Enjoying Your Dinner Sir?
Jon Hartley is worried that coach customers can be getting a raw deal when it comes to hotel food.
Am I alone in hearing strange goings on when it comes to the food served over the past few months in hotels?
Have you received any complaints about it?
When it comes to ‘trimming costs’, the chef is the easy target as most other hotel costs are fixed. Remembering that chefs have some very sharp knives I will be careful with my next comment, and that is that the standard of hotel chefs can vary enormously – from the excellent to crap.
Starting with Breakfast, I was fed up years ago with some hotels offering plated meals which did not offer the same choice as others were receiving, so I simply changed our Terms and Conditions to read “ A full cooked British or Irish Breakfast is included in the agreed rate, as served to a private guest”
That sorted out one problem.
Then there was Dinner. This opened a whole new can of worms (!) as standards varied so much. The better hotels offered the full tdh menu, which could include as many as six choices per course, because they saw the group as valuable business and liked to look after them as guests, and not ‘the bus party’, whilst others – the majority, offered the minimum ‘three from three’ menu, and sometimes charged for tea and coffee as an extra.
This clearly had to change, so I was on one of my missions!
Firstly I insisted tea and coffee was part of the meal and should be included, and then I requested sample menus from every hotel I used. With contracting about a million bednights every year this was no mean task, but with the very able help and assistance of my colleague, Matt Barron, we succeeded. Matt has since gone on to success at Wilfreda Beehive. Well deserved too.
This was, as it turned out, requesting menus was quite a good action to take, as it made the hotel think for the first time about just what they were providing, and during my contracting I used to mention to the GM or SM that it should be as good as their own parents or grandparents would find acceptable.
I also mentioned that whilst the Three from Three was OK, I had no objection to them adding other additional choices at a small supplement, payable by the guest. This would enhance the menu, and give the client greater choice. This was already being done by a couple of hotel chains with no adverse comments.
It worked! There were some delicate negotiations when a poor menu was submitted, as it is not my place to tell someone how to do their job, but it was my place to advise them others seemed to grasp the idea better, and to show them samples of better produce. Tact may not be my middle name, but it can come in useful!
We also covered the touchy subject of al dente vegetables, as we know that most clients see them as ‘raw’, but there is a world of difference between al dente and mush. Middle ground had to be found!
So back to the theme, have you received any rumblings about food recently? I know some operators have, and it from some of the chain hotels too – the ones who should know better.
There is no excuse under the sun for treating a group guest as different to a private guest. The hotel agreed the rate, and if he has to cut corners to achieve this he shouldn’t have done the deal. Coach guests are quite often better off than hotels seem to think, and could quite well return as a private guest. However on this occasion they chose (quite rightly) to take the stress out of travelling, enjoy the journey and the views from being sat above the hedge rows, and to travel with other like minded folk on a coach. To treat them in any lesser way than a ‘normal’ guest is short sighted at least.
Hotels (some of them) appear to forget just how many new buildings now welcome both private guests and groups. Premier Inn and Travelodge alone have over 880 hotels in the UK, with many more in the pipeline. University accommodation has changed beyond recognition, and there seems to be a plethora of chic or boutique hotels opening every year.
The traditional hotel needs to be aware things are changing, and they risk our loyalty and business by not treating our guests correctly.
Why not let us know of your best hotels – if you are willing to share the information – and help them benefit from future bookings.
In closing, a short tail of what not to serve our guests. Some years ago I had to escort five coaches of Womans Realm readers ( I get all the best jobs) on a weekend that included Granada Studio Tour, a fish and chip tea at the very excellent Mermaid in Morley near Leeds, and then a visit to the City Varieties in Leeds. I was once asked why they didn’t get mushy peas with their meal, and I had to point out that 250 people with fresh mushy peas in an enclosed theatre was not a good idea.
Although on second thoughts.........
