Analyse de la maison de vacances Peter & Holidays (document en anglais)

Conflict

11/10/2012

5001 words

CONTENTS

Contents………………………………………………………………………………………………... page 1

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………… page 2

The Story……………………………………………………………………………………………..… page 4

Recommendations…………………………………………………………………………………. page 15

Escalating Conflict Situation…………………….……….…………………………………… page 16

Royal Resort Site Organizational Chart…………………………………………………… page 18

Head Office Organizational Chart ………………………………………………………….. page 19

References……………………………………………………………………………………………… page 20

Negotiations: Personal Action Plan……………………………..……… …………………. page 21

INTRODUCTION

Peter & Holidays (1) has 250 resorts and residences, varying in size (40 to 1200 apartments). The Royal Resort is one of their largest sites, with 900 houses and apartments that are rented out during the warmer season, from March until end of October. July and August are the busiest months with 100% occupancy by individual guests. In September and October there are a majority of conventions.

The guests rent the apartments from Saturday to Saturday. The apartments consist of a kitchen, dining room, bathroom, terrace (with a small garden) or balcony and bedrooms. Each apartment can accommodate from 2 to 10 guests. The Resort has a golf course, a convention centre, 3 swimming pools, shops, restaurants, an open-air theatre (for shows), tennis courts, a stable with ponies, an animal farm, a kid’s circus, jogging and fitness trails, a huge park and two lakes where boat rides are offered. Children’s activities and sports activities are available all day whereas entertainment is provided only in the evenings.

At the head office, there is the Tourism Operation Support Team who assists the sites in operations plus six business lines headed by six Directors of Operations. The real estate, accounting, finance, marketing, sales, purchasing and human resources departments (amongst others) are centralized.

The Director of the Resort is assisted by department heads: housekeeping, reception, maintenance/security, animation, conventions, retail and restaurants. He is sole responsible for the financial aspects, team management, security, animation and ambiance of the resort. The department heads are usually young adults who have worked their way up through the company. The highest turnover in department heads is in housekeeping. The population working in housekeeping is unskilled and somewhat difficult to manage. Being a non-rewarding job it is harder to find professional, serious staff. They are young people who are looking for summer jobs and/or unskilled people who find nothing else available so they are not very motivated to clean bathrooms and kitchens. They receive minimum wage and only work one day a week – on change-over day (2). Teams of two are preferred, taking them 20 minutes to clean a one bedroom apartment. Time increases with the size of the apartment. A team of two does 10 – 12 apartments in one change-over day. Budgets allow for one deep clean of the apartments per year but the Housekeeping Managers are relatively free to use these budgets as best they please, as long as they don’t over spend. The Housekeeping Manager hires, trains, motivates and manages his/her own teams. Unions are all powerful in these working groups, constantly striving to get better benefits and a minimum work load.

The Royal Resort has been looking for a Housekeeping Manager for nearly a year when this story starts. There is no one in the company that can manage such a big site so the Director has to do an external recruitment, preferably someone who has experience in 4 star luxury hotels as the Director of Operations’ priority is to increase the quality of the cleaning on the resort. Experienced Head Housekeepers for such large sites, gain twice the pay offered by Peter & Holidays. Recruitment, in this case, is done by the Director of Royal Resort and the head office Human Resources Director.

THE STORY

Rose has been in the hotel business all her life. She started out as a house maid in a 3 star hotel in Biarritz, her home town. When she was 30 years old she married but she felt she wanted to set a better example to her future children so she decided to become Housekeeping Supervisor. She trained in the hotel she worked at. Once she was promoted she changed company and travelled the world. She worked for a French company who has resorts all over the world and was soon promoted to Housekeeping Manager. This company is very structured and she had very little freedom to initiate her own ideas. Her husband, who had travelled with her, wanted to go back to France to settle down. So they went back where she found a more stable job running a small resort that rented out houses to their clients for weekends or longer stays. She did very well. She was a real hands-on manager, managing her staff of 8 house maids sternly yet in a relaxed and jovial atmosphere. She became obsessed with guest satisfaction, perfection and details. She treated the resort like her own business welcoming the guests as though they were family. Rose became a very good Housekeeping Manager. When she was 49 years old she was looking for a new challenge when her attention was drawn to a job advertisement she saw on a specialized web site. Peter & Holidays was looking for Housekeeping Managers for various sized resorts. This is what information she found

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