Great Hotel Service outlines proven principles and processes for helping your hotel focus on satisfying your customers. Orkun Avkan's book provides tips and rules in a variety of service topics. One hundred one practical ways in the book will not only motivate you but create a culture to solve problems proactively and deliver exceptional customer service.

Success in today’s rapidly changing hospitality industry depends on understanding the desires of guests of all ages, from seniors and boomers to the newly dominant millennial generation of travelers. Help has arrived with a compulsively-readable new standard, The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets by Micah Solomon, with a foreword by The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company’s president and COO Herve Humler. This up-to-the-minute resource delivers the closely guarded customer experience secrets and on-trend customer service insights of today’s top hoteliers, restaurateurs, and masters of hospitality management including: Four Seasons Chairman Isadore Sharp: How to build an unsinkable company culture Union Square Hospitality Group CEO Danny Meyer: His secrets of hiring, onboarding, training, and more Tom Colicchio (Craft Restaurants, Top Chef): How to create a customer-centric customer experience in a chef-centric restaurant Virgin Hotels CEO Raul Leal: How Virgin Hotels created its innovative, future-friendly hospitality approach Ritz-Carlton President and COO Herve Humler: How to engage today’s new breed of luxury travelers Double-five-star chef and hotelier Patrick O’Connell (The Inn at Little Washington) shares the secrets of creating hospitality connections Designer David Rockwell on the secrets of building millennial-friendly restaurants and hotel spaces (W, Nobu, Andaz) that resonate with today’s travelers Restaurateur Traci Des Jardins on building a “narcissism-free” hospitality culture Legendary chef Eric Ripert’s principles of creating a great guest experiences, simultaneously within a single dining room. The Heart of Hospitality is a hospitality management resource like no other, put together by leading customer service expert Micah Solomon. Filled with exclusive, first-hand stories and wisdom from the top professionals in the industry, The Heart of Hospitality is an essential hospitality industry resource. As Ritz-Carlton President and COO Herve Humler says in his foreword to the book, “If you want to create and sustain a level of service so memorable that it becomes an unbeatable competitive advantage, you’ll find the secrets here.”

Indispensable information for away-from-home lodging, from the author of the New York Times bestseller The Travel Detective In Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective, America’s best-known and most trusted travel authority reveals the insider knowledge that can make every hotel stay as comfortable as (and sometimes even more cost-efficient than) home. With his incomparable access and nose for news, Peter Greenberg shares the secrets that people who know hotels—managers, maids, reservation clerks, bellhops, chefs, and maintenance guys—don’t want you to know about value, service, safety, security, and cleanliness. Tips include: • How to tell if your room is really clean • What never to order from room service • The real way to prevent hotel crime • How to beat excessive hotel phone charges • The exact rooms where headline-making events took place Drawn from the author’s experiences as both an investigative reporter and a constant traveler, Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective is an essential guide to everything from luxury resorts to motels, from airport hotels and bed-and-breakfasts to outrageous (and often secret) alternatives to hotels.

In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry. “Highly amusing."—New York Times Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge. Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.

Hotels.

