The current economy has affected every individual at the micro level. So, the hotel and travel industry is expecting to see tougher times for a while yet. In order to sustain these tougher conditions the hotel and travel industry players need to gear up and come up with new innovative business ideas. Here are some of the findings based on experts study on food trends for hotels and restaurants expected for the year 2009 that can help you in business decisions.

• Straight from the farm to the Table cuisine is now-a-days getting very popular. A customer might ask, and would be delighted to know about where the food comes from, and can be a great selling point for wait staff when taking orders. If it’s structure properly can be used to up sell.

• With market ups and downs and changing inflation rates, changing menus is an ideal thing to do.

• Customization and personalization sometimes can make your customer feel special. Considering a slight change in the menu or taste, to suit your customer needs is worth it. Strong Return Guest programs could record like and dislikes of particular guests.

• 2009 will be a year of cost cuttings, savings and restoring the economic health. Consider things like half glass wine, happy hours, offering several snacks type foods that are a better option for customers as compared to a fixed priced complete dinner.

• In today’s fast paced life people are unable to stick to the traditional timings of breakfast, lunch or dinner. You should be ready to serve them food according to their needs anytime.

• Restaurants that are open late night are very convenient for business travelers. In fact business travelers choose hotels (to stay) that have late night restaurant services.

• Dining in different areas of the hotel other than the traditional restaurant, bar can add uniqueness and a lasting memory. Creating a rainforest effect in the ballroom for a couple of sittings or out in the garden is fast getting popular. So, offering this kind of services can give guests and visitors an exciting and fun filled experience.

• Complimentary restaurant services like serving breakfast or tea/coffee round the clock is an important thing for luring visitors. According to a study 72% of vacation travelers and 71% of business travelers check this kind of services before choosing hotels to stay.

• With globalization the world has come closer. People travel to different places of the world and enjoy different type of food. So, prepare to serve any all kinds of food i.e. Chinese, African, Japanese etc.

• Herbs in particular Tarragon was not much used till recent times, is gaining popularity among chefs these days, probably through programs from Gordon Ramsey! Leading chefs around the world are now recommending including this ingredient in their menus.

• More and more people are becoming aware of the importance of being eco-friendly. So, stop supplying those water bottles and offer sparkling filtered tap water. If It tastes nice then less will need to be thrown out at the end of service.

The Kenson Team

It’s a bit like the shopping story where the silent shopper never complains when they get bad service they just never come back.

Your guest does notice. Just Last month the author stayed in a hotel interstate where the showers were still operating at full flow, no regulators nothing and in another property on a different trip there was no less than 11 different globes of different colors , types ,energy usage and wattage in the one room.

Global warming looks like being a health hazard. Hotels in particular are required to put their best foot forward, however many stop short of a measurable approach and seem happy to just have a green tinge.

Listed below are some easy things your property may not have tried.

A great way to address your indirect emissions is to address your material suppliers. It could be good policy to ask your suppliers if they have programs in place to “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle products. Using this type of approach can give a hotel significant cost savings.

Restaurants could use the organic produce to also minimize the hotels carbon footprint.

The Purchasing department might find that there are providers who use less packaging on or for their goods.

Guest room, bathroom amenities can be of the biodegradable type to minimize the impact of wastes entering the environment through the rubbish dumps. It’s a simple question and selection process with your suppliers.

More direct actions for hotels are things like having the Guestroom drapes closed to help retain the heat or cool air regardless of the room being occupied or not. Sure it’s up to the guest to do what they want when they occupy the room - rest of the time belongs to the hotel. Advertising has told us the heating and cooling costs lost through the windows is significant.

For those hotels that have variable thermostats in every guestroom, it would be a beneficial in terms of energy used if Housekeeping were to adjust the dial to a predetermined standard setting after they have finished servicing the room. Instead of having one room running on 20 degrees Celsius and the next at 23 degrees Celsius

Imagine the energy wasted everyday when thermostats are all over the place; it’s like a silent killer.

Do you have computers running 24 hours day because they’ve not been turned off in places like sales and marketing, housekeeping, finance, or admin departments?

It’s very noticeable the accommodation industry has not taken onboard advances made in lamps and lighting technology. Just Lookup in any reception area at the widespread use of incandescent lamps. With LED lamps 5 times more efficient than halogen or incandescent globes it pure common sense to change. Environmentally friendly LED is Mercury free unlike the fluorescent globes, guess that’s the reason hotels are hanging off changing over.

