The Renaissance
4-13-10
Emanuel Royster, Cameron Geer, Kyle Blazer, Katelin Hancock, Dan Filmer
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary…………………………………………………..….………..3
Introduction...…………………………………………………………...………...5
Operations:
Food and Beverage……………………………………………...…………6
Housekeeping………………………………………………………………8
Engineering……………………………………………………..…………12
Front Office…………………………………………………….……..…..14
Catering Sales Manager/Banquets…………….………………………..…17
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...20
Sources…………………………………………………………………………….23
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Executive Summary
We visited the Renaissance Hotel in Raleigh in which we met five department
heads that included food and beverage, housekeeping, engineering, front office, and
catering sales manager. They were having a very busy day since an event was going to
take place that evening and from that, we found out how crucial good communication
within the hotel is and how it is essential in not only keeping the hotel operating smoothly
but also providing the guess with a positive experience. After being in Lodging
Management, we were able to relate to what we had learned in class to what we were
observing at the hotel.
During our interviews, we spent the majority of our time with the Executive
Housekeeper, Diego Lopez. He explained the Property Management Software Program
that the hotel used to control which rooms were cleaned. Each individual housekeeping
staff used the House Keeping Report Menu to keep track of the status of the rooms and
which need to be cleaned and inspected. Mr. Lopez also gave information on the
importance of handling the linens. A large amount of our time with Mr. Lopez was spent
touring the hotel and comparing the different types of rooms and floors. The information
we obtained from the House Keeping Executive was very helpful when completing this
project.
The front office manager at the Renaissance Hotel was Julie. She mentioned to us
that they use software called the Hotel Management Property Software, which modules
designed to make sure that the hotel is running a smooth operation; it has front and back
office capabilities. The front office job consists of operations that manage hotel guests
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and rooms, they also have the guest history information, individual and group
reservations, housekeeping, guest accounting, night audit, check out and city ledger.
Rick Johnson was the head of the engineering department at The Renaissance. He
showed us the inner workings of the hotel from the rooftops all the way down to the
ground level. On the roof he showed us the vents from bathrooms, the water storage
area, the heating a cooling system for the hotel and its water, and many other things that
were on the roof. We went back down to the lease space and saw what the skeleton of
the hotel looked like and how it looked without anything covering it. He told us
everything about the hotel and how everything in the hotel works.
The director of Food and Beverage operations The Renaissance is Chef Dean
Wendel. He oversees the day-to-day operations for the restaurant, room service, catering,
and special events cooking. His responsibilities include inventory, truck orders, cost
control, staffing, and operations supervision. His department is the second highest
sources of revenue behind sales and has already earned a reputation for excellent service.
The Catering Sales Manager for the Renaissance hotel is Megan Brewer. Her job
is to meet face to face with guests planning events, and she works with them to plan a
budget and organize their event. At the Renaissance, they have many ritzy weddings,
which is the main special event that takes place, and Megan’s job is to help create a
menu, decorations, and works with other vendors to provide a good experience for the
guest.
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Introduction
The Renaissance is located in Raleigh at North Hills Mall. Marriot bought the
land and built the hotel in a year and a half, and opened up a little over a year ago. Due to
its rushed construction, the building, although only a year and half old, is considered a
ten-year-old structure based on its depreciation because it was poorly built. The hotel is
owned by Concord Hospitality Enterprises yet is ran by the Marriott chain hotel, and is
based on the Renaissance style them of purple and gold. The Renaissance hotel is a fourstar full service hotel, which includes 10 floors, 223 rooms, 6 suites, 7 meeting rooms,
and 8,000 square feet of upscale event space perfect for weddings, businesses meetings or
receptions. Its target market is a luxury destination for leisure travelers, business
travelers, and special events. Unique shopping spots, enjoyable restaurants with local
taste, and invigorating attractions surround its main entrance.
