Investing in staff from Kent hotelier roundtable

First, David Hayward from Oracle.

Hello,

everyone.

Yeah, so we were kind of discussing the issue and it was mainly around the sort of the staff, getting the staff, the younger staff, the cost of the younger staff.

the commitment from the younger staff.

So we were blaming everything on young people.

And then we kind of looked at, well, why is that? So, you know, as a result of lockdown that has kind of caused kids today to not have that commitment that we had when we were all kind of getting into hospitality, when we were all doing...

kind of 24 hour shifts and leaving at five o'clock in the morning um and then we kind of looked at so what is the solution is it kind of using technology to a certain degree it is so we could be using things like qr codes on table ordering um self check-in but then again we have to look at the property a property like this is not going to have people kind of checking in on like a kiosk at the front desk for example so um i don't think we came to a conclusion did we come to a

Giles here, this is a first.

Thank you for jumping in so early.

Giles from Bramley Court Hotel.

So we discussed that focusing on retention of our culture and our teams is really important.

I think we were discussing that generally outside of London and the kind of boroughs, I would classify us on the cusp of that, but we're finding a blend of staff is good.

Having older staff members in the team kind of Made a bit more consistency with the service offering that was being offered and gave us a chance to train some of those younger people that were in place.

Last minute demands causing a bit of a challenge on stretching the teams.

I mean, I had that issue last night.

I think we sold 30 rooms on the day and then you got more people then wanting dinner and more people wanting to be served.

And then have you got enough chefs in the kitchen? Have you got enough produce? Over-ordering on food? I think we discussed was...

a challenge and all of those things are quite expensive and then we discussed also kind of focusing on retaining our teams really so make sure there's plenty of training schemes and opportunities to develop those people so they don't want to disappear or move on really so yeah

You're alluding to our next topic.

Thank you very much indeed, Giles.

Very interesting there, that's for sure.

I mean, especially around the technology aspect of how does AI help you predict demands that's unpredicted, especially when it comes to making sure you've got enough stock in.

On this table, who took some notes? I'm handing over to Prem from ByteLux.

So we continued on the conversation about short lead times and we were just discussing how post-COVID hotels obviously wanted to open everything up.