Lifetime on LED is significantly longer than any of the others out there meaning less replacement and maintenance costs. LEDs do not emit harmful infrared or ultraviolet radiation.

Think they are not bright enough - think again, check them out.

Till next time

The Kenson Team

It’s a pretty exhausting process - here are a couple of things you need to keep an eye on to get the best value.

It’s sad to say along the way you will find that some of the information received was a little deceptive. Some points below will help you stay on track.

Misleading the weight or grade of carpet can catch the unwary buyer out.

Weight or grade of carpet used in a commercial application is 40 ounce as the standard requires. Substituting only a 20 oz weighted carpet means less cost to the supplier but means a dramatically shorter life for the hotel carpet.

Cheap nasty underlay can ruin any good carpet as it flattens out and is like concrete to walk on. It’s popular to substitute cheaper underlay.

Overstating metres required can catch you out very quickly and add extra unwanted dollars to the bottom line. The hotel generally relies on the carpet measurement of the supplier, consultant, and installer. Would you know if the corridor was 50 metres long or needed 50 metres of carpet? If the corridor was only 46metres then being charged for an extra 4 metres at $200 per metres adds up. If you were doing 25 floors that’s a very quick $20,000 you lost. It happens more often than you think.

You should ask what the measurement is and then have your own people check it.

Its not uncommon to find also a little surprise when those third party people who are helping you, handover the quote have added a couple of metres , after all it was a nice presentation you may not realize what’s going on.

Did you know you are suppose to receive from the supplier a certificate that identifies the carpet in terms of material, weight and fire rating?

You need to check that the carpet is fire rated and get the certificate - if you have a fire in the hotel you could faced with possible non payment of the insurance and possible a negligence charge for not checking by both the insurance company and the asset owner.

Many get bitten with a great price on that imported stuff but it could be underweight and not be fire certified.

Finally read the fine print on your proposal the GST is included on some quotes and sometimes in very small print and not included in others.

That means your purchase will vary by another 10%.

The Kenson Team

Well sometimes that can be the case.

Looking at Chemicals used around the hotel and in particular the housekeeping departments can give us some great green and money saving ideas.

Did you know there were 81000 chemicals registered with the EPA in the last 30 years? Reports tell us that fewer than 20% have been tested for toxicity.

Not something we like to hear considering the everyday use of these products.

Going “Green” in the cleaning of hotel guest rooms probably conjures up using well know products like baking soda, white vinegar and salt !

Hardly practical when it comes to cleaning hundreds of rooms everyday.

Health and safety issues in chemicals used for cleaning by hotel staff are pretty well known.

Cost of a sick leave provision for staff is a real issue for management.

Improper use of chemicals and anything that goes down the drain costs money to the hotel and the environment. All well known facts.

So what product has technology bought to us in the last 15 years that is used extensively in hospitals and can resolve all of the issues mentioned earlier?

I won’t give you the answer just yet but I do have some hard facts for you to consider from a 5 star hotel in Sydney that has completed a comprehensive

Trial to prove the true worth of not using chemicals.

They had a 3% higher rating from guest comment cards that room cleanliness was better. This was backed up by a bacterial swab count which came out lower the chemical cleaned surfaces. Infra red light tests for dirt buildup showed negative. And reports, that to the naked eye, glazed and metal surfaces such as sinks and kettles as an example looked to have an enhanced appearance.

“They looked cleaner” Great that’s what keeps the guests happy!!

The trial by the hotel did include costings in terms of products and labour, training and was completed in March 07.

Feedback from the housekeeping staff was very good with comments like

“The method used was less physically strenuous”

“Feel good about less chemical usage and its helping the environment”

“Far less water used”

Chemical costs were reduced by 80% Water usage was down by a million litres.

OK so what are we talking about? Microfiber of course.

Used in hospitals since the 1990s – it’s a water based cleaning solution invented and developed in Sweden in the 1990s.

Just how high tech is Microfiber cloth- well when these guys say the fibre is thinner than human hair, that’s only part of the story.

Actually one square centimeter of Microfiber contains over 30 kilometers of fibre.

