Managing International Hospitality Service Experience at Hilton Hotel

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the international hospitality service experience at Hilton Hotels. It begins with an introduction to Hilton and its global presence, followed by a discussion of key concepts such as service scape, service management, and marketing branding. The report then identifies various issues faced by Hilton, including inventory management, staff turnover, and communication problems. It delves into the features of service, including intangibility, inseparability, perishability, and heterogeneity. The core of the report focuses on managing the international hospitality services experience, outlining objectives and exploring service quality management systems. The SERVQUAL model is introduced, and its five dimensions (reliability, tangibles, responsiveness, empathy, and assurance) are discussed in the context of Hilton. The report offers recommendations for improving service quality, including room design, ambient conditions, and food service authenticity. The conclusion summarizes the key findings and emphasizes the importance of managing the international hospitality service experience for Hilton's success.

Managing the
International
Hospitality Service
Experience

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................4
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................4
Background..................................................................................................................................4
Service scape-..............................................................................................................................4
Service management-...................................................................................................................5
Marketing Branding-....................................................................................................................6
Issues-..........................................................................................................................................7
Service features............................................................................................................................7
Intangibility- ...............................................................................................................................7
Inseparability- .............................................................................................................................8
Perishability- ...............................................................................................................................8
Heterogeneity- .............................................................................................................................8
Problem-.......................................................................................................................................9
Topic- Managing the International Hospitality Services Experience..........................................9
Objective-.....................................................................................................................................9
Service Quality Management Systems-.......................................................................................9
Model -.......................................................................................................................................10
Reliability-.................................................................................................................................10
Tangible-....................................................................................................................................11
Responsiveness..........................................................................................................................11
Empathy.....................................................................................................................................11
Assurance...................................................................................................................................12
Measurement .............................................................................................................................12
Recommendation.......................................................................................................................13
Room Design.............................................................................................................................14
Ambient conditions of the Rooms ............................................................................................14
Space and Functions of the Rooms............................................................................................15
Signs, Symbols and Artifacts in the rooms................................................................................15
Food Services Authenticity........................................................................................................15

Recommendations......................................................................................................................16
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................17
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................18

INTRODUCTION
Managing the international hospitality service experience is essential for hotel to be
successful. They can easily manage and renders the high quality services to their consumer and
satisfy them with the tremendous service to them.
Hotel Hilton is the global international brand which renders full service hotels and
resorts. The hotel runs under flagship of the international brand of the American multinational
hospitality company named as Hilton. It was developed by Conrad Hilton. The above report
includes the background of Hotel Hilton in which it includes the Service scrape, service
management, marketing & branding and various issues which is faced by the hotel in
marketplace. The aims and objectives of the study which is being conducted. The report further
carried forward with the literature review on the service quality management systems and model
& practices which are related to it. The measurement of the practices and model with evaluation
and recommendation on the application. Report ends with room design and food service &
authenticity which is being obtained by the Hotel Hilton in their services along with
recommendation on it.
MAIN BODY
Background
Hilton Hotel & Resorts is international brand of the full service resorts and hotel. It is
flagship brand of the American multinational hospitality organization Hilton. Originally it was
established by Conrad Hilton on May 31, 1919. It's headquarter is situated at McLean, Virginia,
U.S. It has over 586 Hilton Hotels & Resorts in across 85 countries. Hilton offers the high class
hospitality services to their consumers. It also renders leisure and business travellers globally that
offers very fine accommodation, value and service to guests (Ali, Amin and Cobanoglu, 2016). It
is one of the hotel company which is leading brand, spanning lodgings sector from the luxurious
full service resort and hotel with extended suites to stay and mid price hotel. They used to
develop new guest rooms every year in US. Hotel Hilton ranks first in these terms of operating
and opening rooms in United States.
Service scape-
It is physical environment of the Hotel Hilton where services in hotel take place. It is
very helpful in analysing and identifying impact of good environment on services based industry.
It is the model which is established by Booms and Bitner. The hotels should build the

environment which is helpful in achieving balance among two basic objectives. These objectives
are to develop the environment which appeals to customer arousal state and pleasure while
avoiding atmosphere which develop submissiveness. Constructing environments which facilitate
operational efficiency and ease of hotel Hilton. It is believed that a product and services are
judged by the abstract image but service is already abstract. Thus services is evaluated with
tangible or comprehensive things (Campos and et.al., 2018). It includes the social or natural
environment which is surrounded by physical and man made surroundings. The Hotel Hilton had
an exotic physical man made surroundings. They had the amazing surroundings which is
connected with the physical and natural environment which is the major consumer attraction
toward the hotel. That's why the wide range of consumers are attracted towards the hotel.
Service management-
Service is the intangible product which brought value or utility to consumers. Service
management is managerial discipline that focus on service and consumer. The service
management of the hotel Hilton consistently outperform market on all the key metrics. They had
RevPar premium of the 117% in 2009 which is one of the challenging year for the hotel along
with that cost has also being reduced by 30% with the help of permanent program for cost

