Mr. Escoffier

Food & Beverage

Room Service Add-ons that Make Money

By Marcel Escoffier, Associate Professor, FIU School of Hospitality Management

The Measured Approach to Room Service

The home as a fortress idea has been much discussed. Many people in America have a lifestyle centered on home activities. From working at home to home schooling, to home media / entertainment centers, nearly our whole life can be lived within the confines of our own home.

We hoteliers have come to realize this. The suite hotel is becoming something other than an extended stay or family traveling on the cheap travel option. However a historian of hotel construction and use may interpret the trend, it is clear that most hotels today have larger rooms, more suite options, and room furnishings that encourage a guest to use the room for something other than a private bathroom with a bed.

We in the F+B end of the business have not been sitting idly by while this has happened. Foodservice options have become better, with more variety, more creativity, and more service options. Hotels now offer food choices from their specialty restaurants in addition to their coffee shops. But we have a long way to go.

Let's begin at the beginning: the goal with room service is to maximize sales but not at the expense of profitability. It does us no good to increase sales by offering 24 hour room service when it increases our cost of operations (usually labor costs) so that we are having hourly sales late at night of $50 and expenses of $75!

So what can be done to achieve those dual goals of increasing sales while also increasing profits? Well, when confronted with any problem, as a manager, I usually begin by trying the easy solutions first. The easiest is to tweak the menu so as to increase orders and revenues.

Tweaks to the Menu

The current room service menu probable has a conglomeration of menu items. There are the traditional breakfast, daytime, and diner items usually coupled with a few items that the Chef or F+B Director believe differentiate the hotel. The menu pricing structure probably hasn't been reviewed in a while (if at all) and individual menu item prices probably are some function of their production costs plus some differential for the convenience factor of room delivery.

I'm a "top - down" kind of person, so I would begin tweaking the overall menu pricing structure. Sounds like some super mathematical exercise, but it really isn't. We want a range of prices that reflect the value of our hotel services in the eyes of our guests. In other words, it this is a luxury hotel in an expensive city )like New York), than our menu pricing structure should reflect those attributes. A second analysis would be to look at the check averages for the various day parts. ("Day parts" is restaurant speak for the different meal periods.) If we determine that our check averages for breakfast, for example, are near the bottom of the range of possible breakfast check averages, than either we have priced our breakfast menu too high or we have not written a breakfast menu that demonstrates the true value of our offerings. (This is MBA-speak for, "We wrote a menu that fails to entice our guests to spend money on our more expensive items or we failed to write a menu that has offerings that our guests can be enticed to order.")

As I have mentioned in previous columns, studies have shown that hotel guests tend to want to eat a traditional breakfast. What is "traditional" for we Americans is not traditional for a Frenchman. Accordingly, the breakfast menu often becomes ungainly in its size and scope. One innovation that is gaining wider acceptance, especially in hotels catering to guests from many nationalities is to offer a breakfast menu that is, in essence, a written buffet wherein the guest "builds" his own breakfast from many options. I'd highly recommend a breakfast menu that includes some pictures so that the adventurous guest can see what a German might eat, or what "two eggs over easy" looks like.

Moving to the other day parts, many hotels are copying the casual dining menu style with the usual "pseudo-cuisine" selections like the ubiquitous quesadilla, or nachos, or food themed to other nationalities. Personally, I'd recommend a very limited selection of these things. The menu should offer items that reflect the region or location of the hotel property, in addition to the usual "favorites" like a hamburger or club sandwich.

New Menu Items

One advantage most hotels have over restaurants is the multitude of dining outlets available to guests. Most hotels has a coffee shop, a fine dining or other specialty restaurant, a pool bar, and banquet service. All of these outlets make it possible to offer multiple source menus for room service. "Multiple source menus" refers both the source of recipes (menu items) and to the ability to create special occasion menus. F+B Directors need to look not at room service as the special occasion, but at room service as a delivery system that allows us to market special occasions in the guests room.

