When Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Inc. embraced Six Sigma in 2001, it was able to develop innovative customer focused solutions and to transfer these solutions across the global organization.
One glaring proof was when one of its chains of hotel, The Westin Turnberry Resort in Scotland won the IQPC’s 5th Annual European Six Sigma Summit in London on April 28, 2004. The five star resort hotel won the fiercely contested European Award category “Design for Six Sigma” for a reservation project.
With the innovative project, The Westin Turnberry Resort has created a single point of contact from which all the individual reservation channels for hotel, golf, spa, transport, restaurant and outdoor activities are received and redirected. They have formed a multi-skilled Resort Sales team that can immediately confirm and cross sell any request received by the hotel.
The benefits were immediate. To date there has been an 11.95% increase in incremental spend by customers and increase in rooms revenue of more than 19%. In addition, The Spa revenues have increased from GBP 91 per booking to GBP 141 per booking as a result of the newly centralised reservation group, which enables the maximum utilisation of treatment rooms and
therapists.
As a result of this success, the Starwood Hotels & Resorts group is continually sending some of their people for Six Sigma training. As of August 1 last year, the hotel company, with over 740 properties globally, had trained over 1000 associates from all over the world to become Six Sigma Green Belts, the first training stage in the Six Sigma development program. And executives of the hotel company will be sending more associates from Europe, Middle East, Africa, and other regions for an intensive Six Sigma training.
Paul James, Master Black Belt, North West Europe said, “This project is just one example of countless SIX SIGMA projects we have going on in many of our hotels across the world. We are constantly looking at ways we can improve the guest experience and make the use of our associates time and skills more productive, so it is a win-win situation. However, SIX SIGMA projects are not a one off – ‘lets do it and leave it – there needs to be on-going monitoring of results to ensure that improvements made are continuous and sustainable.”
That’s definitely putting value for money where it should be.
Green Belts Galore at Starwood Hotels & Resorts