The hotel has a Prevision Island, a lobby and banquet rooms located on the first
floor. There are also meeting rooms and an open lounge open to guests on the second
floor. The guests also have access to a laundry room, pool, fitness center, and spa. The
hotel offers three different kinds of rooms, a standard room, handicap room, and suite.
The ninth and tenth floors are the VIP floors at the Renaissance. They offer a first rate
upscale lodging experience for their guests. All these aspects and amenities make the
Renaissance a welcomed new addition to the Raleigh hospitality community.
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Food and Beverage
The food and beverage department is an important aspect of any full service hotel.
Expectations are always high, and guests can become easily disappointed by mishaps
with customer service. It is the responsibility of the food and beverage department to
deliver customer service that is on par with the star rating of the hotel. The department
should be able to give the guest a pleasurable dining experience in any division of the
food and beverage department of the hotel.
The food and beverage department consists of many different divisions.
Most full service hotels have at least one restaurant on the premises. The hotel gives
guests the opportunity to have a fine dining experience without having to leave the hotel.
The catering division is responsible for providing food for the various on-sight and offsight catering functions hosted by the hotel. The room service is also handled by the food
and beverage department and is probably the most time sensitive of all the departments.
When a guest orders from the room service, menu it is up to the kitchen to deliver the
appropriate dish in a timely manner. Guests use this amenity because of its convenience
and expect timely results. The special events and conventions are probably the most
demanding aspect of the hotels’ kitchen. These typically very large events require a lot
of preparation. In many hotels this is also the main source of revenue for the food and
beverage department. Chef Wendel typically designed his catering and special events
menus around the restaurant and room service menus to help keep his food costs under
control.
Another food costs control tactic utilized by the executive chef was his careful
execution of the business meetings that the hotel hosts. This is considered a high
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profit/low cost venture that yields an excellent food cost ratio. The chef charges roughly
twenty dollars per person for the meetings and serves them coffee and danishes. He is
able to do this because the quality of the food that is served is top notch. It is very
important for any executive chef to keep his food costs under control. The typical
restaurant keeps their food cost between thirty-two and forty percent.
Costs can also be cut through labor and paper costs. Labor is usually a big
expense for a kitchen staff in a full service hotel because of the technical skill involved in
a four star environment. In order to keep this cost under control the executive chef must
make sure that his cooks and sous chefs are properly trained and work well together.
Paper costs consist of any to-go items or other paper products used in the operation of the
kitchen. These should be easily controlled if a good system of checks and balances is in
place to prevent loss.
Another way to reduce the cost of banquet operations is by limiting the amount of
décor used for events. For example, the tables that are set out for guests are typically not
covered in linens. Instead, tables are kept polished giving them a clean and organized
appearance. By doing this, the hotel is able to save on the cost of purchasing and
cleaning them as well as the labor cost of setting up each table.
A large part of Chef Wendels’ responsibility is the inventory management.
Because of the lack of storage space, truck orders are done weekly and deliveries arrive
often. This allows them to work with the small space and not worry about insufficient
stock. A physical inventory is done every month to ensure that their numbers are correct.
The Renaissance uses a perpetual inventory system. Chef Wendel expressed a certain
level of difficulty adjusting to the system since it was one that he was unfamiliar with
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prior to employment at the Renaissance. Using a perpetual inventory system, certain
high priced items such as alcohol are kept locked up. The items can only be used if they
are requisitioned in or out of a logbook. This helps the kitchen keep a running count on
their inventory, ensure sufficient stock, and prevent employee theft.
Chef Wendel offered us a piece of advice when doing inventory. If your numbers come
up irregular, be honest about it. The worst thing you can do is lie. Not only will you be
in danger of losing your job, but it also makes it continuously harder each month to make
up the difference. The next month your number may come up over or under the projected
stock and it will be that much harder to come up with an honest estimate. His next piece
of advice was to surround ourselves with the best possible co-workers. You need to be
able to trust your employees. He is supremely confident in his staff and has no problem
relying on them to do the majority of the cooking. He actually does very little cooking in
his kitchen. He trusts his sous chefs with his recipes and knows that they will deliver a
quality final product. He told us not to worry about hiring someone better than you are.