"Special occasions" need not be especially special. A bedtime snack menu, or an in-room movie menu constitute special occasions. One hotel in Hawaii offers a "write postcards to your friends" menu where the guest gets a puu puu platter (an hors d'oeuvre platter) and two tropical drinks along with some post cards to facilitate a few hours on the balcony ("lanai" in Hawaiian) spent writing home about what a wonderful time they are having. Hum... direct mail marketing written by the guest to their friends touting the wonderful time they are having staying at the hotel and the guest pays the hotel for the menu. Is this the "best of all possible worlds"? How about what a hotel up in Orlando does; a "pack yourself for the trip home" menu with snacks TSA allows to be carried on board as well as some refreshments to make that chore go easier.

Wedding occasions, the closing on a lucrative contract while on a business trip, any reason that travelers have for staying at your hotel can be thought of as a special occasion. Like the top restaurants in France, multiple Table d'H^ote menus can help create a mood that guests will remember for a long time.

Let's Serve Something to Drink

As I write this I am in Florida where it is hot. I'm getting thirsty. I just came back from three weeks in the California wine country where things to drink usually mean "wine". At two of the four hotels I stayed at there was no beverage menu - nothing to entice me to order a drink; alcoholic or not. How silly. In California I was sitting in one of the World's great wine regions and the hotel had no wine available through room service! How dumb can we get?

Everything and anything that we offer at our various bars, lounges, night clubs, or through the various dining rooms at our hotel should be readily available for delivery to the room (assuming local liquor laws allow for this.)

Our room service menus should have wine suggestions for as many dishes as would be appropriate (let's forget the breakfast menu!) Food and Wine (or, as they say in the Wine Country, Wine and Food) pairings are the hottest fine dining trend. Why not offer a tasting menu for room service.

Fleets of drinks (like a fleet of martinis) have become relatively common at many bars, why not serve them up in the room. A case could be made that the hotel confronts much less liability getting a guest drunk up in his room than getting him drunk at the lobby bar. In any case, lets get real... $100 for a bottle of otherwise cheap booze? Why even put that on a room menu? We can generate more revenue having several rooms a night order a fleet of cocktails than waiting for the occasional order of one of those $100 bottles.

The Cocktail Revolution has hit the bar scene. Casual dining restaurants have been using the cocktail to boost check averages for a few years now. We should be doing the same up in the rooms. Given the bumpy ride many room service carts take going from the kitchens up to the rooms, I'd recommend a thoughtful look at alternatives to the usual cocktail glassware common in bars. Maybe Trader Vic (the originator of so many tropical drinks) was right in creating those pineapple shaped drink mugs and other pseudo-tropical drink containers. They at least kept down on the number of spilled drinks.

One less than adequate excuse I have heard for not selling liquor to guests in the room is that the waiter is not adequately trained in determining the age of the guest. Hey, if we can block risqu'e movies to select rooms we can block drink service to those rooms occupied by under age occupants. Another excuse for not emphasizing in room drink service was that it would cut down on the use of the mini bar. But may hotels have already cut back on the use of a mini bar due to other cost considerations. I see this excuse as another non-starter.

The key question here is; why are you making it more difficult for a guest to order beverages than to order food?

Beyond Food & Beverage: Delivering Room Service

Let's step back for a moment. We have hotel guests who are requesting we deliver things to their room. So far we have looked at food and beverage "things". But why stop there? Remember, this process is known as room service not food and beverage service to the room. Why not expand our horizons and deliver a whole host of services. "Oh, but we do," was one response by a hotelier to my question. But do we?

A service that is obscure or poorly advertised is a service that is going to be overlooked by a large portion of our hotel guests. Remember, the average hotel guest is far less knowledgeable about how hotels run than we are. They are not necessarily stupid, just ill informed. And we do nearly nothing to give our guests the needed information.

Most luxury hotels (and most hotels in general) have a Guest Services Directory in the room. Some are quite imposing documents, usually loose leaf, but many pages in length. Not something most guests are about to read through upon arrival. The room service menu should be out, visible, on the desk or, even, on the bed.

