Capitalizing on Technology to the advantage of providing service to hotel guests AT REVIVAL

We are a brand known in the Tourism Industry as the Revival Hotel group. We have Revival Hotel, in Baroda, which started on 14th May '98, as a "Three Star," classified by the Government of India, Department of Tourism. The other property is a three storied "Approved Restaurant" by the Government of India, Department of Tourism, in Bombay, since 1991.

The hotel in Baroda has 54 rooms including an Executive Floor, Suite and standard "Deluxe" rooms, most of which command a breath-taking view of the neighbouring, 113-acre garden. We have a well-appointed lobby, as shown on the brochure, two conference rooms - "The Chambers" and "The Council," each accommodating 35-80 persons for business meetings. Our hotel has two open-air garden facing terraces, sufficient for get-togethers of 600 people. The multi-cuisine restaurant "Banyan Tree," serves North Indian, South Indian, Italian & Continental food and is open from Breakfast through Dinner, not to mention the 24-hours Room Service. The "Executive Center" offers a state-of-the-art business service for today's discerning business traveller.

Our restaurant and banqueting areas in Bombay, Chowpatty are known as Revival Restaurant. The first floor houses about 100 seats and the second and third floor have a banquet get-together area for 25 to 80 persons, both air-conditioned as well as non-air-conditioned. Here we serve the finest cuisine in Italian and Indian Vegetarian food, with full silver service and a well stocked bar.

At both these properties, we have used Information Technology to bring out the best service to the guest and to the staff members of the properties. We enumerate hereunder the way in which information technology has been used effectively:

Our Hotels e-mail address is Revivalhotel@pobox.com. This is more out of convenience than a compulsion. Baroda did not have an Internet Service Provider when the hotel was commissioned in 1998. Since our aim of providing the latest in information technology was on priority, we found this pobox forwarding service on the web, which gives a choice of three forwarding addresses that can be changed at will with a initial registration fee only. The convenience available was in all our communication we could mention our pobox address as the front end and behind we could keep changing ISPs as and when they keep coming in Baroda. Thus when we changed from the first ISP to the other and then to another, we only had to change our forwarding address on the pobox website, while the stationery and media carried the same e-mail address. It would have been a daunting task otherwise to keep changing all our stationery as and when the ISPs changed.

We thus offer a complimentary E-mail service to all our guests on request and forward these mails promptly to their addresses after their stay, as well. With the ISPs the arrangement has been to give us multiple email Ids of temporary nature, so that when a guest requests for his temporary email address, we give him a temporary address, from the ISP and have the same removed when the guest checks-out of the hotel. This is now though become very easy, with the free email portals like Yahoo and Hotmail. Now we create a temporary e-mail ID for a guest on Yahoo and dump it when the guest leaves our hotel. If there is any mail lying in the inbox, we forward it to the guests' permanent address, if he would have left one back with us. Free Temporary E-Mail ID for guests, before checking-in, after checking-out forwarding facility to parent E-Mail address is a part of this feature.

We have our web-site http://www. Revivalhotel.com which provides information about our hotel, its location, its food, its eco-awareness banquet areas, and on-line reservations.

We have an exclusive Executive floor, with superior rooms and an attached Business Center, on that very floor. We provide services like DTP, Power-point presentations, Internet surfing, Word processing, Colour printing from this Executive Center to the rooms guests, so that they do not get stranded with office matters in Baroda, and with the Internet surfing they are in contact with their home office at all times. We use this center even for our in-house tent card, media artwork, brochure printing and DTP work for the guest and staff announcements effectively.

We use the internet to exchange a lot of MIS reports, instant reservations on the web, by attaching them to emails everyday and are linked up with a lot of search engines to give marketing exposure for our hotel. The latest to happen is of our tie-up with the American giant, Worldres, to take care of our reservations worldwide. We use the web yahoo messenger and Netmeeting for video conferencing and discussions, which saves a lot on our geographic distance between Bombay and Baroda. This helps us in reducing commuting costs and helps in timely decision making. We also download a lot of industry information from the web.

A state of the art telephone system makes guest communication a pleasure and provides a host of modern features aimed at the guest's convenience. The latest in terms of technology from Siemens the Hicom 353, is installed at Revival Hotel. It has a software link which allows mind boggling features, like picking up the guests details from the Hotel Software program and allowing the room to dial out only after a guest has checked into the hotel. It is the Automatic activation of room phones with all facilities (i.e.- Local, STD & ISD.) It stops all the telephone features to the room the moment the guest pays his bill at the counter. The name of the guest is reflected in every phone screen and the Hotel Software flashes the guest name at every computer terminal so that a very important feature of the hospitality industry in terms of personalizing the guest with calling him by his name, is exploited to the maximum. No guest is referred to as room no. 202 or only Sir.