control and several best practices. Then further they aim at balancing the new low cost base so
that there business can recover soon (Stauss, 2016). The hotel service management leases, own
or manages 635 properties in America, with over 300,000 staff members across all over industry
segments among Hilton globally. Portfolio of the hotel features over 672,081 rooms which are
perfectly placed so that they can help hotel to raise profitability, whatever financial condition
faced by hotel. It is helpful for hotel Hilton to become world's largest and majorly experienced
operator globally from upscale, luxury, mid price to the extended stays and full service suites.
The Hilton management service portfolio includes DoubleTree, Hampton, Hilton Hotels &
Resorts, Home2 Suites, Hilton Garden Inn etc.,
Marketing Branding-
The Hotel Hilton targets travellers as well as corporate employees with having their
property in main cities, convention centres, vicinity to the airports and famous holiday
destinations globally. They aim to provide true and unique products to their consumer across the
world. With the help of market segmentation they can easily differentiate themselves among the
other competitors. The three main segments which is being used by them are property
management & franchising, property ownership a property time share. The hotel business across
globally with its two highly luxury brands that are Conrad Hotel & Resorts and Waldorf Astoria
Hotels & Resorts. The luxurious guest and highly spending guest are attracted towards this brand
of Hilton. It offers customizable experiences to their luxurious guest (Peng, Zhao and Mattila,
2015). The various segments and pricing strategies are used by the hotel and both the brand
focus in various locations. They had 55 properties and 19, 757 rooms among the Hilton portfolio
in which 2.5% of rooms are available for booking other than all are pre booked and vacant.

Issues-
As Hotel Hilton is the biggest luxury hotel brand which operates its business globally but
besides this it also has various issues in their business operation. The Hotel as strong financial
status as it is very successfully in satisfying their consumers with their amazing service and
experience but rather than this they lack behind somewhere. They don't have proper inventory
management thus they could manage the stock in hotel on time and somehow there can be delay
in service which is rendered to the visitors (Qiu and et.al., 2018). The staff turnover of company
has also been reducing as their employees are not satisfied, motivated and less valued thus they
are decreasing in numbers. Day by day the turnover of staff has been declining. There is poor
communication among the employers and employees so that they couldn't manage and perform
their jobs. The staff thus couldn't be satisfied with their employers and so they couldn't be able to
perfectly attend and treat their guest well.
Service features
Intangibility-
Important feature of service is that as a product this is intangible in its form. Unlike
physical and tangible products that are visible and concrete this is invisible and untouchable
(Ivanov and Webster, 2019). Because of this it becomes difficult for hotel to tell their clients
what they will be getting as their product. This requires service providers to promote their

product and service in such a way that customers can feel what they will be getting as their
product in form of service.
Inseparability-
Service can be separated from its creation time to its offer time. They are created and
offered simultaneously. Service is created on the same time when organisation requires selling it
to client or at the time when client is required to get their product. It is also said about the
services that goods are first produced and then sold but services are first sold then produced and
consumed.
Perishability-
Another significant feature of service is that service is perishable and unlike physical
goods it can not be stored to sell next day if not sold today. This complicates the task of offering
services. This can be explained through one example that if one room in hotel remain unbooked
for a day it means opportunity is lost forever (Grobelna, 2015). Clarifying that if room remain
unbooked and hotels provide services on the basis of day and because room remain unbooked
hotel lost its revenue for that day which was supposed be generated from that room.
Heterogeneity-
Another feature of service is that it is heterogeneous. This means that same kind of
service can not be provided to all the customers and quality of service cannot be standardised.
Even if customers pay same price service provided to them will be different (Tabari, Wilson and

Ingram, 2016). This difference emerges from the perception of service providers and service
users. Providers of services however use their expertise try to minimize the difference.
Problem-
Topic- Managing the International Hospitality Services Experience
Aims- To investigate the strategies that can be used by Hotel Hilton to solve the problems.
Objective-
 To improve the inventory management at the end of financial year.
 To increase staff turnover within 6 months.
 To enhance communication among the employees.
Service Quality Management Systems-
According to the Pizam and Tasci, (2019) Service quality management embrace mixture
of procedure which is used for assessing quality of services as per the consumer expectations.
Long term monitoring and maintenance of every service which is rendered to the consumers are
also included in this management system. It also tracks developments in the quality and
measures efficiency of the improvement in efforts. Suggestions and idea can be delivered by
hotel with the help of analysing size of gaps among reality and expectations. The hotels can
reduce errors and identify problems and decreasing the consumer complaints. Service quality can
related to service potential, service results or service process. The quality of service can also be
determined by analysing significant amount of the consumer opinion over the time. It also
enables overlapped trends and developing correlations. It produces actionable response for hotels
which needs continuous source of the particular information which states individual interactions
for services. The hotel can further get criteria on which they can work and make further
improvement in their services. Measuring and creating consumer and the employee satisfaction
which enable the hotels to custom evaluation of the success as per the factors (Ma and et.al.,
2016). The measurement system can be implemented by capturing exact data which is helpful for
hotel to cut the costing and saving time. They can also get consumer performance report that are
satisfaction rankings, NPS and benchmarks for viewing the hotel's performance from different
aspects. The bonus malus system can also be used which is based on performance achievement
and motivating teams and their staff. The gaps among consumer service reality and expectations
can be closed for raising consumer satisfaction and building loyalty among customers.

