Company Visit - L'hotel Island South
Company Background
L’Hotel Management Company Limited (or L’Hotel Group) is a modern and state of art hospitality group. Its brand includes L’Hotel and Lodgewood series. The L’ hotel provides a comfortable stylish environment that is luxurious while affordable.
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L’Hotel
There are 4 L’Hotel throughout Hong Kong. All of the them offer an unwavering level of modern Asian hospitality, house exceptional facilities including swimming pools and fitness centers and feature high quality restaurants and trendy bars for guests and visitors alike.
The Lodgewood
The Lodgewood brand prides itself on providing a ‘home away from home’ for guests with two modern chic boutique hotels cum serviced apartments in urban locales. Ideal for long stay guests, the Lodgewood properties possess a young and energetic vibe in eco-friendly surroundings.
Apart from its business, L’ hotel group actively engage in corporate social responsibility. It is highly conscious in environmental protection. The L’Hotel Group was first recognized for its green operations in 2011 when L’Hotel Island South received the ISO 14001:2004 certificate for Environmental Management System, awarded by BSI Management Systems.
Company Development & Footprints
Image: Captured from website of L'Hotel Group
L'Hotel:
Tsuen Wan
L’hotel Nina et Convention Centre (1,608 rooms and suites)
Kwun Tong
L’hotel élan (254 rooms and suites)
Causeway Bay
L’hotel Causeway Bay Harbour View (275 rooms and suites)
Aberdeen
L’hotel Island South (432 rooms and suites)
Lodgewood
Mongkok
Lodgewood by L’hotel Mongkok Hong Kong (87 rooms and suites)
Wanchai
Lodgewood by L’hotel Wanchai Hong Kong (90 rooms and suites)
Our Visit
An area that offer to guests to have a rest with some refreshment for free.
LIS Cafe located on 3/F of L'Hotel Island South where offers brunches, tea buffets and an authentic noodle menu.
Front dest area that allows guests to do their check-in and check-out procedures.
View from one of their aqua suite on the top floor of L'Hotel Island South.
One of their city view rooms that offer single bed or double bed.
Special facilities in guest room toilet that are designed for disabled.
Q & A
1. How many rooms can be made up on average per day? How long does it take to prepare a standard guest room on average?
The room attendant of L’Hotel can make up average 16 rooms per day which takes around 30 minutes per room. Meanwhile, the make up time depends on the condition of the room; it takes longer time for check-out room but it takes shorter time for occupied room.
2. How can L‘Hotel differentiate itself from other hotels of similar positioning in terms of operations, service offerings and the number of headcounts?
L’Hotel offers luxury services and products to their potential consumers, which can stand out among their competitors. The moderate room rate helps to attract tourists, and with the luxury facilities such as three conference room, gym room etc. They believe even though the location of them is far from the high street (central district), yet they can build up the reputation by providing excellent services.
In addition, the atmosphere of L’Hotel is quite leisure which can also attract the consumer who seek for relaxation in the holiday. With the location near Ocean Park, it becomes a competitive edge to L’Hotel as local consumers can also check- in to the room after visiting Ocean Park.
In terms of the number of headcounts, in fact, there are fewer employees in L’Hotel Island South as the rooms in this hotel are relatively less than the others. Moreover, if there will be holding a bug event such as banquet, the hotel will hire some causal workers.
3. Does the rapid growth of the hotel online booking platforms such as Agoda, Expedia pose challenges or opportunities to your hotel? What would you do to deal with these challenges or opportunities?
This is both the opportunity and challenge to the Hotel. The Hotel can take the chance of having partnerships with different online booking platforms and hence do not need to rely only on single agent to conduct partnership business. Even if one platform agent terminates its contract, the Hotel can still optimize its profit by backing up from other agents. The Hotel also corporates with the partners by providing different experience packages, such as late check-out and upgrade with free of charge and the Ocean Park package. Hence, the variety of services and flexibility of operations becomes larger.
Yet, the rapid growth of hotel online booking platforms poses a challenge to the Hotel at the same time. As partners with the Hotel, the Hotel is required to pay commission to them. Generally, agents can receive 10-20% per each room rate as commission. With the number of partner increases, the commission in total also increase. Hence, the profit that Hotel can earn will decrease.
4. How do you position yourself since there are many hotels in Hong Kong?
The position of L’Hotel Island South is leisure hotel and affordable for guests. Since the hotel is proximate to Ocean Park, the Ocean Park guests could be attracted to stay in L’Hotel. Also, in order to deliver its leisure image, all of the room of L’Hotel Island South are spacious and in relaxing theme. Besides, L’Hotel insists to provide affordable but luxury services for guests. The room rate of standard room is kept to be around HKD600 as long as there are comprehensive facilities and services, for example, gym room and swimming pool.
5. Are there any additional charges for the 24-hour medical assistance and baby-sitting service?
In L'Hotel, they are providing 24-hour medical assistance and baby sitting service based on customers’ request. For both of the service, they are charging additional fees when the customers consume the services. Besides, for the baby-sitting service, the minimum hours of the service that customers have to consume is five hours.
