Hospitality Assured Business Excellence Awards ‘09

Achieving excellence in the service environment means striving to consistently meet the expectations of a broad range of customers. To identify and reward those businesses who have worked hard to create a winning service culture that meets and exceeds expectations, new for 2009 comes the Hospitality Assured Business Excellence Awards.

Hospitality Assured is the customer service and business excellence standard that comprehensively maps a process which encourages a business to look at its operation from the customer’s perspective. By improving operational efficiencies, enhanced profitability can be stimulated, reputation improved and the likelihood of capturing repeat business increased.

The Hospitality Assured Business Excellence Awards have been launched to celebrate healthy competition in the hospitality, leisure and tourism trade and to stimulate the proactive benchmarking, that makes service delivery and business performance first-rate.

A company is only as good as its customers say it is, so measuring customer feedback and understanding the way it is reflective of internal management processes is critical to harnessing a business’s full potential. Through considered implementation of an effective performance framework, the winners of the 2009 Hospitality Assured Business Excellence Awards are three companies that worked exceptionally hard to transform the way they thought about their operations.

This year's well-deserving winners are The Møller Centre, for being the Highest Scorer in 2008, Evergreen Bed & Breakfast for being the Highest Scoring Newcomer in 2008 and VisitScotland, for its Most Innovative Use of the Hospitality Assured Standard in 2008. Read more on the winners' journeys below...

*Highest Scorer in 2008*

Winner: The Møller Centre, Management Training & Conference Centre, Churchill College, University of Cambridge

Pictured: (from left) Ann Corrigan FIH, Managing Director, Hospitality Assured, with The Moller Centre's Director Gillian Holdom and her team, and Chairman of the Institute of Hospitality, Professor Andrew Lockwood.

The Møller Centre cuts a stylish dash in Cambridge, recently scooping a regional 2009 RIBA Award for its contemporary architecture. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, which affords the centre a reputation as the only dedicated, residential executive training and conference centre in the city. Its facilities include 23 meeting rooms, 71 bedrooms, alongside restaurant, bar and leisure facilities and the centre has consistently achieved Hospitality Assured accreditation each year since it first embarked on the journey for business excellence in 1999.

In 2007, a new Study Centre development was completed, offering delegates a flexible, collaborative learning environment with state-of-the-art technology to enhance the learning process. With a Customer Service Promise firmly planted at the centre of all Director, Gillian Holdom and her team do, the sights are set admirably high as they work hard to display their genuine passion for excellence ‘to create a ‘wow’ factor’ that competes on a ‘world-class’ scale.

The Møller Centre attracted 10% of its 2007-8 business from China and with demand forecast to increase through 2009, measures have been taken to provide dedicated multi-lingual signage, materials and staff for these international guests, in addition to commendable cultural awareness training in preparation for visitors from other countries around the world.

Market price comparisons and visits to local and national venues are routinely conducted to monitor the competition and at the time of assessment, measures were underway to engage an external market research company in measuring and benchmarking The Møller Centre against other conferencing facilities. Feedback from customers continues to be reflective of the emphasis that is placed on knowledgeable and warm service and this customer-focused culture is aided in part by strategic twice-daily meetings between operational staff, where plans for the day/evening’s events are formulated and discussed.

“We started our journey in 1999 and we wanted to do something that didn’t have too much paperwork – something that could involve the whole team.  It needed to be based on what we already do, but signposting key areas for improvement for the business.  HA fit the bill,” said Gillian.

“As it is based on the European Foundation Quality Model, the three key aspects for us were, firstly, people. We wanted to focus on training and development, ensuring that our employees’ personal goals are aligned with the goals of the business. Secondly, we were keen to maximise our operational efficiency and thirdly, we wanted to better understand and make use of our customers’ feedback. Looking at customer feedback is so important for us. It is no good us looking from the inside out and simply assuming we are doing what we need to. We now have verification that we are improving.

“We needed advice on internal and external benchmarking, which is a valuable element of the HA assessment process. Our mission statement is to ‘support our clients to acquire knowledge for professional development and personal and business success’, so it’s essential that we are demonstrating best practice too. HA forced our organisation to ensure that the infrastructure was in place to deliver the customer service.”

