reducing usage of energy and resources, the hotel can save significant amount of money. In the case of Scandic hotel, the hotel has implemented what is called “Resource Hunt” to train their employees that would hopefully reduce the energy and resources usage. Within the first two years of the program launch, the hotel saw a 23% reduction in energy consumption (Bohdanowicz et al, 2005). Also, in seven years, the hotel saw a huge 48% decrease in the amount of unsorted waste (Bohdanowicz et al, 2005). The two figures are a reflection of considerable cost savings for the hotels because they are representative of reduced operational costs.
Possible Obstacles and Limitations
Although involving the both parties in the hotels energy and resources savings seems to bring great financial benefits, there are obstacles as well. As effective as the employee training program and reward programs are, the initial cost can be more than manageable for some hotels. For small hotels, it may not be easy to obtain the funding they need as they might not have a big pool of money that big chain hotels do. Also, it takes lots of attention and time for small hotels to train their employees and implement systems (Energy Start Update, 2008).
Recommendations
To successfully implement the plans to get both the employees and the guests involved, managers at hotels must act proactively and intelligently. They have to look at the environmental surroundings of the hotel and if technology or practices are adoptable.
Once the employees are well trained, the managers need to encourage them by a means of compensation. The managers may give the employees a case study or scenario that is relevant to the hotel’s energy and resources saving issues, this should not be too often as the employees may feel stressed out from it, which may negatively affect productivity. This would encourage employees to take training programs more seriously and effectively.
Conclusion
To control the cost of the operational costs, the managers often try to bring down the bottom line by reducing the amount of energy and other resources. Since the hospitality industry is service industry, hotels have limited control over reducing the other part of the operational costs – labour. Thus, the importance of lowering the bottom line becomes significant. It seems reasonable then that the managers try to engage the employees in saving the energy and resources to run business more cost-effectively. As important is the involvement of guests as they occupy the rooms. With appropriate means to educate the both parties and reward them, the hotels can gain the potential benefits and address the obstacles to implementing the plans. By successfully having the both parties engaged in the strategies, the hotels will be able to reach the full potential of the plans and maximize their benefits from them as well.