You then free yourself up for other responsibilities.
Housekeeping
The housekeeping staff is the hardest working staff in the Renaissance hotel. We
met with the Executive Housekeeper, Mr. Lopez, to interview his experience and discuss
the Renaissance’s housekeeping operation process. During the interview, he explained
the importance of the Property Management Software Program and the Housekeeping
Report Menu that the staff used. Mr. Lopez also gave our group a large amount of
information about the room cleaning process. He expressed the importance of the linens
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and gave other interesting facts on the cleaning process throughout the hotel that most
people do not think about.
The Property Management Software, PMS, program is a very important aspect of
the entire hotel. The house keeping staff used the PMS program to control rooms. This
software is made up in modules designed to insure the smooth operation of the hotel
property in the areas of hotel management, reservations, hospitality, accounting, POS,
and reporting. This program is important for the communication with the housekeeping
and the front and back office. The software has both back office and front office system
capabilities. The front office functions in the program consist of operations that
housekeeping must use to determine which rooms need to be cleaned. Some operations
in this function that housekeeping refers to are management of hotel guests and rooms
and that will include guest history information, individual and group reservations,
housekeeping, check-in/check-out, and night auditing which collects and posts room and
guest data. This software has remote system access to access the hotel’s PMS over the
Internet or through a direct phone dial-up which allows data to be sent to a remote
location or home office and printed. Mr. Lopez checks this program every morning at
7:20. He gave our group an example of how he typically uses this program. Mr. Lopez
showed us the total amount of rooms that needed to be cleaned on the day of the
interview, which were 109 rooms. There were six housekeeping women on the day of
the interview. Mr. Lopez showed us how to divide the 109 rooms by the six
housekeeping women to determine that each housekeeper was required to clean 18 rooms
that day. Mr. Lopez assigns each housekeeper to a specific room based on the schedule
chart.
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The House Keeping Report Menu, also known as the Room Status Report in our
book, is the worksheet that lists all of the items needed to be cleaned in a room and is
checked off regularly by the housekeepers when cleaning. After cleaning, the rooms are
inspected and the report menu is used again to check off what has been inspected. The
inspection can only take three to four minutes. Mr. Lopez let our group know, during the
interview, that there were 140 rooms that needed to be inspected that night. The House
Keeping Report Menu is about two pages long for each room and includes other
information as well. Some of the other information includes times of checkout and even
late checkouts. The worksheet uses abbreviations for the status of the room. For
example, VR stands for vacant rooms and OC stands for occupied rooms. During the
lectures in class and the information we have learned from the book, there were many
discussions about the issues with room status discrepancies between housekeeping and
the front desk. To avoid the room status discrepancies the Renaissance has devised a
system in which the housekeepers log in to the room status over the phone system and it
is automatically changed in the computer system at the front desk.
The facts given by Mr. Lopez about the room cleaning was very important. The
housekeeping staff starts cleaning the rooms at 8:30 am on Monday through Friday. On
the weekends, the housekeeping staff starts cleaning at 9:00 am. For the late checkout
rooms, a certain group within the housekeeping staff is called around 11:30 am and clean
those rooms tell 5:00 pm. Mr. Lopez informed our group that the house keeping staff
must work very hard and fast so, the hiring process is very crucial for this job. The
standard amount of rooms cleaned per day is about sixteen rooms per each staff member.
The housekeeping staff’s standard time for cleaning a particular room is fifteen minutes.
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When comparing the interview with Mr. Lopez with what we have learned in the class,
we discovered there were several similarities we came across. The book discusses team
cleaning as a possible housekeeping operation. We found that the Renaissance has a form
of team cleaning. This is where the housekeepers work in floor-to-floor cleaning teams
but operates independently on each room. They also have runners that stock their linen
for them.