Since we have that menu in a place where a guests cannot fail to see it, let's suggest some fun things they can purchase from us. How about a "Spend the night at the movies" menu with popcorn, sodas, nachos, and, oh yes, the offer to have the waiter show the guest how to work that darn in room movie system. We stayed at a positively wonderful hotel in Napa, the Vintage Inn. Now, I may not be the most electronically inclined individual, but it took me almost 24 hours to, (1), figure out that the maid had left the TV on and set to an "easy listening" channel, and (2), how to turn off the TV! Let's get our room service people to be as helpful as the vast majority of bellmen who show guests how to turn on or off the air conditioning or where to get ice. (Advertise this service along with the food and beverages on that movie menu.)

Books and magazines are available at the gift shop. But how about offering delivery with the morning coffee or with a bedtime snack? I bet most gift shops are closed really early in the morning or very late at night.

Other gift shop services could also become a room service activity. While unpacking after arriving late at night I found out I had forgotten my razor and my deodorant. Why not offer a traveler's accessory pack for delivery to the room? I recommend it be delivered by room service since I am sure that they can also sell a night cap to the dehydrated airline passenger!

Why Tripling Room Service Revenues May not Triple Profits

OK, you revised the room service menu, made the service more elegant (tuxedo-clad waiters after 6), trained your staff to up sell. And it was a success (one hotel on Miami Beach tripled its sales.) But, wait... Profits fell. What happened?

First, you might have gotten caught up in a trend that is described in a magazine, but whose actual operation can be difficult. The Chef in your Room idea is used in some hotels. This is where the guest can order a meal that a Chef prepares in the guest's own room (usually a suite that includes a kitchen area.) Sounds like a great idea, and it is, but the pricing has to factor in costs beyond that of the time and labor on the part of a Chef. I respect most Chefs, but let's face it - they are not the neatest, cleanest people when they work. Food gets on the floor (and everywhere else), pans get dirty, and the Chef's workplace is anything but ready for photographs in Architectural Digest!

In the days when we did table side cookery, the Maitre d' or Captain would cook using techniques where, a) the mess was confined to a cart, b) the dirty dishes were swiftly whisked onto hidden areas of the cart, and, c) the person doing the cooking had a well-practiced script they would go through numerous times.

Cooking in the kitchen area of a guest room has many drawbacks when compared to tableside cookery. Extra time on the part of a maid, making sure no smelly food remains in the guest room, and establishing a traveling mis en place all pose operational headaches which must be taken into account.

On a more general note, profitability is a product of both the sale price of the good or service and its cost. But, without going too far into the mysteries of cost accounting, suffice it to say that opportunity cost must be considered in addition to direct cost. That is, the cost to the hotel of dedicating labor and materials to a specific room service product (like an in-room chef) is a product of both the direct costs of labor and materials and the "opportunity cost" of removing labor and materials from some potentially more profitable activity. For instance, having a world famous chef cook up in someone's room may cause numerous people down in the main dining room to be unhappy that they do not have that famous chef swooping around the dining room greeting the guests and emphasizing how lucky they are to be paying big bucks to eat his cuisine.

To a lesser extent this would be true of any room service activity. That waiter who is delivering popcorn and sodas for a movie experience might earn the hotel more money serving Kobi beef to guests.

This kind of analysis usually requires that the F+B Director to work closely with the Hotel Controller. In our modern hotels, I would highly recommend that this profit maximizing activity be performed by a revenue management person. But under the close eye of the F+B Director!

As stated at the beginning, Room Service should always be a money maker. The necessity to have 24 hour room service in order to have five stars doesn't mean that the F+B Director can throw up his or her hands and allow it to lose money. I've mentioned in previous articles how to keep costs in line in this area. But I hope that you consider adopting some of the money making ideas other hotels have used to make this a profit center.

Marcel R. Escoffier was an Associate Professor at the School of Hospitality Management Florida International University. He had over thirty years experience in hotels and restaurants throughout the U.S. Unfortunately, Mr. Escoffier passed away in September, 2009. We at HotelExecutive.com would like to continue publishing Marcel's articles on our website as a tribute to this brilliant man. The one thing we loved most about him most was his sense of humor. He would always make light of any serious situation, and this was reflected often in the articles he wrote for the Hotel Business Review. Mr. Escoffier can be contacted at editor@hotelexecutive.com Extended Bio...

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