6. How many cars and drivers are available to provide the hotel-airport limousine transfer service? Are they outsourced? If there are over-booked, what is your solution?
L'Hotel did not own any car and drivers in their hotel-airport limousine service (charge item). The service is now outsourcing, therefore the cars and drivers are available based on the outsourced company. However, L’Hotel based on the service order that they received from their clients to reserve the cars and drivers from the outsourced company. Since outsourcing can help them to lower the operating cost rather than owning their cars and drivers. Also, it can avoid over- booking as the serving providing company will follow the order from L’Hotel and then send correct number of cars to destination for transferring the guests. Mainly based on the market demand, L’Hotel will adjust the supply from the outsource company.
7. What would you do to maintain your business when facing the decreasing numbers of overnight staying tourists?
L’Hotel is nearby to the Ocean Park which many tourists would pay visit to. Besides, L’Hotel is only 15 minutes’ drive to Causeway Bay. The advantaged geographical location can still attract many tourists to stay overnight. Membership programme is introduced to encourage tourists’ re-visit to the Hotel.
8. What technologies do you adopt to maintain the sustainability of the hotel?
L hotel strives to go digitalized which reduces the use of paper so as to be environmentally friendly. Below are the examples of technologies from the hotel website that it adopted to maintain sustainability.
L’hotel élan are equipped with an eGuest System whilst Lodgewood by L’hotel Mongkok and L’hotel Island South offer guests a dedicated hotel app. L’hotel Group restaurants Forte and canton pot are proud providers of eMenus and guests can register for the Group’s Vivva rewards program online.
LED lights, which are more efficient than conventional lights and enjoy a longer lifespan, have been installed in all guestrooms whilst guests are encouraged to play their role by using ‘Guestroom Linen Change’ cards allowing for less electricity, water and laundry chemicals to be used. Some hotels have installed special chiller operations which maximize energy efficiency.
9. Why does L’Hotel join the VIVVA membership scheme? How would L’Hotel attract more people to join the membership?
VIVVA membership scheme, stated in the official website of L’Hotel, is an “All-in-One” loyalty programme for its Vivva members to earn rewards from eligible spending on a variety of dine and accommodation services. The rationale behind, as well as the market value, of this programme is that L’Hotel is intended to boost customer engagement and sustain a long-term reciprocal relationship with customers. Enabled to accumulate Vivva Dollars and possess eVouchers and enjoy a long list of fringe benefits under this scheme the customers are more likely to come back and consume in L’Hotel. What L’Hotel does with Vivva membership scheme is generate customer repeat purchase, which is, the host speaker remarked during the visit, similar to what Hang Seng Bank has been doing in the Cash Dollar scheme under “Enjoy” credit card service.
10. How do you manage the front office staff schedule? Are there any potential problems / risks to hire part-time staff?
The speaker did not directly respond to how they mange the front office staff schedule but just stated that the number of front-office staff is sufficient to deal with incoming customers. As for the potential problems or risks of hiring part-time staff, they normally forecast the approximate occupation rate by referring to historical rates in the same month of past year and hire some part-time or temporary (daily paid) staff as the past year did.
Reflection
It was an interesting company visit experience as hotel industry is totally different from what we had experienced before. All we observed before was operating mainly with goods and sometimes providing services to final customers while this was just operating by providing services. Hotels “produce” services to customers, but not goods, which required high customer interactions. Therefore, L’Hotel pays attention to customers’ experiences during their hotel stays and aims to provide the most valuable services to customers. When our group was having the site tour conducted by the Duty Manager of L’Hotel, he demonstrated a good example of caring for customers. He was willing to help their two customers who came from China to move their luggage into the lift and press the lift for them.
Besides, L’Hotel is actually one of the green hotel in Hong Kong and it saves energy by turning on dimmer light in corridors on the rooms levels and using recycled materials to decorate its corridors. However, customers are not familiar with this green operation in the Hotel and our group thinks that the Hotel could advertise more on it and do more to go green. For example, the Hotel could give discount to customers who would like to live in the rooms which the air conditioners are controlled above 23.5 degree Celsius and the volume of water running out from the tap is less than the normal one. Hence, customers are encouraged to contributed in being environmentally friendly.
References:
L'Hotel Management Co. Ltd. (n.d.) Social Responsibility. Retrieved on 22 March, 2016, from http://www.lhotelgroup.com/GroupSite/About-LHotel/Social-Responsibility
L'Hotel Management Co. Ltd. (n.d.) L'Hotel brochure final. Retrieved on 22 March, 2016, from http://www.lhotelgroup.com/CMSPages/GetAzureFile.aspx?path=~\l_hotel\media\images\group\about-us\l-hotel-group-corporate-brochure-%E5%A6%82%E5%BF%83%E9%85%92%E5%BA%97%E9%9B%86%E5%9C%98%E5%B0%8F%E5%86%8A%E5%AD%90-(nov-2015).pdf&hash=61683da18830f919c8e2727e713f21714b0674a3222177917cac79b83f4dab63
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