A successful productivity analysis of your hotel's restaurant will allow you to meet the agreed objectives and attract new customers.
By: Eng. María Fernanda Dobronsky*
In Hotel Management, the functions of planning, organization, direction and control are especially focused on the productive areas of accommodation and food and beverages.
In the actions that include these administrative functions, the calculation, analysis and projection of statistical data constitute an important tool for the administrator, since with these he will have a high level of certainty regarding the fulfillment of goals and obtaining results.
Hotel restaurants aim to maximize results, and both high revenues and low costs are important goals when planning and measuring profitability.
When it comes to revenue, the application of adequate business and marketing plans and new strategies that allow competition in a market such as the hotel will create competitive advantages in the short and long term.
Guest and private clients
Likewise, when defining sales strategies, it should be remembered that the restaurants of a hotel can be occupied by 2 segments: guest customers and private customers.
Guest customers are those people who, making use of the hotel accommodation service, also use the food service in the same hotel.
Private clients are called people who are not guests of the hotel but come from external places to use the services of the hotel's restaurants.
Having numerical data of customers, both guests and individuals, helps the administration to turn its efforts towards the segment that requires promotion and satisfaction of their specific needs.
To calculate and project the total number of customers that the restaurant would have, it is necessary to know how to use the statistics of percentage of guest customers and percentage of private customers, always noting that each one belongs to a different total:
The percentage of guest customers corresponds to the hotel occupancy, that is, it is a portion of the total number of guests.
The percentage of private customers corresponds to the occupancy of the restaurant, that is, a portion of the total number of customers.
Hence, the formula for calculating the number of customers in a restaurant would be as follows:
# Customers = # guests * % C.H. * (1 / %C.P.)
in which:
% C.H. is the percentage of guest customers.
% C.P. is the percentage of private customers.
In addition, the calculation of total customers of the restaurant can also be obtained with rules of three simple always taking into account the reasoning of what total each percentage belongs to.
In this context it will be worrying, then, to have low percentages of guest customers, since it would be a sign that a small portion of guests prefer the food and beverage service of the hotel restaurant and, taking into account that this is a complementary service to the accommodation, the Management must implement measures that allow combining, in promotional packages, the two services of the productive areas of the hotel industry.
Rotation analysis
Another very useful statistic when projecting results is turnover, which is the reference value to evaluate the occupation of a restaurant. It is interpreted as "the number of times a position or table is occupied daily."
To calculate it, it is sufficient to divide the number of registered customers in a period for the maximum capacity of the restaurant, meaning maximum capacity as the product of the number of seats by the number of days of the period analyzed.
To perform the evaluation of the rotation, there is no standard value considered always good for a restaurant, it depends on the type of restaurant, category, type of service and food it offers. A high turnover may be due, for example, to the fact that it is a fast food restaurant, or its size is small and even the hours of operation intervene.
The turnover value should be analysed period by period and determine a trend that may change direction when changes in consumer habits are detected or when a new accommodation or food and beverage establishment aggressively enters the market. The trend will serve the Area Manager to apply corrective measures in time and make decisions that curb, for example, a downward rotation trend.
Likewise, we can suggest, take into account the statistics of the rotation time considered as the valuation of the number of hours and minutes that, on average, the position in the restaurant remains occupied. To do this, the following formula is used:
TR = # hours served by the restaurant
Rotation
It is important to note that the longer the rotation time there is a danger of "empty stall time" which, from the point of view of results, are hours of lost sale for the restaurant.
This statistic is complementary to that of rotation and its evaluation also depends on the type of restaurant, service and food you have.
Finally, calculating the "average consumption" of the restaurant is a tool that gives the Manager some analysis guidelines, from the preference of dishes to the efficiency in the sales work carried out by the service staff, since this human potential can suggest greater consumption to the client, promoting the dishes of higher price or influencing the purchase of additional dishes or drinks such as desserts, cocktails, salads, etc.
All of the above comes together in the analysis of the break-even point or also known as cost-volume-benefits analysis of the restaurant, a management instrument that allows establishing minimum sales goals for the recovery of operational costs as well as the measurement of the performance, even daily, of the food and beverage area.
In any case, statistical control acquires real importance when the numerical data obtained are the basis for making managerial decisions, decisions ranging from the change in the capacity of the restaurant, in the hours of operation, in the type of product they offer, to deeper structural changes such as innovation in processes, organizational structures, access to new market segments, strategic alliances, etc.
These changes can be decided depending on how and when to execute them to ensure that the cost they require is always less than the benefit they will produce, achieving optimization in the distribution and combination of resources in the food and beverage area.
*Eng. María Fernanda Dobronsky is a professor at the Equinoccial Technological University of Quito, Ecuador, if you wish you can write to the email [email protected]
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