Guest Preparation Like Never Before

For owners, managers, and employees alike, the past few years have been, in a word: unpredictable!

Stay open - stay closed. If closed, for how long, and if so, how to best prepare while we wait. And when our guests return, how will we be ready to serve them better than ever?

Challenging questions like these have been dogging all of us for an extended period – including all of us at Columbia Hospitality.

But there are ever increasing lessons learned and some real bright spots - this roller-coaster has allowed us to be creative, never taking what we do for granted, while taking our business and how we service our guest to new levels of fluidity.

Across our management portfolio of urban hotels, destination lodges, residential communities, golf courses, restaurants and bars, spas, and distinctive venues, we, along with many of our colleagues, have not only learned to survive, but how to truly thrive.

When you ask, Jenne Oxford, General Manager?at The Lodge at St. Edward State Park (The Lodge is an 84-room, adaptive re-use converted seminary, located North of Seattle), you hear a common story, "How can we best serve our guest, when hospitality talent is too often not returning?".

But let's lay out an initial plot twist – The Lodge only opened in May of 2021, so the plot thickens as this property had to find their entire staff in the Covid world. In the case of Oxford, how could they best look after their new guests when many of the industry veterans weren't returning; so, she and her team had to find creative ways to seek out and secure new talent that might never have worked in the hotel industry before.

"As we ramped-up to open this beautiful lodge, we were concerned and focused that we couldn't find enough seasoned team members with years of hospitality experience," Oxford explained, adding "the 'great resignation' left us wondering where these people had gone and if they would ever return."

Oxford and her team had to think through a new guest solution and re-think best practices to follow. So, with Columbia, they developed a new set of adapted best practices as they started hiring 130 new team members.?They had to find new individuals, to do an outstanding job, all while defining the guest experience at a brand-new destination, many with little to no high-end resort background.

Luckily, Oxford was very aware of the phrase, "necessity is the mother of invention."

For starters, "I had never had to rely so heavily on teens before," Oxford stated. "This was a real first, so much so that we had to get a special business license from the state to hire local, high schoolers. With unique hours for entry level jobs, they still had to go through the hiring process, but you can't ask, 'what prior experience do you have'?

To those on the hiring team, it came down to a look in their eye, an eagerness to work, a curiosity about hospitality, and the type of personality that could be developed into future guest service leaders.

Oxford and her team also looked at hiring people from other service sectors, often without a fine dining or resort resume. "We brought in folks from limited service and quick service operations. These are amazing people in roles and experiences that we might not have sought out in the past. Once we changed strategies and focused on even more listening, and learning, we found our next talented team members," Oxford said.

Again, the team at The Lodge looked for more than the ability to serve, they looked for personalities that would suit and support their brand; great people that could naturally connect with the guest and were open to learning new skills in a whole new environment. "We are not completely void of seasoned hospitality leaders – we intersperse experienced teams from other Columbia properties to bring alongside the new team members, helping to accelerate their process to develop, train, support and nurture," Oxford said, adding, "we have learned a lot though this course of action, and best of all, we celebrate our growing team on a daily basis!".

This mentality has also paid off with their valet team. They have hired charming people who know how to make a great first impression. They can train the rest. Train what exactly? How to drive a stick shift, for one, but that's for a whole other article.

The Lodge team has also had to look at innovative technology solutions to support the team and elevate the guest experience while still focusing on the profitability of the property. "Located in the Pacific Northwest, we are always open to exciting new technologies," Corey Roettgers, Lodge Manager, states, "and this open-mindedness is working to everyone's benefit".

Oxford concluded, "Where we can't hire or train a team member, we can augment the human experience with today's best technology."

Between seasoned experts blended with energized team members, continual training and support, all reinforced with the latest technology, The Lodge at St. Edward is enjoying a record setting first year while guests are experiencing a destination unlike few others. 

Meanwhile, in Montana, we find a quite different, yet just as creative solution to great guest service.

Justin Robbins, General Manager at Sage Lodge arrived for duty in February of 2020 - a month that started a domino effect, unlike any we have seen in modern history.

One of the first big questions Robbins faced was, "Should we shut down the lodge due to COVID?", Robbins stated. "The entire team helped address this question. Things were just starting to heat up, but we wanted to hear from everyone on the team, and the consensus was to remain open - with new safety protocols in place."

Although much of the U.S. was closing, the Sage Lodge team knew people would still want to travel, if only in their own backyard. "Many other hotels had temporarily closed down, but we had made a commitment to ourselves and our guests to be a safe place of refuge to get away from all that was going on in the world," Robbins stated. "And when we look back over the past two years, we aren't facing the same hiring challenges others are seeing now." "We believe that, because we didn't close, our team members stuck with us, so we didn't face the reality so many others had with employees leaving and not returning to the hospitality sector," Robbins mentioned.

Robbins and his leadership team not only retained their crew, but increase their wages, offered even greater perks and, "continue treating them like royalty - as we know, a happy team member equals a happy customer," Robbins noted.

They did something else they had not planned on doing, "we provided deeper cross-training efforts," Robbins remarked. "We hadn't focused on that level of training before, but wow, did it work well," he added. "By offering our team the ability to train in other departments – server to housekeeping to kitchen to front desk - not only did we lower the risk of boredom, but we also increased employee hours and retention. And if by chance anyone did get sick from COVID-19, they were immediately quarantined, and their job fulfilled by another, cross-trained team member. It was seamless," Robbins observed, continuing, "to the guest, they didn't see a blip in service levels and always saw a contented/efficient team member."

However, the 'great resignation' combined with their remote location (just North of Yellowstone National Park in Paradise Valley) brought other learning opportunities. "We may have kept our existing team happy (and here), but as more and more guests arrive at our lodge, we needed to augment the number of talented team members to attend to their needs. We were starting to really stretch, so we chose the government's J1 program to help."

To confront the realism of people not looking for new work, Robbins and the Sage Lodge team tapped into the J1 program – a non-immigrant visa issued by the United States to research scholars, professors and exchange visitors participating in programs that promote cultural exchange, especially to obtain medical or business training within the U.S. 

"Using the J1 program has provided us a dependable set of resources." "These are great people, with the schooling, talents and backgrounds we need to best serve our guests. Our newer team members still bring the highest level of competency, skills and hospitality, so we are thrilled we made this decision," Robbins mentioned. He continued, "We recognize that, for many in our region, the past couple of years have not been kind, but we, somehow, foreshadowed what was to come, and with the joint decision to remain open, to cross-train, increase salaries and perks and look for new employee opportunities, we are heading into our third straight year of 95+% Summer occupancy, our highest guest satisfaction scores, lowest employee turnover and highest profitability. That makes all of us breathe a little easier, while keeping our guests happier than ever" Robbins concluded.

Although the Lodge at St. Edward State Park, and Sage Lodge might be physically miles apart and have taken different routes to weather the storm, they have encountered and solved similar queries, how, through good times and bad, can one still offer the greatest level of guest services and experiences while still looking after their team members?

People have come through this more resilient, better, wiser. They may have some battle scars they didn't ask for, but as the saying goes, "what doesn't break you makes you stronger!" We have learned together, grown together, and succeeded together and our guests are the better for it. We just needed to be open to the possibilities. That's what makes our industry so exciting, so resilient, and so intriguing. It is all about the people who are fanatical about keeping our guests happy and content.

Matt Hagerman is Executive Vice President of Columbia Hospitality