During our interview, Mr. Lopez spent a large amount of time explaining the
struggles of taking care of the linens in the hotel. The housekeeping staff changes linen
every 3rd for the rooms. There is a worksheet that the staff uses to show the amount of
linen needed to be cleaned and linen that has already been cleaned. In the hotel, the
washers and dryers are very small for the amount of linens that need to be cleaned.
Therefore comforters are not ever really washed. It takes the staff about forty- five
minutes to wash a load of linens and twenty-five minutes to dry a load of linens. The
housekeeping staff spends an hour and a half or more transporting linen. Transporting
linen time is from 6:00 to 8:00 every day. The hotel keeps a backup of three of each type
of linen. This is because many people steal the linen in their rooms and the hotel needs a
large amount of backup to make up for the loss. There is a linen cage on each floor to
store the floor par. These cages have shelves with labels on each type of linen to keep the
linen organized. The housekeeping staff must take inventory in the cage every three
hours.
Most people forget the other items in the hotel that the housekeeping staff must
clean. Cleaning the massive windows in the lobby and other parts of the hotel is
probably the most time consuming task. The staff must also clean and take care of the
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furniture in the lobby, meeting rooms, and the Prevision Island, the walkways to
banquets. The housekeeping staff cleans carpet on every floor regularly. There is a
special housekeeping staff for cleaning the outside floors, furniture, and pool in the hotel.
Public restrooms are cleaned and inspected regularly as well.
Engineering
The engineering department is the backbone of the hotel. The duties of the
engineering department includes but is not limited to maintaining the mechanical and
technological aspect of the hotel, fixing problems with guest amenities, fixing out of
order rooms, and keeping the hotel in top shape. It is the responsibility of the engineering
department to make sure that everything is running to the highest standard when it comes
to the mechanical and technological needs of the hotel and its guest.
The head of engineering at The Renaissance is Rick Johnson. He is the heart and
soul of the engineering team. We did not get a chance to meet any of the other engineers
that day. He took care of everything around the hotel. The roof was the central location
for most of the hotels mechanical and technological storage stations. It included
lightning rods that kept the hotel safe from lightning strikes. There were cords that led
from the lightning rods to metal boxes that got rid of the energy from it. The bathroom
vents were located also located on the roof was the storage area for the heating and
cooling of the building. This room had been named the pent house. Also in the same
storage area were the devices that were used to heat and cool the water throughout the
hotel, it also included large pipes that ran across the sides and the ceiling of the room.
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Located outside the pent house was the communications hub. It held all the
communicating devices inside of it. It held all their phone lines, which was not many
because they did not feel the need to have hundreds of phone lines because they figure
that since everyone uses cell phones they do not need many phone lines. Their Wi-Fi
runs from the top of the building into the interior of The Renaissance. In addition, they
used AT&T for their communications services.
There was a building located next to the pent house that held part of the
electronics system. Inside the room, it held the controls and power for the elevators. Mr.
Johnson informed us that the elevators in The Renaissance cannot fall and if they do fail,
they would automatically lock up and not move until one of the engineers come and get
you.
The control area also consisted of the controls for the spas, pool, and the main
power for the hotel. The roof also had a fake owl that was used to help keep the pigeons
off the roof so that there is less to clean up. Mr. Johnson also told us that an outside
company did the windows on the outside of the hotel.
When entering the leasing area of the hotel, he showed us what the hotel looked
like before it was fitted with all the decorations. He explained how it was going to be
turned into a competing restaurant, which will compete with the one in the hotel. Mr.
Johnson explained that the hotel was poorly built and built too quickly. He said that it
was more like a ten-year-old building then one that had only been operational for a little
over a year, it made him angry cause then they always had to fix things within the hotel.