With an improved score of 81%, the HA assessor was pleased to recommend continuing accreditation to The Møller Centre, to the Hospitality Assured Standard for Service and Business Excellence.

*Highest Scoring Newcomer for 2008*

Winner: Evergreen Bed and Breakfast, Inverfarigaig, Scotland

Graeme and Fiona Ambrose own the multiple award-winning Evergreen Bed and Breakfast, Inverfarigaig, which overlooks Loch Ness in the Highlands of Scotland. A petite property offering two large bedrooms, Evergreen is a popular retreat for both outdoorsy types and those looking to “listen to the silence” – Evergreen’s enchanting strapline – and relax away from it all.

The award of ‘Highest Scoring Newcomer for 2008’ coincides with the seven year anniversary of the Ambroses’ venture into the hospitality industry, when they left behind careers in retail and local government to embark on a “better quality of life”, combining their enthusiasm for nature and adventure with their desire to develop a place where guests could retreat and enjoy a personalised service that suited their holiday needs.

Evergreen boasts a 4 Star Visit Scotland rating and VisitScotland’s Green Tourism Gold standard for its energy-efficient bed and breakfast facilities and the Hospitality Assured Standard brought a different perspective to Graeme and Fiona’s desire for all-round accreditation in every aspect of their business. The HA assessors commended the Ambroses for the majority of processes, procedures and associated documentation that were ‘of a level and standard not seen in many a larger organisation, demonstrating the owners’ commitment to business development and management’.

“Inverness is growing rapidly and with this comes a huge explosion in the hotel market, which has created a number of local competitors. Our market tends to be fairly consistent and we largely attract guests in the 25-45 age range, many of them travelling up from the south. There’s a direct flight now from Bristol to Inverness and I believe it’s one of the busiest routes in the UK,” said Graeme.

“Right from the word go we’ve been providing a number of added value services but we still wanted to excel. We asked ourselves what we could do to make the visitor experience top notch. At the time we felt we were dragging our feet a bit, but Hospitality Assured put the urgency back into our day to day strategy and pushed us hard to address areas for improvement.

“Tourism is changing so rapidly that you can’t stand still. The level of analysis that comes with assessment for Hospitality Assured accreditation helped us look at how, within the limitations of finance and our size, we could keep things fresh and maintain that competitive edge. We’d always welcomed customer feedback by leaving comment cards in the guests’ rooms and yes, it is always hard at a place like ours, because the guests are in your home. It would be very difficult not to take negative feedback to heart, as the nature of the personal service you get at a B&B is unlike what you get when staying in a chain hotel, where your feedback is absorbed by layers of management.

"We’ve found that a guest would either leave remarks that they’d enjoyed themselves, or they would say nothing at all. The HA process got us to look harder at what exactly we were asking for feedback on and we learnt that it would be more effective to specify areas of service for comment, like bedroom facilities or breakfast, rather than rely on our guests identifying these themselves.”

The Ambroses generate the majority of their business through the internet, maintaining an up-to-date website with integrated online booking facility, showing real-time room availability. Traffic to the website was actively tracked using Google Analytics and following consultation with HA assessors, consideration of new measures was encouraged that could better monitor how regular electronic newsletters were converting web visitors into sales, as a means to better understand customer marketing preferences. At a national level, Evergreen continued to be above the Scottish national average in terms of its occupancy rates between 2002 and 2008.

Proactive networkers within the local tourism circuit, in addition to the B&B operation, Graeme also chairs the South Loch Tourist Group and is Chief Executive of Destination Loch Ness; both organisations of which are dedicated to improving local tourist facilities and increasing awareness of the area.

An overall assessment score of 71.4% was deservedly awarded to Graeme and Fiona Ambrose for the ‘many mature processes’, including an Environmental Policy and use of local suppliers, and the ongoing innovation effective at Evergreen.

*Most Innovative Use of the Hospitality Assured Standard in 2008*

Winner: VisitScotland

Demonstrating that customer-focused business operation is critical to any successful organisation, be it public or private sector, comes the encouraging application of Hospitality Assured’s service and business excellence framework to the various teams operating within Scotland’s National Tourism Organisation, VisitScotland (formerly known as the The Scottish Tourist Board).

