Your menu is probably the most important sales tool you have in your hospitality armoury. Guest’s can have seen it several times before they give their order to the front of house staff. You start to plan on where you want to go with your significant other for dinner.…
Category Archives: Hospitality
Customer Service – The 4A approach
I like to think of myself as easy going, sometimes even described as a nice person. There are few things that really bother me, apart from … dishonesty and laziness. I can forgive some degree of incompetence, a bad day, minor rudeness but never something that is done to brush away or trivialise a situation.…
Anatomy of the professional complainer
Customers complain for a number of reasons; you did something wrong, they had a bad day, they are critics or they are after a freebie. If you did something wrong, fix it. The middle two can benefit from a little tender care.…
The Shameful Sham of the Shill – How NOT to Market
Once upon a time, a shill was an employee of a venue who acted as a customer with the intent to enthuse the unwitting genuine customer into parting with their hard earned cash. What makes this different from public relations you may ask?…
New licensing rules – and the costs?
Who would have thought that Her Majesty’s Government could have put through a piece of legislation based on what looks like a cursory set of sums?
More on that later, let us look at what the provisions of The Licensing Act (Mandatory Licensing Conditions) Order 2010 has in store for us.…
5 Simple tips to making your hotel business travel friendly
Question: What is the difference between the business traveller and the leisure traveller? Answer: The business traveller would probably like to be at home rather than with you. Sounds harsh, but the person is there to do a job. They often don’t get a chance to play tourist and sometimes, maybe, would like to spend some time in their room.…
Menu Pricing 101
This is more of a craft than a science, so take from this article the basics and a few considerations you need to make to come up with your ideally priced menu. First please let’s clear up a misunderstanding before we commence.…
Restaurant critic or business critic?
Love him or loathe him, AA Gill, food critic for the Times, has been around a bit. This is the man who legend tells, was thrown out of a restaurant along with his dinner guest, Joan Collins, by Gordon Ramsay.
In an article in this weeks Sunday Times, he offers some sage advice for newbie restaurateurs.…
Frontseat hospitality
A couple of years ago I spent a week at a clients site in a town in the Midlands of the UK. Day one, I got off my train and jumped in a cab to get to the site. The driver was friendly, helped me with my luggage and gave me a few tips for my stay in town.…
Q. How long is a piece of dirty string?
A. Just long enough to hang you.
Attention to detail is the key to being a leader in hospitality. The devil is in the detail but you are in Hell if you fail to follow up. If you cannot see the most obvious of small things, you need to win with the big stuff, or you are doomed to critical feedback.…