Some of the problems that he had while being at the hotel was having to go up
and help guest with their problems. Because most of the time it was something that was
unplugged or stolen from the room and had to be fixed or replaced. Another problem that
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he had to deal with was helping a woman get from her bed to her wheelchair everyday
because he did not know how to properly do it or do it without it being inappropriate.
Therefore, he would send two people up there to make sure nothing would go wrong.
The last problem Mr. Johnson told us about was the situation with bed bugs. They were
found in one bed in the hotel, and because they found it on one they had to spray the
rooms next to it, below and above it to make sure that the bugs did not spread anywhere.
The last thing he told us was that they had no out of order rooms. He stated that if they
had out of order rooms they were not making money, so they got to those rooms quickly.
We learned a lot about the inner workings of the hotel and the importance of having a
good engineer in the hotel.
Front Office
The front office is broken into several different parts. The woman that we
interviewed at the hotel name was Julie. She is from Queens, NY and attended St John’s
University in New York City. Everything that comes to the hotel has to go through the
front office first. The reason for this is because the front office is the in charge of all the
guests’ packages and the front office is located just as you walk into the hotel. An
interesting fact that Julie said to us was that nobody in the front office has any prior hotel
experience. She claims that is a good thing because they are being taught for the first time
how to do things. This is better than working at another hotel then joining the
Renaissance because you would have to change the way you do things. Julie told us that
each employee gets a little pocket that explains how you should approach people and the
way to act towards them. The reason in which they do this she told me that it has just to
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be stuck into your brain. We asked Julie how many no shows the hotel usually gets and
her reply was, “A bunch”. The report of how many guests are at the hotel comes out at
night, when the night auditor is working and it is called the executive summary. There are
three different categories of groups of people that come to the hotel. They are broken into
gold, silver, and platinum. The most money for the hotel is coming from the platinum
where they make up 11% of the revenue of the hotel. Julie said that platinum’s get a lot
of privileges and points on their cards. In order to be platinum you have to go to many
different renaissances. The Renaissance is part of the Marriot chain hotels, so the
platinum card is used by all of those hotels. Another thing that Julie said she likes to do is
to give people upgrades. One example of a time she did it was when a couple who
recently got married and was on their honeymoon, she gave them an upgrade on rooms.
The reason why she does this is that she wants to make sure that these people come back
again, and enjoy their time. Julie said that the occupancy rate for the hotel is at 70
percent, which is a lot better compared to the 50 percent for other hotels in the area. The
rates on the hotels tend to go up and down it just depends on what time of the year you
are trying to go to Raleigh.
The software that the hotel uses is called the Hotel Management Property
Software. The software has modules that are designed to make sure that the hotel is
running a smooth operation in all the areas of Hotel Management. The software has both
the front and back office capabilities. The front office functions consist of operations that
manage hotel guests and rooms they also will have the guest history information,
individual and group reservations, housekeeping, guest accounting, night audit, check out
and city ledger. The back office functions consist of operations that manage hotel
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personnel and assets and include payroll, accounts payable, asset accounting, general
inventory, and personnel/human resources. Features crucial to hotel property
management software for front and back office operations are guest reservations, guest
check-in/check-out, also maintaining guest facilities. Hotel Management property
software should have remote system access to access the hotel’s PMS over the Internet,
or through a direct phone dial-up.
The staff is ranked and rated each week. The higher the score the better you have
worked during the week. An interesting fact that Julie told us was that hotel was rated
number 2 in the area when it first opened which pretty is amazing, because usually it
takes time for a hotel to get that high. Also especially since the front office staff had
never worked in a hotel before until the Renaissance opened up. Julie told us that not all
of the front office staff stays in front of the hotel, sometimes they are in the back
working.
The Hotel has many different parts of the area in which they own. One thing that
they own is the Gold’s Gym. They have a deal with the gym that anyone staying at the
hotel can go there free of charge, so that is another bonus that they have.