As a result of significant collaboration with the private sector and input from public sector agencies throughout 2005, the Scottish Government published a Tourism Framework for Change in March 2006, in which a key aim was to increase tourism revenues to Scotland by 50%, by the year 2015. From this came the major 2008 restructure of non-departmental government body, VisitScotland, that would transform the way it approached its ambition to build a tourism industry worth £6 billion by 2015 and, in that time, to make Scotland one of the world’s foremost tourist destinations.

With the correct mechanisms in place, strong private sector involvement and a focus on effective working across local authority boundaries, the Strategic Development and Planning Authorities (SDPAs) could contribute strongly to the economic development of the four new customer-focused directorates – Visitor Engagement, Business Engagement, Strategic Partnerships and Corporate Services – on which all VisitScotland’s activities became focused, and to the local authorities which it serves.

As a major employer, tourism touches every part of Scotland and earns £4.1 billion for the Scottish economy every year, continuing to provide jobs and investment opportunities in both urban and rural areas. VisitScotland’s Director of Strategic Partnerships, Riddell Graham, saw an opportunity to maximise the impact the 2008 restructure had on internal and external relationships and on corporate reputation.

“Hospitality Assured helped to dramatically increase the emphasis on our core customers – indeed HA was instrumental in defining our core customers, right at a time when we were reorganising the structure of our business. The key with HA was the fact that it was easy to understand; more so than many other accreditations that we looked at.”

Assessing business conduct within the four new services established highlighted numerous examples of good practice, where market research, trends analysis and quality assurance measurement were central activities. Amongst those, a panel of 400 companies in Scotland is surveyed four times a year to determine the state of the market and to ascertain their needs and at the time of assessment.

New Customer Service Standards had just been introduced into the Tourist Information Centres under the banner of “Live It – Learn It”, with the new Customer First Strategy and organisational structure developed to encourage high standards of service performance, where the customer is always the key consideration.

VisitScotland operates a five-level star grading system in its assessment of the standards of customer care and range of facilities on offer at accommodation providers, restaurants, leisure attractions and on tours. The Quality and Standards Team carry out regular reviews of the activities of their competitors, such as the AA, and the findings are used to determine what changes should be made to Quality Schemes.

A six-monthly telephone survey of a cross section of customers is undertaken by the Quality and Standards Team and 5,000 visitors of varying nationalities are also surveyed each year as part of the Visitor Satisfaction Survey, the findings of which are then used as the basis for planning future marketing campaigns in key markets. The media expenditure of major competitors, like Enjoy England and Visit Wales is reviewed on a monthly basis.

“The HA scheme has dramatically improved cross working across the organisation. I deliberately brought people into the implementation team who may not have thought specifically about the customer and this has been very beneficial,” said Graham.

“To be honest, we really don’t talk about Hospitality Assured as a project now. The principles have been embedded and it has become the way we do things in the organisation. The plaque and the certificate are much less important than the fact that we are now an organisation that is focused on our customers and on continuous improvement.”

Given the current climate, VisitScotland’s immediate goal and priority is to ensure an effective response to the economic environment and together with Scottish Enterprise, Highlands & Islands Enterprise and the Scottish Government, it has established an action group to co-ordinate and deliver a response plan. The core marketing strategy remains the same but developments are being monitored closely and tactical adjustments are being made, shifting expenditure to capitalise on the positive opportunities that exist.

In practice, this means increasing marketing, using levers such as Homecoming Scotland 2009, in areas of opportunity including Canada, Europe, Northern England and Scotland, whilst still maintaining a presence in markets such as the USA, that are currently more challenging. Approximately £1.5 million of VisitScotland’s marketing budget has been allocated to these campaigns.

With an encouraging initial score, VisitScotland’s first ever service and business excellence assessment has demonstrated the team’s positive commitment to improving the perception of government-led tourism in Scotland.

Related Links

• Hospitality Assured is a service sector specification, owned by the Institute of Hospitality, which provides an effective framework that can be used by all sorts of customer-facing businesses to create a service culture that delights customers and supports business sustainability. Learn more >>