Dusseldorf On evenings like this in November, Cyrus Heydarian is a very satisfied hotel manager. His top restaurant “The Duchy” in the Düsseldorf five-star hotel Breidenbacher Hof was already fully booked for lunch, and all tables are now also occupied at dinner. Guests order kingfish sashimi from the Raw Bar, Eifler saddle of venison or speculoos tartlets. The service has their hands full to do their evening work with the professionalism and attention required in such restaurants.
In between, the boss welcomes one or the other guest – and distributes praise to the employees. He believes that they have understood his message: “Our main product in this hotel,” says Heydarian, “is service, nothing else. For this I do not need a recipient of orders, but people who put their heart and soul into it and are rewarded accordingly. “
With this quality of encounter, the best hotels in the republic compete for the guests’ favor. The number one in the Düsseldorf five-star cosmos is now being rewarded: In the second edition of the ranking “The 101 best hotels in Germany”, in which the Handelsblatt is a partner, the Breidenbacher Hof has moved up from sixth to third, only defeated by last year’s winner Vier Jahreszeiten from Hamburg and last year’s second Schloss Elmau in Krün in Upper Bavaria. The two top hotels in the very north and in the very south of the republic are jointly at the top this time.
The ranking clearly shows that hostels outside the metropolitan areas and with resort character are apparently better able to cope with the effects of the pandemic than many other top hotels: With Schloss Elmau in 1st place, Severins Resort & Spa (4th) on Sylt, Ofterschwanger Sonnenalp ( 7th) and the Tegernsee Bachmair Weissach Spa & Resort (8th) as the newcomer of the year, four holiday hotels are among the top ten.
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They are completed by the Mandarin Oriental Munich (5th), the Althoff Seehotel Überfahrt (Rottach-Egern / 6th), the Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa (Baden-Baden / 9th) and the Hotel Traube Tonbach (Baiersbronn / 10th century). )
For the first time, the 101 best ranking has also distributed prizes in six sub-categories. “The various categories support the customer’s decision-making process in their search for the best spa, city or grand hotel,” says Ingo C. Peters, head of the four seasons, the new winner.
His hotel also comes out on top in the grand hotels category, followed by the Breidenbacher Hof and the Adlon in Berlin. The other special award winners: the Mandarin Oriental Munich as the best city hotel, Brenners Park Hotel in the Spa / Health Resorts category, Althoff Seehotel Überfahrt (culinary hotels), European Court Heidelberg (hotels within historic walls) and once again Schloss Elmau (hideaways).
Similar to Heydarian in Düsseldorf, Peters in Hamburg also knows what has brought his company to the top again: Excellent service can only be achieved with excellent employees. “Luxury means investing in quality,” says Peters – also in that of the employees. During the pandemic-related short-time work, they invested in employee loyalty, increased salaries to 100 percent from the start and offered training.
It is a principle that is anything but a soft one, and has meanwhile become standardized and measurable. “In the past you invested in service when times were good, today it is exactly the other way around,” says Carsten K. Rath. For almost two years, the 101-best idea generator and Handelsblatt author has also been the director and operational head of the Center for Service Excellence (CSE) at the University of Koblenz-Landau.
At the CSE, the topic is approached in an academic way: Here, among other things, international standards are developed that are intended to help companies advance towards service excellence.
In hotels, this only works with well-trained and equally well-motivated staff. With which many houses find themselves in a dilemma. Because the pandemic has reinforced a trend that has been observed for years, but was often neglected in the years of glorious sales growth before Corona: Employees are running away from the accommodation industry, and potential new ones can hardly be enthusiastic about the job.
Luxury means investing in quality.
(Photo: Franziska Krug / Wilde and Partner)
The pandemic-induced drop in bookings and lockdowns play the role of the amplifier: “In the short-time work, the employees had a lot of time to think about how they want to continue to shape their lives,” says Heydarian. In many cases, they decided to break new ground – and migrated to other industries that are often better paid or offer more regular working hours.
The German hotel industry is now facing another corona winter, and the industry fears their effects on staff almost as much as possible declines in bookings or even lockdowns in the fourth wave of the pandemic.
The figures so far are clear: in April 2021 there were still a good 266,000 employees subject to social security contributions in the accommodation industry, two years earlier there were 307,000. There was also a drastic decline in the number of apprentices: in 2010 just under 37,000 young people decided to take up an apprenticeship, in 2020 it was only a little more than 17,000. The number of budding chefs has almost halved within a decade: Compared to 2010, 45.3 percent fewer people were trained in this profession in 2020.
