General Manager of Bougainvillea Beach Resort Sharon Hugh-White presented Pauline Bynoe with the South Coast Housekeeping Employee of the Year award.
Special awards
9/17/2012
Unsung heroes of the hotel sector acknowledged
THEY have been described as the unsung heroes and the backbone of the hotel sector.
Though usually working assiduously behind the scenes, on Saturday night, the housekeeping staff had their moment in the spotlight as activities for International Housekeeping Week drew to a close with Gala Affair held at the Crane Residential Resort.
General Manager of the Crane, Michael Phillips, acknowledged the importance of housekeeping to the hospitality industry and ultimately to the future prospects of the Barbadian economy, particularly during difficult economic times.
“All of our major source markets are going backwards. I went to a BHTA meeting a couple days ago and fairly ordinary results were shared in all of our major source markets with the possible exception of Canada.
“So the market is intensely competitive and most of your general managers will acknowledge that all of our inputs that go into our product makes us, in some cases, a little uncompetitive. We cannot compete on the basis of price, [but] we can compete on the basis of outshouting the competition in advertising. We have to compete on the basis of service excellence, which I believe is really critical to our position in the market,” he continued.
“So it is not only what you do when servicing the rooms, but how you interface with the guests, the sort of resourcefulness and creativity that we have seen in the past week. So that is very important to all of us,” Phillips said.
The week of activities in which most of the hotels on the South Coast participated, began with a service at the Hawthorne Methodist Church. It continued with a buffet breakfast at Courtyard by Marriott and Bougainvillea, an island tour, an Inter-Hotel cleaning and decorating competition, a social evening, and a Health fair at Accra Beach. It concluded with the Gala evening, with dinner and awards at the Crane.
The staff had an opportunity to showcase their talent in a number of musical selections and a modelling segment by designer Cathy-Ann Baird. (JH)
