The hospitality industry is huge and encompasses many sectors related to travel, tourism, and entertainment. Hotels, restaurants, bars, travel agencies, airlines, events... all of this is part of hospitality. So how do you create processes for such a comprehensive area?
The secret lies in knowing the industry well and delimiting the sector in which you operate, to create specific processes for your business. This is an industry that's set to rebound with the end of the pandemic - the World Tourism Organization predicts that the sector will return to what it was before 2020 this year.
To prepare for an error-free return, the entire hospitality industry needs to have its business processes in place. Let's learn, then, what the hospitality industry is and talk about processes for hotels, tourism, restaurants, and more.
What is the hospitality industry?
The hospitality industry is a huge area that encompasses diverse sectors. The term comes from Latin and refers to the relationship between guests and hosts; that is, everything that has to do with receiving guests and entertaining them ends up being part of this industry. You can understand how diverse that is, right?
The industry is divided into 3 major areas:
- Accommodations
- Food and drinks
- Tourism and travel
When we talk about accommodation, we think of everything pertaining to the lodging sector. Now, with food, we're dealing with restaurants, buffets, bars, cafes, and meals in general. Finally, tourism ends up being even more comprehensive, with entertainment, trips, concerts, fairs, exhibitions, and so on.
The hospitality industry is not only gigantic, but it's also one of the oldest, with its origins going back to antiquity, when people started traveling for business, religious, and political reasons. In ancient Greece, people were hosted in private homes when traveling. In ancient Rome, inns came along offering paid accommodation for travelers.
European pilgrimages to the Holy Land in the Middle Ages generated a new wave of growth, as the need arose to provide accommodation for these people. Especially for the richer ones.
In the 18th century, the first hotels emerged in Europe, evolving from these concepts and special needs. The difference is that they were dedicated to people on the go from the beginning. In the 19th century, the hospitality industry expanded further with the rise of tourism and leisure travel.
No wonder this is one of the biggest industries in the world, and it's clear that technology has also helped hospitality with new ways of planning trips, leisure, tourism, and ordering food, not to mention the apps and platforms dedicated to this type of service.
What are the main issues in the hospitality industry?
An industry this big, offering services, is obviously going to have problems. Some of the most common ones are:
Seasonality
Especially in tourism, interest depends on the season. In the gastronomic area, not so much - but even there, a rainy day can spoil profits. There is a great reliance on the day, the weather, or the time of year.
High staff turnover
Despite being a representative area of the economy in most places, this isn’t a business known for decent working hours or high wages - quite the contrary. This leads to high staff turnover, which undermines the learning curve and standardization of the service.
Interaction challenges
Services essentially depend on the interaction between who offers the service and who buys it. Then it goes to both people's day: the mood they're in, the weather, the circumstances. In addition, standardization is difficult, as it requires a lot of training.
How BPM and Process Management can support the Hospitality Industry
You can see above that there’s a staff problem: amidst the industry's high turnover, the problem of standardization common to services becomes even worse, since there are always new people joining the team.
Ongoing training to prepare staff and improve customer experience - in restaurants, in hotels, in exhibits - becomes essential. It's at this decisive point for the business that having good process management can help.
Like any service, the focus on quality goes through the need to standardize processes. That's because clear, standardized processes improve both efficiency and delivery. ABPM program is a platform that helps you manage your business processes.
Using platforms like Qntrl for BPM andprocess mapping helps you analyze data about your operation, identify bottlenecks, and improve based on data. With a technological resource like this, everything is registered for the whole team's benefit.
To build efficient workflows in the hospitality industry, it's important to map out the step-by-step and logical order of each repetitive task, in order to standardize. The main steps for this, regardless of the hospitality area in which you operate, are:
1. Identify the main processes
See what these processes are in the company. They’re usually processes such as check-in, check-out, order entry, stock checking, and ticket sales. These are essential for both the business and the customer experience. Prepare this list to get started.
2. Define goals and objectives
For each process listed, have clear goals and objectives. They guide the steps you will map for each one later. Examples of objectives to help you: decrease waiting time, reduce errors in orders, or improve quality of service.
3. Map out the step-by-step guide for carrying out this process
With clarity on where you want to go (goal), define the logical sequence of steps for the team to complete the process successfully - list everything that cannot be missing. This will be essential to standardize your service, improve quality, and increase efficiency.
4. Register the process and train the team
With the logical sequence of tasks in hand, record your steps on the BPM platform and train the team, both on the process itself and on its use in the tool.
5. Monitor to identify possible improvement opportunities
As your process is now digitized, it's possible to monitor times, delays, and usage on the platform, in real time. This monitoring helps identify points for improvement in the process, bottlenecks, and even the need for new training.
Why digitize hospitality processes
Customer experience should be at the center of every business and has always been at the heart of hospitality.Digitalization of processes brings numerous benefits that help solve common problems in the industry:
- It keeps the process visible to everyone and helps with ongoing training.
- It supports standardization efforts that boost quality and increase efficiency.
- It helps the company take another step towarddigital transformation.
- It improves customer service with faster responses and more accurate actions.
Digitizing your processes also enables you to change them whenever necessary. People continue to demand more and more from companies, and mapped processes help you keep up with changes and adapt to them more quickly.
Want to better understand how BPM and Qntrl can help you? Schedulea free, personalized demo of our platform.
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