The front office does not have many issues with other departments. Julie said that
they have never had any arguments with the marketing department, banquet, chef or the
general manager. However, they have serious issues with the housekeeping staff as you
could imagine. The reason why there are so many issues is that there are so many
problems with the rooms because of the way that they are cleaned. Julie told us that there
are at least three problems with the rooms a day because of the way they are cleaned and
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sometimes they are not even cleaned because they simply put the wrong things on their
sheets.
Once we concluded with the tour of the hotel, we sat down with Megan Brewer
Catering Sales Manager, the Human Resource Manager Mark Gifford and the General
Manager Bill Gant, for a lunch and more information on the hotel.
Catering Sales Manger
Megan Brewer’s job at the Renaissance Raleigh Hotel at North Hills Mall as the
Catering Sales manager is to book and detail the events. She meets with the clients to
plan the event and communicate that information to the departments within the hotel. She
negotiates the price of the events, organizes it and puts it into order and actually meets
with the group wanting to put on the event but does not execute the event. Although she
may be seen at the beginning of a banquet or event, she is not in charge of carrying it out.
The Renaissance Raleigh Hotel at North Hills Mall has 8,000 square feet of
meeting space. The Renaissance Ballroom, where they hold the large social events and
weddings is 5,400 square feet. They have one banquet manager, two full time banquet
captains, and one part time banquet captain. The banquet captain is part of their plum
perfect program, in which they all wear purple coats, so that they are easy for the guests
to spot when something is needed and they can provide excellent service and leadership
for events. When we visited the hotel, we actually got to see the hotel setting up for a
banquet and the purple jackets stood out, which allowed them to be better noticed to
bring faster service.
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The banquet manager’s job is to staff and oversee events. The banquet captain
actually manages the staff and the event and is the one mainly there on the floor checking
in with the client. As the banquet captain, he or she reports to the banquet manager. The
Renaissance has a BEO (Banquet Event Order) Sheet meeting every Monday and
Thursday to review the next few days’ events in the hotel. The meeting consists of the
banquet captain or banquet manager, whoever is available, a kitchen leadership
representative as in the executive chef or sous chef, and the catering managers. Together
they sit down, talk through the BEOs, and highlight any important notes on groups.
When planning a banquet or event, the biggest challenge faced by Megan is
staffing. Trying to figure out how many servers are needed for an event can be very
difficult especially because the group is not required to give the exact amount of guests
attending until three days prior to the actual event. People tend to drop or add the amount
of guests and that requires either more or less staff needed which can be tricky because if
your under staffed the even could be a disaster. The bigger the group the harder the
banquet is because you have to worry about more. You have to make sure that everyone
at the event is served at the same time and that there is not a shortage of food. You can
run into problems such as people being allergic to different kinds of food and those
special needs have to be dealt with rather than accident happening. For most weddings
and dinners, the sea bass is most popular menu item.
Most events that are held at the Renaissance are high-end and can be very
expensive. The most expensive wedding that was put on was 46,000 dollars just for the
hotel portion of the wedding, which did not include invitations or the wedding cake or
anything like that. On average, most weddings cost around 25,000 dollars to put on at the
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Renaissance hotel. Although the economy has taken a fall, the number of bookings has
not been impacted. The location and level of service associated with the Renaissance has
helped it provide the best service and bring in much business. Since The Renaissance has
only been opened a little over a year, the amount of people who have been laid off in the
surrounding area have been hired by the hotel. The hotel is also very distinct as opposed
to the hotels in the surrounding areas, with a higher level of service and is unique.
Megan’s biggest event she has helped plan was a Bat mitzvah, with two hundred
and fifty people that needed to be served. There was a theme, which was the musical
Wicked, and they actually had actors form the North Carolina Theater come in to
perform. Its total cost came out to be around 100,000 dollars, yet just for decorations
alone a total of 6,000 dollars was spent and much more on the lighting and actors. Some
groups have requested some ridiculous things to be at their event such as someone
brought in a camel, and another group wanted the entire ceiling draped with linen. Many
groups ask for ice sculptures and other sorts of extravagant table decorations.
