Portman Hotel Company PV System: Diagnosis & Action Plan

The Portman Hotel and the PV System's Business Goals

The Portman Hotel Company is recognized as one of the most prestigious and luxurious hotels in its market. Its personal valet (PV) system was designed to elevate service levels for guests well beyond what competitors offered. The primary business objective of the PV system was to deliver exceptional, personalized service, as PVs were specially trained to understand the personality-based needs of each guest. The system was intended to transform the hotel's organizational structure, making it more effective and distinctive compared to its competitors.

Conventional luxury hotels in America traditionally assigned different personnel to different duties — cleaning rooms, restocking minibars, cleaning hallways, and so on. The PV system sought to consolidate all of these services into a single role. At the Portman Hotel, personal valets performed the full range of duties, from cleaning bathrooms to attending to the needs of high-profile guests.

Original Design of the PV System

In its operational structure, PVs reported to the director of guest room services through five supervisors, one drawn from each team. The director was responsible for preparing staff for guest arrivals, monitoring and approving PV schedules, overseeing payment and compensation, and responding to guest concerns. Each PV's duties included greeting guests at check-in, escorting them to their rooms, and explaining how the hotel operated. PVs were also expected to remain available on call for the entire duration of a guest's stay.

Many of the tasks performed by PVs were comparable to those of a personal butler. These included ironing a guest's shirt before a morning meeting, preparing drinks, drawing baths, cleaning rooms, performing minor maintenance, cleaning hallways, and restocking minibars in each room (Heckscher, 1989).

Problems with the PV System: Design, Not Implementation

The major problems facing the managers of the Portman Hotel Company included disagreement among staff, a lack of motivation among many Personal Valets, and poor managerial oversight and discipline. To analyze the conflict among PVs, the theory of fundamental attribution error best illuminates its causes (DeLamater, 2006). In the Portman Hotel case, "floaters" — PVs who rotated across floors — were perceived by other staff as inconsiderate and undisciplined. Management blamed them for wasting time and stealing tips. Rather than integrating floaters into the team, the Portman Hotel made them feel like outsiders and failed to instill a sense of team spirit (DeLamater, 2006).

In fact, the failure was not attributable to the personnel's inability to implement the 5-star plan. Rather, it was the company's failure to build a strong and resilient relationship with its staff and guests. The theory of fundamental attribution error is significant here because it highlights how businesses can over-emphasize dispositional factors in human behavior while overlooking situational factors that encourage constructive or destructive conduct. If supervisors and other PVs had viewed floaters as helpful, purposeful colleagues rather than subordinates, the floaters might have been more engaged and committed. The resulting dissonance among staff stemmed from the organization's failure to recognize and appreciate them, which decreased morale and integrity and ultimately harmed the hotel's revenue (Price, 1994).

A second issue in the Portman Hotel case was the lack of motivation, self-confidence, and optimism among PVs. Expectancy theory helps explain this problem. The theory holds that employees within an organization will choose behaviors that maximize reward while minimizing discomfort (Chiang et al., 2008). In this case, the perceived value of the PV role diminished as expected tips from guests declined. The motivational force was insufficient to sustain high performance (Gallardo, 2010). The situation was further compounded when PVs spent more time on assigned housekeeping responsibilities — such as cleaning — than on building personal connections with guests (Chiang et al., 2008). As a result, PVs were unable to form warm and cordial relationships with guests, and the hotel consequently failed to earn the level of gratuities it had anticipated (Chiang et al., 2008).

The problems at the Portman Hotel stem from the design of the job, not from its implementation. According to Simons (2005), job design encompasses four dimensions: accountability, span of control, support, and influence. The Portman Hotel required its staff to overwhelm guests with specialized, enthusiastic, and immediate responses to every request. For such a high level of performance to be sustainable, all four dimensions must align with the hotel's strategy — and at the Portman, they did not.

For example, Simons (2005) defines span of control as the range of resources over which an employee has decision-making authority. At the Portman, this span was extremely limited. Resources available to PVs were inadequate and largely beyond their control. Employees were required to work specific hours with specific colleagues and were not empowered to make independent decisions, even as they were expected to satisfy every guest need. Simons (2005) also defines accountability as the range of trade-offs that affect how a manager's performance is measured. Although roles in many hotels are narrowly defined, Portman's PVs were expected to handle everything — from standard housekeeping tasks to delivering the highest level of personalized customer service. This created an exceptionally high accountability dimension while simultaneously denying PVs the autonomy and resources needed to meet those expectations.

Conclusion

One of the key findings of this analysis is that the problems experienced by the Portman Hotel Company stem from the design of its PV system rather than from failures in implementing its strategies. The core lesson is that the absence of an effective organizational plan has a profoundly adverse effect on the day-to-day functioning of the business. Equally important is the finding that employee satisfaction is critical, particularly in the service industry (Gallardo, 2010). The Portman Hotel failed to assess whether its personnel were content in their roles, and its disregard for staff wellbeing ultimately generated numerous guest complaints and undermined the very service quality the PV system was created to deliver.

References

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Chiang, C. F., Jang, S., Canter, D., & Prince, B. (2008). An expectancy theory model for hotel employee motivation: Examining the moderating role of communication satisfaction. International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration, 9(4), 327–351.

DeLamater, J. (2006). Handbook of Social Psychology. New York: Springer.

Gallardo, E., Sanchez-Canizares, S. M., Lopez-Guzman, T., & Margarida Nascimento Jesus, M. (2010). Employee satisfaction in the Iberian hotel industry: The case of Andalusia (Spain) and the Algarve (Portugal). International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 22(3), 321–334.

Heckscher, C. (1989). The Portman Hotel Company. Harvard Business School.

Pfeffer, J. (1994). Competitive advantage through people: Unleashing the power of the work force. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Price, L. (1994). Poor personnel practice in the hotel and catering industry: Does it matter? Human Resource Management Journal, 4(4), 44–62.

Simons, R. (2005). Designing high-performance jobs. Harvard Business Review.