Developing Effective Hotel Plans With Hotel Strategy Map
When creating a hotel strategy map, it is important that you link the management processes to the main strategies of the business. However, the problem here is that it is difficult to describe a strategy. Aside from that, you have to think of a way on how you can connect long term objectives to the short term goals along with accountability and initiatives of the business. Contrary to what most people believe in, the hotel strategy map is not only a work for the executives and the managers. Everyone should be involved here so that the diagram will be focused on the whole organization and everybody has a clear understanding about the company strategies.
Before the hotel strategy implementation, you need to develop the hotel strategy map first. Best practices here include immediately defining the corporate role, aligning the corporate and the strategic business units, alignment of SBU and support units as well as the external business partners and board of directors. With all of these linked together, it will be easy for you to accomplish hotel strategy implementation.
Now, how do you create a hotel strategy map? There are a few things that you have to take a look into when you make one. The most important are the hotel objectives and goals. Typically, the strategy map for hotels focus on three economic value added aspects: growth or innovation, customer loyalty and operational excellence. When these three are effective, they will lead to achieving organizational superiority.
Using the hotel strategy map, you will have different sets of measures that are connected to the hotel objectives and goals. For instance, in financial perspective, your objective could be to increase the value of the shareholders. The measures here can include ratio between marketing and booking and return on capital used. Another frequent objective is to improve the cost structure of the business which can be measured employing indicators like the percentage of reduction in cost for every unit of output every years and the cost per unit.
Do not misinterpret though that the hotel strategy map is only about the financials. Since you are in the hospitality industry, your main goal is to provide satisfaction for your customers. Customer outcome targets include achieving customer loyalty and satisfaction, acquiring new customers, improving market share and enhancing customer profitability. In the latter, you can use KPIs like the percentage of unprofitable customers and the number of loss-making clients that has been transformed into the beneficial guests.
The hotel strategy map will display the correlation between the objectives and the strategies. Linking the strategies are the actions that will be performed to achieve the targets. Often financial and customer perspectives are adjoined to emphasize that the clients are the ones that provide good cash flow for the company. Your hotel strategy implementation will be ready once you have completed the strategy map for your business. Bear in mind that there are five things that affect the responses of the customers and these are price of services or products, their quality, the availability, the name or brand and the relationship of the hotel and the customers.