Another important feature mentioned in our Directory of Service under the "Guide To Use Your Telephone" section shows how a guest can set his own alarm on the telephone, without the assistance of the Reception or the Telephone operator as the Programmed wake up call.

A call can also be routed from the reception to the housekeeping to the restaurant a feature know as Call routing, which needs the operator to combine a few switches and the call shall get automatically transferred from one department to the other the moment that call is over.

A guest proceeding from the room to the restaurant or a banquet area, can forward his call to that area from his room, just by following the Call forwarding part of the Directory of Services book, in his room. There is a feature about the Security phone lock which allows the guest to lock his phone when he wants to helps him to avoid unwanted calls made from his room by his visitors.

A feature of making outside calls from other Hotel extensions, allows the guest to avail of the entire facilities of his room from any part of the hotel by using his specially assigned Key number. He could also activate the Do not disturb facility, for his telephone if he does not want to get disturbed in his room, and also the Automatic call back, which allows him to talk to a busy extension, once it gets free.

The normal Room to Room Dialing facility is always available. All these features are available with office epbax, but with all these facilities used effectively with the hotel software programme, it takes care of its billing getting linked to the guest's room bill at the end of his stay, without any human intervention and error.

Another important feature of the telephone system is the Direct Data/Fax/Laptop / PC / Internet connectivity in all rooms. Today a lot of our guests carry their own laptops and like to work in the confines of their own room, for which the telephone exchange allows us to give the facility of data connectivity in the room. A separate telephone port in the room gives the required billing link to the Hotel Software program. We have designed special laptop safe deposit lockers, for this purpose and have kept a PC and Fax machine available for hire, from the business center. Fax is therefore available on hire for personal and confidential documents, receivable by the guest in his room and for that our Direct Inward Dialing facilities is a big success. Here without the intervention of the hotel operators or receptionists, the guest can send and receive faxes in his room privately, and the telephone system charges our marked up rates for this.

All these facilities are available with many good telephone switches, but we are proud to say that we have used each and every facility provided by the telephone technology, with our limitations of a non-metro city, Baroda.

When the hotel was commissioned in 1998 we had only 3 lines at our disposal but by using the hunting facility with the Telephone Exchange of Baroda Telephones, we could manage to publish only the Pilot number on all our stationery and communication. Today we enjoy the luxury of 15 lines, with two pilot hunting numbers, one for out-going one for in-coming.

We use Microsoft Windows 95 operating system with Office 97 and Novell Netware for our networking. This gives us support for software related issues too.

We have installed a dedicated network Fax server instead of a thermal or inkjet fax machine for our in-house systems. The reason is to have a storage of the received faxes, which might be important business calls, on our hard disk for any retrieval purposes. We would have no backup for faxes on paper without electronic storage, save the fax server. It also helps us to use the bundled software on fax-on-demand feature for our brochures and tariff cards.

The hardware has been devised to use one server with a mirror hard-disk that avoids the use of a stand-by server. The data is zipped on a Zip cartridge and purged at the end of the year, giving dependability a major aspect in data storage. The above systems have been installed and implemented under the expert guidance of M/s Nandanetcom and M/s Wysetek Systems.

The hardware besides being linked up with the telephone system, is also linked with the staff attendance system, which grabs the attendance of staff and transports it into the Hotel Application software, that further processes and compiles all reports on personnel. We are in the process of devising an interactive Induction and Training CD for the personnel department, which usually requires a lot of human intervention. But with the use of technology this routine task can be undertaken very effectively.

We use pager system between Bombay and Baroda for small messages, avoiding a costly long distance call. Also instant reservations through e-mail reduce our faxing charges between Bombay and Baroda.

The hotel application software helps in effective use of Property Management system technology. The above mentioned telephone features, food cost control systems, attendance system, guest history data maintenance, communication facility, guests' business services, internet and intranet service, in-house CC mail, sharing of common data between the various guest departments, pre-registration of incoming guests, maintenance of variety of rack rates, automatic night audit procedure are just to name a few of the features we effectively use to run our hotel.

