Challenges
Novotel Breda is a 4-star hotel situated in the eponymous Dutch city near the Belgian border. It combines Accor Hotel Group’s comfort with the charm and personality of a city hotel in picturesque surroundings. Both business travellers and families will quickly feel at home here.
To also ensure a smooth operation behind the scenes, the hotels management set a number of targets: internal communication was to be improved, as well as the coordination of schedules within the team. In order to accomplish these goals, a central knowledge platform allows all employees to easily access content that is relevant for them. Daily routine tasks should be managed more efficiently in order to have more time for the guest.
Implementation & Trial Phase
The decision in favour of hotelkit was taken even before the end of the trial in March 2017. The smooth transition from implementation to permanent use was apparent early on: The introduction of hotelkit to employees had already been straightforward. The set-up phase, including the training of all employees, took only ten days. This was possible as a result of hotelkit’s determination to keep the start simple and uncomplicated, therefore, the hotel incurred little or no strain throughout this important process. (Hotels can begin the trial any time and the set-up can be accomplished within one working day.)
At Novotel Breda, hotelkit’s features were really put to the acid test during the trial. All tools were used intensively right from the beginning on. Recurrent tasks and checklists, for example, were implemented very quickly, therefore incorporating hotelkit immediately into daily work routines.
Our team is excited and works very actively with hotelkit.
Results
Jeroen Schipper had a very positive attitude from the beginning – and yet his expectations were still surpassed: “I had heard about the ‘solution from Austria’ via some colleagues, and immediately thought that this would work well at our hotel. The result, however, is even better than we’d expected”, the hotel’s General Manager explains. It was important to him that the solution should go down well with employees: “Our team is excited and works very actively with hotelkit. It’s great to see how the digitizing of standard processes makes work easier and enables employees to attend even more to our guests.”
Intensive use is also illustrated in numbers – the hotel has only been working with hotelkit for around six months. During this time, well over 3,000 activities have already been reported. This corresponds to an average of 630 activities per month and 21 activities per day.
Handovers are particularly frequently used, three of them are generated per day – which corresponds to a total of 500 handovers to date. The team is continuously kept up to date with 75 news items. The task tool, however, is equally used with great enthusiasm and now includes some 250 tasks. In addition to individual tasks, there are daily, weekly and monthly recurring to-dos that can be processed efficiently in hotelkit. Amongst these tasks, there are 15 checklists for various purposes. Furthermore, departments are supported by 5 calendars that coordinate events, meetings, and 260 different schedule items. Communication around repairs has also become smoother at Novotel Breda with some 50 new repairs per month processed through hotelkit. The manual has also been filled bit by bit over the past few months and now contains 261 knowledge articles for the various departments.
Schedule items, repairs, daily handovers, routine tasks, checklists and much more at Novotel Breda are now managed through hotelkit. As a result, our work has become much easier.
About the author
Michael Santner
Narratives about impoverished poets during his studies encouraged him to follow his passion in a secure job. In hotelkits marketing he takes care of packing the numerous ideas of his colleagues into exciting stories.
