How and why did you decide to employ the services of Hospitality Assured?
Our decision to employ the services of Hospitality Assured coincided with a major investment and re-branding programme across the group, which involved re-positioning Thistle as a quality, full service brand with consistently high levels of service.
We were looking for a way of supporting the excellent work Thistle was doing with continuous improvement and a quality-led approach to measure processes right across the brand. Crucially, we wanted to drive consistency in our customer service delivery and refine and develop our operating processes at the same time.
Hospitality Assured quickly emerged as the most relevant quality standard across the industry which covered multi-faceted parts of the business, from customer service through to business planning and operational resourcing. Perhaps most critically, Hospitality Assured seeks to ensure that businesses with the standard are continually improving and looking for ways to enhance the customer experience. Our aim is “putting customers at the core of what we do”, so this fitted the Thistle brand perfectly.
What were the challenges of going through the programme?
One of the biggest challenges for us was that we were the first major UK hotel group to aim for full accreditation, so we were in essence leading the way. This is a great achievement, but it did mean that we didn’t have anything to benchmark ourselves against.
We are focused on driving continuous improvement across the Thistle business, which in turn meant the standards of the Hospitality Assured programme needed to be flexible and adaptable. While this is something that initially proved a challenge, we were able to overcome this during the course of the programme by working closely with Hospitality Assured.
How did you prepare for the necessary work?
We took a three-step approach to achieving the Hospitality Assured standard. Firstly, we focused on gaining accreditation for our central support teams, as we wanted to demonstrate to our hotels that we had the knowledge and experience to support them as they work towards their own accreditation.
Secondly, we started a national roll-out programme that involved a poster campaign, regional workshops and a dedicated session at our National Conference.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we developed a “Business Improvement Process” tool that allowed all hotels and support centres to analyse, review, implement and measure their standards against those outlined by Hospitality Assured. We also carried out further regional workshops and one-to-one coaching in the months leading up to assessment, which were facilitated by members of the Hospitality Assured team and our own in-house project team.
Ultimately, it was the bespoke development implementation and support for the “Business Improvement Process” tool that helped make this project a success nationally. We see this tool as a means by which to help develop and continuously improve across the group.
How did your employees react to the programme?
Initially, I think they were extremely daunted by the prospect of being assessed for a minimum of two days on every part of the business. The teams were clearly concerned about the size and scale of the task. However, with the combination of one-to-one support, regional sessions, the “Business Improvement Process” and access to the support team, the task soon became more of a positive challenge and one that nobody wanted to fail.
What have been the outcomes so far for Thistle UK since completing the HA programme?
We have now completed the Hospitality Assured assessment successfully at 31 Thistle Hotels across the UK, becoming the first major group in the country to achieve this. Once Thistle Marble Arch has completed its extensive refurbishment programme, it too will go through assessment, hopefully becoming the 32nd hotel to receive the accreditation.
We have achieved a 10 point rise in customer loyalty across the group and continued out-performance in the service and hospitality category of our customer survey.
In terms of the primary outcome we set out to achieve, we are certain that the adoption of Hospitality Assured has led to significant improvements in the consistency of service delivery and our core operating processes.
We’re already preparing for re-assessment, which will commence in our Aberdeen hotels, but with work already underway across the brand, the future looks brighter by the day.