But that’s not all round surface threads on a traditional cloth are not really designed to pickup dirt particles. Microfiber secret is the fibres are wedge shaped and that makes the millions of fibres much more effective in trapping the dirt particles.

Hence the reason no chemicals are required.

The cloth is simply washed out with water at the end of the day for re-use the next day.

All in all a genuine Green proven product.

Your Kenson’s Team

Now you can easily listen to the menu and decide on your favorite dish. The technology was developed by a company in the US with the thought in mind of solving the problem faced by visually impaired people.

However the interesting part is that, this new technology proved to be very helpful in restaurants that have low lit areas, especially during the evening time.

Low lighting levels in restaurants seem to be the norm these days all in the name of creating “atmosphere”.

The Lion and Rose – a famous pub and restaurant based in San Antonio, Texas is one such place where this technology is successfully implemented. Lion and Rose has always taken initiatives to improve quality wise, service wise and keeping up with the emerging technologies.

In an effort of keeping up to its commitment the operators of The Lion and Rose went looking for a technology that could help in reading menus in the low lit areas of the restaurant particularly in the evening time and candle night dinners. A solution was found at a Miami based company – Menus That Talk in December, 2007.

Menus That Talk is a handy electronic device that reads out the items or contents of a menu to its customer.

It is a portable DVD case sized device which helped customers in chandelling the device efficiently. The buttons are lit to enable easy operating in low lit areas and navigating between customizable menus.

The user could easily find buttons even in the darkest place. When the user presses a button on the device, it reads out the option and informs the user about the selected option.

To help the visually disabled, buttons are identified in Braille. The device is a cost effective measure that can eliminate the cost of generating and maintaining the conventional menu cards. All menus can be easily fitted into it no matter how big or small including the restaurants logo.

It also has a detachable speaker and a volume control to adjust according to your privacy. The device can also be paired with the Telecoil based hearing aids.

The menu displays the items categorically viz. seafood, appetizers, steaks, sandwiches and lavish beers etc. The menu is interpreted in both, a male voice and a female voice. Presently the taking menu at Loin and Rose uses a British female voice. It can be changed according to the customer needs.

Since its introduction the talking menu has been amusing every guest at the restaurant. Kids enjoy listening to the menu; adults prefer to listen to the menu rather that reading it. Aged people loved it as they didn’t have to use their spectacles. Management report, this was a great business idea and was worth the spend.

Have you ever noticed the subtle tricks used in your local electrical store who scream day and night in the media they are the cheapest or have a once only red hot price.

Well perhaps you should look a little harder and take more notice of the tricks used to seduce you to buy that “Cheaper Priced” large flat screen TV you dream of having?

Notice how it’s dark where the TVs are – They look better.

See how they all run on a DVD – that’s the best picture you can get. The picture that comes from you aerial is much poorer quality.

Many TVs generally display the picture from the aerial very poorly compared to a DVD

.

Notice the cheapies are placed in the middle of the big brand name units.

Its called Brand Association – A little bit of glow rubs off!

First and foremost, a brand is a promise. It says ‘you know the name, you can trust the promise’. Trust is a first critical step and brands aim to accelerate that step by leveraging the implied promise of the brand

The brand image works as a psychological trigger or stimulus that can causes an association.

That cheapie association seduces you through things which are similar or related in someway.

By putting the Cheapie in the middle of the brand names the sales person by offering a few well chosen lines intimates the Cheapie is as good as the more expensive models.

You will find on the Cheap no name models have the contrast ratio is turned right up to 95%. - Makes them look close enough to the picture quality of the better brands.

Good brands need only 75% contrast ratios.

Cheapies use far inferior unrepairable components and generally a nightmare when you need it fixed. Stores sell these units to get higher margins or make them a loss leader to get you in the store.

Up selling by the sales team on these models consists of an “extended warranty” which sounds reasonable until you trot your TV into the local repair guy who has not seen that brand or model before and has no references to trace back faults let alone get parts.

A well known cheapie recently put their warranty repair out to tender to drive down the price of repairs – guess what no takers, we wonder why.

Stick with manufacturer’s warranty.

No doubt you will be offered a surge protection device to go along with the sale.

The idea is ok but the price for the device is generally horrendous - however it looks OK when compared to the price of the TV. Check other devices in other stores first.

There are so many tricks – we’ll bring you more to help you with your awareness.

The Kenson Team