ASK NOT WHAT THE BUTLER DID, BUT WHAT HE CAN DO FOR YOU We all know the clich from the movies and board games about the butler doing it, but what was it the butler did? In the hotel environment, the butler can be a failed experiment or a service facility that commands high-rack rates and keeps occupancy rates at 100%. Where the butler fails in hotels, it is because he is cast in (frankly) degrading-to-the-profession roles such as "bath butler," "fireplace butler, "technology butler," "baby butler" (who provides rocking chairs and watches children), "dog butler," "ski butler," and "beach butler." The idea being that anything offering superior service in some small area is called a "butler" in an effort to siphon some of the prestige of the profession. At least when the term valet was extended to "dumb valet," that furniture item upon which one lays out clothing for the following day, there was no pretense that this was the real item. Fortunately for the profession, the public were not fooled or taken in by these "dumb butlers" and the practice has faded relatively rapidly-before it could sour the public mind on the concept of butlers in hotels. Fortunately also for the butlers working in top hotels around the world, who do justice to the profession, and the hotel managements who have recognized the value butlers bring to the bottom line and the repute of their establishments. In an industry that is completely premised on the idea of service, and in which service is a key differentiator, it's a no-brainer to institute butler service. Butlers have always represented the pinnacle in service quality. This book will go a long way toward bringing about and keeping on track a butler program. When used in conjunction with standard on-site training, it will cement in place a very successful butler service that will - Allow rack rates to be raised - Create a loyal following of repeat visitors - Enhance word of mouth - Increase new business - Raise service standards throughout the facility. All of which make the investment very sound. If you would like to become a butler in a hospitality setting, or think your hotel, spa, resort or private villa could benefit from an honest-to-goodness butler program, read this book.

This proceedings volume presents the latest trends in innovative business development theory and practice from a global, interdisciplinary perspective. Featuring selected contributions from the 25th International Economic Conference Sibiu (IECS 2018) held in Sibiu, Romania, it explores various topics in the areas of economics, business, finance and accounting, including tourism, marketing and Islamic banking and finance. Written by researchers from different regions and sectors around the world, it offers significant insights into the emerging shifts that characterize the fields of innovative economics and global development, innovative business practices, as well as innovative finance and banking, and provides organizations, managers and policy makers with new reliable solutions and opportunities for innovative development and growth within and between organizations around the globe.

New York City's top concierge gives up a keyhole view into the luxe hotel rooms, private dining and dressing rooms of the ridiculous, rich and demanding Michael Fazio is the ultimate behind-the-scenes support man. Want two orchestra tickets to the Broadway musical that just won the Tony? Call Fazio. How about an upgrade to first class on an overbooked overnight flight to Tokyo? Call Fazio. Or a roomful of fresh hydrangeas—in winter? That's right. Call Fazio. From his early start as the harried and neglected personal assistant to a typical L.A. casting agent, Fazio took what he learned there and moved into concierge work at New York City's Intercontinental Hotel, where he was eventually able to parlay his services into a large and successful business of his own. In Concierge Confidential, Fazio reveals the behind-thescenes madness that goes into getting the rich and famous what they want, and shares some great insider knowledge on how to get access to the unattainable without making the concierge, waiters and other service people crazy. A few of Fazio's tips include: • When and how much to palm in tips • How to get a seat or ticket to the hottest thing in town • How to avoid being labeled a rube the minute you walk through the door • How you can become your favorite store or restaurant's most beloved customer • And much more

What if you could protect your business against competitive inroads, once and for all? Customer service experts Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon's anticipatory customer service approach was first developed at The Ritz-Carlton as well as at Solomon's company Oasis, and has since proven itself in countless companies around the globe--from luxury giant BVLGARI to value-sensitive auto parts leader Carquest and everywhere in between. Their experience shows that the most powerful growth engine in a tight market--and best protection from competitive inroads--is to put everything you can into cultivating true customer loyalty. Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit takes the techniques that minted money for these brands and reveals how you can apply them to your own business to provide the kind of exceptional service that nearly guarantees loyalty. Soon, you'll be reaping the benefits of loyal customers who are: less sensitive to price competition, more forgiving of small glitches, and, ultimately, who are "walking billboards" happily promoting your brand. Filled with detailed, behind-the-scenes examples, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit unlocks a new level of customer relationship that leaves your competitors in the dust, your customers coming back day after day, and your bottom line looking better than it ever has before.

Who minds sleeping under a mosquito net when it's royally draped over the bed in a lush Kenyan, open-walled hut, fashioned from tree trunks and shielded from the sun by a sumptuous thatched roof? This selection of the most-splendid getaway havens nestled throughout the African continent is sure to please even the most finicky would-be voyagers. Photos.