hejin1_2000_Hospitality_L_26 September

Background

This report is about Beijing-Yi-House art hotel. The hotel is trying to provide a convincing and different experience to its customers by providing easy access to traditional art galleries located near the hotel. The hotel is located at the northeast corner of Beijing 798 Art zone (Yihousearthotel, 2016). The customers of the hotel have easy access to local metro and the vibrant Wangjing commercial centre and Beijing Capital International Airport. The location of hotel is nearby many Chinese attractions such as Tiananmen Square, Fragrant Hills Park, Beihai Park, Beijing Botanical Garden, Beijing Aquarium etc. The hotel provides the opportunity to the customers to know more about Chinese culture and improve their overall experience. In this report the consultant will put a light on the concept of home to market their offering to the customers. The hotels can enrich the experience of customers by providing a similar experience to their home in their services, design and marketing experience. The writer will act as an external consultant and his report is completely based on the secondary articles and resources.

Literature Review

In the 21st century the business has been changed a lot, the business is going beyond the boundaries and many hotels are adopting born-global approach to market their services and target mass number of customers around the world. The born-global is the approach in which hotel industries start targeting the customers from international location since the time of inception (Rialp, et al., 2005). The technology and internet are helping the new hotel owners to market their brand to the international visitors. As the approach of the hotel owners have changed, the expectation of the customers has also changed towards the hospitality provided in the hotels. The modern hotels not only considered as a place which offer better sleep to the tourists. The hotels provide its guests with an escapist experience through its design, sense of spectacle and amenities. The guests are ready to pay higher amount to hotel authorities but they need all the services similar to their homes (JLL, 2013). Many of the guests are international visitors or businesses who spend most of their time outside. They expect everything to be in shipshape manner and similar to their home. The customers often chose hotel on the basis of cuisine, internet facilities, cleaning and interaction of the hotel employees. It is the responsibility of hotel employees to make the experience of the customers memorable. They can make the experience memorable if their services feel the customers that they are at home.

The international visitors who visit the international location first time feel home sickness as they are not adaptable to the new atmospheric conditions, local foods and culture (Zhao & Lv, 2009). The international students also feel the same while visiting international locations for study. The bed and breakfast services are having competitive advantage over normal hotels because those B&B services are providing ‘home-style’ accommodation to the guests (Juwon, 2015). The B&B hotels don’t have the responsibility to provide entire food to the guests. They can easily change their breakfast menu as per customers’ needs. The B&B companies not only take care about the breakfast services to the customers but they also provide internal atmosphere similar to homes. They are not treating customers in regular manner as other professional hotel employees. Instead they give full access to guests to walk around their home, provide access to kitchen, give laundry service, do friendly chat with guests. The traditional and modern hotels can take a learning from B&B services to provide homily environment to the customers.

The international visitors and businesses away from home look have no one to share their experience. The home type accommodation offering provide a chance to the international visitors in which they can frequently chat with the service providers. They can easily share their internal feelings and emotions with the hotel colleagues in home type environment. In this era of globalization, the customers’ expectations are increasing. They compare hotel services with their home environment. The services are intangible in nature but those services can help can provide homily feeling to the customers. In traditional time customers were happy just receiving please and thank you or getting a service with the smile. But the scenario is changed now, satisfied customers are looking for a memorable experience and dynamic service which counts (Ball, et al., 2009; Kim, et al., 2006). The memorable experience can only be provided if hotel managers are flexible in their approach. They should be ready to customize their services as per needs of the customers. Some examples of customization in services are extended a guest check-out in a hotel or customizing a menu item in the hotel list as per customer demands. These customization attracts the guests towards hotel. They feel hotel is giving importance to their needs similar to their relatives at home. The hotels are not stringent on their roles and they are establishing an emotional connect with their customers. Similar to other industries the hotel industry is also facing tough competition. The customer loyalty plays a big role in hotel industry too. The home type concept in designing, marketing and services of the hotel industry improve customers’ loyalty. If the hotels can provide local taste, culture and within time services to the customers it can improve the customers’ loyalty and results in increasing the business of the hotels.