Hospitality Marketing. I\'m Studying Hospitality Management Cold

¶ … Hospitality Marketing. I'm studying hospitality management Cold Coast Australia. I attach documents understanding target hospitality organisation (Meriton Serviced Apartments Gold Coast) I wanna essay.

Hospitality marketing

Meriton Serviced Apartments is an Australian-based firm offering alternative hospitality services in luxurious apartments, in hotels located near the beach and providing customers with a wide array of recreational opportunities. Still, a weakness of the hotels remains the relatively low quality of the rooms, due to the fact that the company outsources the entire room division to a cleaning company (Part A). In this setting then, the current strategic proposal is that of increasing the quality of the rooms through the improvement of control over the outsourced services.

Strategy recommendations

In a more detailed stance, the proposed strategy is characterized by the following:

Objective: The scope of the strategy is that of increasing the quality of the rooms in order to increase the levels of customer satisfaction, the reputation of the hotels and ultimately, its sales levels (Schmitt, 2010). The expectation is that of a 5 per cent increase in sales within the first six months of strategy implementation.

Target market: The primary target market for the strategy is represented by the already existent customers, who would enjoy higher quality rooms, reveal higher levels of satisfaction and as such engage in word of mouth publicity (Cahill, 1997). This would lead to the reach of the second target market, namely the prospected customers, formed from businesses primarily.

Positioning: The implementation of the new strategy would help the company position itself as a noteworthy provider of alternative and high quality hospitality services.

Weakness into opportunity: as revealed throughout the first part of the project, Meriton Serviced Apartments has outsourced all of its room services to a cleaning company and this means that they have a decreased control over room quality, which can be sometimes poor. The implementation of the proposed strategy -- with its expected success -- would result in the creation of a competitive strength of higher quality rooms and an increased opportunity to succeed within the highly dynamic market place, where points of difference -- such as superior room quality -- are essential (Reid and Bojanic, 2009).

Aside from the aspects already covered in the previous lines, it is now important to reveal some practical recommendations on how to actually implement the proposition. Specifically, the strategy would revolve around the creation of additional control mechanisms to supervise over the means in which the leaning partner company is completing the totality of the room services. Some specific recommendations in this sense include:

(1) The analysis of the current shortages in room quality (Hsu and Powers, 2001)

(2) The discussion of these shortages with the cleaning company

(3) The creation of new quality standards desired by Meriton Serviced Apartments and which would be implemented by the cleaning company (Mawson, 2000)

(4) The development of new collaboration contracts with the cleaning company and the negotiation of better terms for Meriton Serviced Apartments. At this level, it is important to sign contracts that allow the hotel to better control the operations and to influence them in the desired direction (Click and Duening, 2004).

(5) The stipulation of consequences for breaches in the signed contract. For instance, if the cleaning company does not deliver the room services at the expected standards of quality, they would suffer consequences such as decreased payment, delayed payment or even the possibility of ending the collaboration on grounds of failure to comply with the accepted terms (Buchanan, 2008).

(6) The creation of a specific team of hotel employees aimed to directly supervise the means in which the cleaning company is delivering the room services (Nykiel, 2007).

(7) The continuous evaluation of the quality of the room services and their comparison across time. Innovation and creativity would be implemented at this stage through the use of technology tools that help evaluate the evolution of the room quality.

The strategy of better controlling the outsourced operations is expected to be implemented in a trial version, which would be revaluated and re-assessed in six months after the initial implementation. At this level, emphasis would be placed on the ability of the strategy to improve the quality of the rooms and the satisfaction of the customers. The measurement of the strategic success would be completed through the issuing of questionnaires to reveal the levels of customer satisfaction. Also, at this stage, emphasis would be placed on the comments of customers on forums and specialized websites, such as www.booking.com or www.tripadvisor.com.

3. Conclusions