Corona shows what difficulties the hotel industry has gotten into when it comes to payment. The earnings of many employees are in the low-wage sector, which they can often only leave with additional income through night and weekend allowances and tips – in times of short-time work, which forced employees into their own apartments, this additional income was lost.
The result: Many employees slipped below the Hartz IV limit. Heydarian’s personal conclusion: If the industry wants to grow again, then employees are “definitely the most critical resource. Our industry is currently on thin ice. “
So what can be done about the shortage of staff? There have been plenty of suggestions since the pandemic held up the mirror to the industry and forced it to reflect on its own undesirable developments. The experts agree on three points.
1. Better pay
The Rhineland-Palatinate state association of the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (Dehoga) published its “Seven Milestones for Recruiting Employees in the Hospitality Industry” at the beginning of November. One point in particular caused a stir: State President Gereon Haumann and his colleagues are demanding, among other things, that trainees in the first year of their apprenticeship should receive 1,000 euros per month – that would be an increase of 60 percent. Downright revolutionary for an association that appears in collective bargaining on the employer side.
After all, it should be 42 and 30 percent more for the second and third year of training. Trained specialists should now get at least 15 euros an hour instead of eleven, the monthly wage should be 2535 euros (plus 36.4 percent). In future, the lowest wage level should always be at least five percent above the minimum wage – without tips and surcharges.
“This is a paradigm shift,” says Haumann, for whom there is no alternative to the “brave step”: “We want to get out of the corner of the supposedly low-wage industry.” The additional personnel costs for employers – Haumann speaks of 25 to 30 percent – should include be absorbed by price increases for the guests.
The ground has been prepared, says Haumann, and hotel and restaurant visitors are willing to pay more money for the service. Before the end of this year, the Rhineland-Palatinate Dehoga employers’ commission wants to agree both a new wage and a new general collective bargaining agreement with the responsible food-gourmet restaurant trade union.
2. More flexible working hours
At the hotel company 25hours, which belongs to the French Accor group, employees have been able to spread their working hours over four days a week in the two Hamburg hotels since the beginning of November. If the test run is successful, this model will be offered in all eight German stores from January.
“Hoteliers and restaurateurs have always expected a high degree of flexibility and commitment from their employees,” says 25hours co-founder and CEO Christoph Hoffmann. “In return, this should go hand in hand with appreciation, balanced remuneration and the possibility of self-realization. Our industry still has a lot of wood to chop. “
In a company announcement, it was recently stated that at 25hours 150 positions, and thus one in three across the group, are vacant. In an internal survey, more than 40 percent of employees said they would like to be able to organize their working hours more flexibly.
In its resolution, Dehoga Rheinland-Pfalz states that weekly working hours and annual working time accounts are suitable instruments for cushioning seasonal fluctuations and creating permanent jobs – such instruments have long been taken for granted in other industries, but apparently not in the hotel industry.
3. More appreciation
“Five years ago, many hoteliers told me that recruiting staff wasn’t a problem,” says Vanessa Borkmann, professor at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and Organization (IAO) and responsible for the “FutureHotel” research project there. “But the topic was already virulent back then, of course we also had demographic developments in mind in our research.”
For her study “FutureHotel – Sustainable Working Worlds in the Hospitality Industry”, published in May, the professor asked almost 4,000 current and former employees in the hospitality industry, as well as trainees and students who could imagine a job in the industry.
Among other things, Borkmann comes to the conclusion that there are stronger motivators for employees than a simple increase in salary: The employer should support the search for accommodation and create leisure activities, better equip the workplace and offer opportunities for the home office. And leadership must be learned and practiced anew: The days of “patriarchy” are long gone in the hotel industry.
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The Fair Job Hotels initiative has been calling for something similar since it was founded in 2016: “to be on an equal footing”. The aim is to create common and binding values and standards for dealing in the hotel industry that are characterized by respect and trust. There are now 80 hotels.
Breidenbacher boss Heydarian, who is involved with Fair Job Hotels with his house, has found his recipe: He practices this “leadership at eye level”, which is still not very widespread in the industry. In his dealings with employees, it is a matter of taking them more into their own responsibility, of jointly developing products and processes, of freedom and freedom. Only the bond with the employees can also create a bond with the guests.
This creates what Heydarian calls the “economy of connectedness” and, in the best case, leads to better performance. This can be seen in the operating result, the employee turnover rate and the number of regular and new guests.
On this November evening, Heydarian also checks the performance of his employees in terms of service excellence using a roasted brother cock that is served to him. The male chicks end up in the shredder and after a good life here, finely prepared on the plate. The service employee can explain where the animals come from and why you should enjoy them. Heydarian is satisfied – here at the “Duchy” the service world is still okay.