When first starting at a hotel, it can be tricky to get the hang of how operations
run. Before initially beginning a fulltime job at a hotel, Megan recommended that
someone might want to get an intern ship at a major hotel chain to get a glimpse of how
things go. It can be hard beginning in a new environment after only having a college
degree but no actual experience. Getting that prior experience can be key in knowing
what to expect when you first start rather than being overwhelmed. The Renaissance
provides a great training program called Service Excellence in which every employee has
to go through before they can start. Megan’s idea for making events easier in the future
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was to create a website where brides can communicate with the catering manager and
other vendors. The hotel industry is becoming more technology based, which makes it
easier to contact each other such as emailing menus and other event information.
Conclusion
Our trip to the Renaissance hotel gave us an inside perspective on the intricacies
of hospitality management. From this experience, we were able to extract firsthand
knowledge from working class professionals in our industry. We were able to learn about
the many challenges that these professionals deal with on a daily basis. We observed the
many functions of each department and the importance of cooperation and
communication between these departments. Each of the departments left us with a lasting
impression and helped us relate to what we have been learning all semester to actually
working in the hotel industry.
The front office manager Julie is the first face that most people will see when
guests walk in the hotel. Therefore, she has to be there to greet and start the guests with a
positive experience. In Lodging 2100 we learned all about the different aspects regarding
the front desk and how they operate. This experience of the hotel visit really opened my
eye on how complex the front office really is. We learned so much about how an upscale
hotel like the Renaissance is run and operated in today’s economy. They should us how
hospitality should be in the industry and how even though they may charge more than
most hotels in the area, they are still having great success in the area. The Renaissance
definitely knows what they are doing, and they do a great job at making you feel
welcomed in their house.
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The Catering Sales Manager, Megan Brewer, was very informative on how to
keep the customer happy and how to work with them so that they have a good experience
with the hotel and will want to come back. She is faced with a new demand from guests
every day, so that she can provide quality service by communicating with vendors, the
staff, and the guests themselves.
The privilege of meeting with chef Wendel gave us a unique opportunity to gain
insight on the food and beverage aspect of hospitality management. Chef Wendel was
very friendly and forthcoming about the day-to-day operations and his responsibilities at
the hotel. He gave us a tour of the kitchen and showed us how things flow during
business operations.
We obtained a large amount of information from our interview with the Executive
Housekeeper, Mr. Lopez. Learning how to operate the Property Management Software
Program contributed to this educational experience. The hotel’s practice on resolving
room status discrepancy issues gave each of us an insight on effective problem solving.
We learned how hard working the house keeping staff is and how organized and prepared
the Executive Housekeeper must be to manage the entire operation.
In conclusion, we learned a lot about the inner workings of the hotel. It was eye
opening to see that most of the mechanical needs of the hotel were located on the roof.
We learned that the engineering department has a lot they have to do and faces more
challenges then just fixing things that go wrong around the hotel. The engineers at The
Renaissance are knowledgeable and very good at what they good.
After going to the Renaissance, we will be able to take what we learned and put it
towards our internships and careers. The employees and managers welcomed us and
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because of it we greatly appreciate being able to have the chance to go and tour the hotel
and interview the department heads. The encouraging environment made us feel welcome
and allowed us to connect with the managers and get a feel for their jobs, helping prepare
for the future.
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Works cited
Johnson, Rick. Personal Interview. 5 April 2010.
Lopez, Diego. Personal Interview. 5 April 2010.
Megan Brewer. Personal Interview. 5 April 2010.
Anderson, Julie. Personal Interview. 5 April 2010.
Wendel, Dean. Personal Interview. 5 April 2010.
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