NO SUBSTITUTE FOR TRAINING
Training is also vital in the hotel business and very few have mastered it as well as the Ritz-Carlton, now part of the Marriott chain. Talk to even former Ritz-Carlton employees and you'll know how deeply imbedded is the Horst Schultze (founder of Ritz- Carlton) philosophy of service.
Ritz-Carlton not only believes in up-front training, it believes in constant training of up to 200 hours per year for each employee. According to Diana Barber, an adjunct professor at Robinson, a former attorney with Ritz-Carlton and now a hotel consultant with her own company, Lodge Law, "Each day at Ritz-Carlton, there is a line-up where employees, right up to top executives, gather near their offices or work stations and talk about an important aspect of service and what it means to them."
"Did you know that each Ritz-Carlton employee is empowered to spend up to $2000 on the spot to make a customer happy?" asked Barber. "If a waiter spots a light bulb out, or hears that a customer's television is on the blink, that employee can authorize the fix on the spot and call in whatever resources are needed."
Barber also noted that, "Employees at the Ritz-Carlton are also encouraged to innovate. In one location housekeepers developed a new way to clean hotel rooms in record time. A corporate-designed engineering program called CARE (Clean and Repair Everything) provides a systemic way to assure that no room in the entire system will be more than three months old in regard to such things as batteries in remotes, light bulbs working, draperies cleaned, paint touched up, etc."
For its efforts the Ritz-Carlton has twice been awarded the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
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