Revival Bombay, was the first to use computers for printing orders in the kitchen, known as Kitchen Order Tickets or KOT. Usually when a customer places an order with the waiter, he writes the order in triplicate, sends one copy to kitchen and other to the cashier, third later to accounts. On the next day, a KOT allocation sheet is made which tallies all the three KOTs from each department. Next day they submit the difference between the kitchen production, and the guest charges to the accounts. In this system, it is only possible to do a post-mortem after the guest has left. He would have either paid less or more, giving a lot of bad reputation, if the guest had paid more and realized it only on the next day. If he would have paid less the owners, suffer. This is a labourious exercise.

We made the waiters write the KOT and give only one copy to the cashier, who would enter it in the computer and fire a print out of the same to the Kitchen on a remote printer. In this way, the kitchen would only produce what was charged by the cashier and the guest never pays more or less. We earn more goodwill and the staff also gets more trust on the systems.

Another system started by us for the first time was to maintain a record of our customers. With the bill, we gave our guests a suggestion card that they had to fill with their name, address, and own birthday, their spouse's date of birth, if married, along with their marriage anniversary date. This we would enter in our computer database and we then issue a special Privilege Card to the guests who had ten visits to the restaurant, giving them special announcements, preferences and discounts. This got us lot of repeat guests and increased our turnover.

With the same database, we printed special birthday cards for each zodiac sign and wrote a small program which would print the names of guests whose birthdays and anniversaries were falling seven days hence. These names and addresses were printed and special Star Signs related to Food, (from Linda Goodman's book), birthday cards were sent to the guest. From our computerized recipes we were able to find which star sign liked which ingredient from the menu, and we printed those items on the cards. Invariably, the guests come with that card to our restaurant on their birthday and order the food items mentioned there. The same was done for anniversaries. It gave us a very good bonding between the restaurant and the guest.

On the Valentine Day the guest who visit our restaurant are surprised, when we take their photograph and mail it to them from our guest history database, with a special frame, to memorize the occasion of dining on the Valentine's Day at Revival, with the help of our Information Technology.

Our entire recipes are on the computer, with the effort of our database maintenance system, which help us in quite a many ways. They are available to the kitchen in the form of a print out so that with the changing of any cooks, the quality of the food is maintained consistently, so also we have photographed each dish and pasted it on these books to show the visual of the dish too.

The other advantage of this information is on control of our cost of production. Our entire inventory is on the computer with the weighted average cost updated with every data entry. In this way the cost of every ingredient is up-to-date. We have our recipes on the computer and when we apply the current rates we get the production cost of every menu item as on that date. This helps us in keeping the production cost under control with the Cost of Food produced percentage under constant vigil with the Kitchen.

Another report works on the basis of quantities. Here the computer gives the sale of each menu item, and it computes the ingredients indented from the stores by the kitchen. From each recipe it gives it's item-wise quantity required for that menu item. Thus the quantity of ingredient actually picked up from the stores versus the quantity required to be picked up from the recipes, is reported to the accounts and they keep the production in check if there is more than 5 percent variance between the two. This gives us an accurate figure of wastage in the kitchen, which would never have been possible without information technology.

These recipes also helped us in preparing a small rejoinder to the actual menu. Many a times the complex names of our restaurant menu items makes the guest worry whether the dish he is ordering would be worth the price or not. We loose a lot of sale in the bargain. We used our recipes and stuck a photo of every dish and took the ingredients from the computerized recipes to show the guest an actual presentation of the dish he has ordered before it comes to his table. This made us sell a lot of new dishes to un-adventuring guests, and the book was known as the Gastronomique Guide.

The computer gives us a report of every menu item sold in on a monthly basis, which allows us to decide items that are the least moving and least paying, (known as Dodos- in catering jargon), to the items that are very popular and highest margined, (known as horses), and items that are ordered out of the menu, which need to be incorporated into our next menu change. This is possible to a great extent due to help of computers, the technique known as Menu Engineering. A copy of this KOT Allocation report is enclosed for your reference.

With the updated cost of each menu item, we also create a report which shows, what the menu item should be priced today, e.g. the onion crisis last year, due to any unforeseen circumstances, with the required mark up of the industry standard. Hence we exactly know the price each dish should be sold at and which items are the Dodos and which are horses.

All these systems are used in both our properties of Baroda and Bombay, giving us a lot of control, vigilance and marketing advantage, possible only due to the effective utilization of Information Technology.

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