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Service Productivity in the Hotel Business

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Book cover Driving Service Productivity

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals ((MANAGPROF))

Abstract

In this chapter, Bob Lillis offers some insights into why service productivity is an on-going issue faced by all services due to its impact on organisational costs and competitiveness. As he shows, responsibility for the improvement of service productivity usually falls on service operations management. In this chapter, some of the main barriers that underline why service productivity improvement is so difficult to achieve are analysed and strategies that can help service operations managers overcome these barriers are developed.

The chapter frames these issues and then explores them in the context of a successful hotel innovator—CitizenM. CitizenM is a boutique hotel located near Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The hotel was launched in 2008 with a unique service concept. Its success in recognising and overcoming the typical barriers to service productivity has allowed it to provide an effective delivery of a personalised guest experience while running a highly productive, ‘back’ and ‘front’ office. Since 2008, three further CitizenM hotels have been opened and a further 11 are in the planned pipeline. The case uses data from interviews with staff at the hotel and the Group Chief Operating Officer, Michael Levie (one of the four founding partners) to show how the typical barriers to service productivity were overcome.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The acronym TIMWOOD stands for the seven forms of waste: Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproducing, Over processing and Defect waste.

  2. 2.

    The process of stripping and remaking the bed may be viewed in Part 3 of the CitizenM Hotel multi-media case study (2012). Authors: Dr. Bob Lillis, Dr. Chris Van Der Hoven and Professor Keith Goffin. It may accessed free on http://www.thecasecentre.org/CitizenMcase.

  3. 3.

    The net promoter score measurement tool was introduced by Reichheld (2003). The most important proposed benefit of this method is believed to derive from simplifying and communicating the objective of creating more ‘promoters’ of a brand and fewer ‘detractors’, while seeking to convert ‘passives’.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedford, MK43 0AL, UK

    Bob Lillis

Authors
  1. Bob Lillis
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Correspondence to Bob Lillis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, United Kingdom

    John Bessant

  2. Center for Leading Innovation and Cooperation (CLIC), HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Leipzig, Germany

    Claudia Lehmann

  3. HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen - Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany

    Kathrin M. Moeslein

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Lillis, B. (2014). Service Productivity in the Hotel Business. In: Bessant, J., Lehmann, C., Moeslein, K. (eds) Driving Service Productivity. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05975-4_9

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