Model -
SERVQUAL MODEL
Figure 1 Servqual model
(Source: Servqual model, 2015)
The SERVQUAL Model is service quality model which is also known as gaps model that
is developed by group of the American authors which are Len Berry, A. Parasuraman and
Valarie A. Zeithaml. It is helpful in identifying principle dimensions of the service quality. It
establishes scale for measuring service quality and further suggesting causes of the service
quality problems. Originally developers identify ten dimensions of the service quality but after
retesting there are only five dimensions for service quality that are assurance, empathy,
reliability, responsiveness and assurances. In hotels SERVQUAL instrument is used for
measuring potential problems in service quality. This model is helpful in identifying possible
reason of problems (Buonincontri and et.al., 2017). It is developed on expectancy confirmation
paradigm which assist that customers gains quality on their perceptions of service delivery which
is up to the level to meet expectations of consumer's. The five dimensions can be described
below-
Reliability-
Hotel should assure that consumer services which are being promised by them should
consistently, accurately and dependably delivered to their visitors on time or before the time. It is
the major dimension of service quality. When a guest visit the hotel they had expectations with
the hotel that the tremendous service should rendered to them by hotel and they had amazing
experience with hotel. The Hilton renders high quality global service to their international guest

and let them feel the extraordinary efforts which are made by them for their consumers. The
problems which is faced by their guest are to be solved by them quickly. They always aim and
targets to render the quality service on time which is promised by them at starting when guest
choose the hotel to have their time with their hotel. So this is helpful for them in gaining huge
consumer trust and satisfaction of their guests.
Tangible-
It is the dimension of the service quality which is done with the tangible services.
Tangible are physical feature of service that is rendered to the visitors which are cleanliness of
facilities, appearance of building and personnel appearance. When visitors arrives at hotel they
firstly saw the surrounding of hotel, their table, corridor, ambience, staff if they all are not in
well mannered it can have negative effect on their visitors. Along with that clean and adorable
corridor, well dressed staff, clean table and relaxed ambience of hotel had positively impacted
the guest. Hotel Hilton provide service quality to their guests and they render high quality service
to their visitors with equipped and clean table.
Responsiveness
Responsiveness is basically the willingness to assist the customers and thus providing
them, with the prompt services. The employees of Hilton need to be highly responsive to their
customers in order to fulfil their needs and demands (Wirtz and Lovelock, 2016).
Responsiveness hotel means effectively handling the complaints of customers and thus giving
them prompt services. The employees as well as staff of Hilton needs to be quick while
responding to their customers and should provide effective post services to them to attract them
frequently. Thus, this is one of the most important dimension which Hilton needs to integrate
within its operations.
Empathy
Empathy is predominately when the individual views the situation from other individual's
point of view and thus applies their perspective for solving the complex issues. In short, it is
generally stepping into the shoes of people. This is the significant parameter which shows the
effectiveness of services as well as quality. The management as well as employees of Hilton
should be highly empathetic to their customers in order to serve them better. They need to
understand what are the expectations of customers and what problems they are facing by
understanding their perspective and hence resolving it through their own way.

Assurance
Assurance is the knowledge as well as courtesy of the employees along with their ability
to disseminate trust and confidence. In order to convert the customers into loyal consumers,
Hilton needs to keep the assurance level high and thus show courtesy to their customers while
serving them (Kim, Lim and Brymer, 2015). The employees should display a high level of trust
as well as confidence to their guests by providing high quality services and entertaining their
complaints on quick basis. The most important through which the employees can maintain a high
level of assurance is serving the customers better.
Measurement
It can be measured by maintaining the quality and measuring the level of the consumer
satisfaction. The model had the scale with help of that hotel Hilton manager can optimize that
whether the model is working properly or not. Thus, if they are lacking anywhere they further
work upon that and improve it and implement it in their operations and functions. The hotel must
include this in their operations so that they can enhance the visit of their consumers and so if
number of visitors have been raised they can state that the model is working well and if the
number of visitors have been declined then the model is not properly working (Kandampully,
Zhang and Jaakkola, 2018). The Hotel must emphasis on satisfying their consumer and their
consumer must be satisfied and thus motivated to visit again to the hotel and enjoy amazing
service at hotel. So hotel can assures high quality services to their consumers and deliver them
service on time. The quality control can be achieved by verification, testing and validation and
other various elements so that they can optimize in their business practices. Various testing
practices can also be used for measuring the evaluation and application of the model in the
business operations.