Guest Facilities

US trends show the way

When the New York Hilton Midtown said it was dispensing with room service starting in August it caught both travellers and competitors a bit by surprise.

Room service has always been an expected feature – more of another eating/drinking facility rather than an extra.

Room service revenue has declined markedly in the past five years, according to PKF Hospitality Research in the US. Among 700 reporting hotels, the average occupied hotel room produced $4.33 of room service revenue in 2007. In 2012 that figure was down 25%, to $3.25. Much of the drop in room service sales can be tied to the recession that began in late 2007.

But even as hotel occupancy has picked up, calls for room service have not, said Robert Mandelbaum, PKF research director.

“Guests are spending fewer dollars,” Mr Mandelbaum said. “There’s been a total change in guest perception about food and beverage.”

Steven Carvell, associate dean for academic affairs at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, said there’s a reason for that: Neither hotels nor their guests much care for room service.

For hotels, he said, supplying room service is expensive (mostly because of labour costs) and it presents challenges with getting food to a room at a reasonable temperature and cleaning up quickly enough to avoid a hallway littered with trays.
Customers aren’t much more enthusiastic, especially on a price-value relationship, Mr Carvell said.

But plenty of hotels are trying to turn room service into a bigger feature. The number of hotels offering room service actually increased by 8% between 2011 and 2012, says Ned Barker, president of Grill Ventures Consulting Inc.
People are eating differently. Simply offering a salad and a club sandwich isn’t going to do it any longer.

As travellers eating and drinking desires change, so must the offerings by accommodation providers. Varied menus and up-market wines are replacing hamburgers and coke.

F&B managers are taking the view that room service can be a lucrative additional outlet for normal menu items rather than creating a special quick feed list. Despite the additional labour costs, for many this new approach is working.

Other accommodation providers have gone the other way by outsourcing their room service using nearby suppliers to bring ready-to-eat or ready-to-make-meals for guests to prepare in their rooms. They can be ordered any time: when booking the room, leaving a business meeting or taking a taxi on the way back from seeing the sights.

In fact, a grab ‘n’ go has replaced room service at the Hilton Midtown; the hotel says its new Herb N’ Kitchen “features seasonal salads, artisanal sandwiches and brick-oven pizzas” as well as “a barista zone (that) prepares specialty coffees”.

But some accommodation providers, such as the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, have gone a step further: The 684-room Grand Plaza created an in-house pizzeria. Andrew Bowen, associate director of food and beverage at the hotel, said the hotel saw a decrease in room service orders along with a rise in pizza delivery to the hotel lobby. In a bid to capture that business, the Grand Plaza invented Piezelli’s that it advertises in its rooms but avoids branding it as a hotel product, precisely to avoid the cost-value association with traditional room service.

Yet, Piezelli’s offers room service convenience that customers still seem to want, such as delivery to the rooms and the ability to charge cost to the final bill.

Industry observers say room service still has its niche: breakfast for business travellers and, say, late in-room dining after the clubs have closed. But short of that, the culture seems to be drifting away from the idea of eating alone in a hotel room.

Able to work wirelessly, business travellers are more interested in life outside their hotel rooms. Local-food movements have bred a new generation of food tourism that runs counter to eating a hotel hamburger in Sydney that tastes like a hotel hamburger in Perth.

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