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Homework answers / question archive / Final: The Success of Hotel ICON From Hotel Development Viewpoints Hotel ICON, located at TST East and one block away from the PolyU’s main campus is a teaching/research hotel and an upscale full service commercial hotel
Final: The Success of Hotel ICON From Hotel Development Viewpoints
Hotel ICON, located at TST East and one block away from the PolyU’s main campus is a teaching/research hotel and an upscale full service commercial hotel. Since it was opened in 2011, the hotel has achieved exceptional success. As a unique teaching/research hotel, Hotel ICON has won the admiration of the world’s hospitality educators who all wish for a similar establishment at their school campus. As a well-accepted commercial hotel, the 262 keys have achieved remarkably, and won the world’s unparalleled recognition since its opening. Hotel ICON has won so many global awards for its excellence in service which many competitors envy.
While teaching hotels are common, traditionally most teaching hotels are small in scale, limited in service, focusing only on the core areas depending on the nature and level of the education programs, offering the students an opportunity to have a hands on experience of serving guests, and/or the operations of the lodging facility. One may say these teaching hotels are simply life-size laboratories using guests as laboratory mice. The students are operators under the supervision of teachers who may or may not be the actual hotel workers. Nonetheless, this is a learning environment where students experiment with hospitality, design and creativity (Maastricht, 2016). And the hotel’s operating expenses are viewed as the laboratory costs which are part of the educational costs. Examples of training hotels are: the Institute for Tourism Studies in Macao – Pousada de Mong-Ha, a 22 guestroom hotel run by the students (IFT, 2016). The T Hotel of Hong Kong VTC, a 30 key hotel operated by students and trainees (T Hotel, 2016). And the Statler Hotel at Cornell University (Tse, 2012).
There are other teaching hotels that are much larger in size, but operated under certain brands in collaboration with certain hotel groups. For example, the teaching hotel of Hong Kong Chinese University’s Hyatt Regency Brand and University of Houston’s Hilton Hotel (Tse, 2012). They are university investment but fully operated by a third party hotel group. To the hotel groups, the primary motive may not be education but profit making. They may be commissioned to provide certain training and internship for the students, but teaching students is undoubtedly secondary. And most such hotels may not promote or publicize aggressively their teaching responsibility.
Many universities and colleges with hospitality program are not at all equipped with teaching hotels or life-size laboratories. Internships are therefore arranged with commercial hotels for students. But these hotels are not invested, developed or designed for teaching. And the educators do not have a say on the internship program. In other words, the training program with these hotels largely depends on the mercy of the business planning of the individual hotel. Needlessly to say, there will not be uniformity in the training results, and how much can a student learn from working at the hotel also depends on his or her luck.
Different from the above three examples, Hotel ICON is not a small life-size laboratory and not a large hotel property operated under a well-known hotel brand. It is a life-size commercial hotel under an independent brand, owned and operated by the university (PolyU) in an exceptional close collaboration with the university’s hotel school (SHTM). Hotel ICON is not under SHTM. The Hotel is accountable to the university’s Board of Trustees, by ownership. The General Manager does not report to the Dean of SHTM. However, Hotel ICON carries an uncompromised commitment to provide training to the SHTM students. While the Hotel is a profit oriented establishment, teaching the students of SHTM is one of Hotel ICON’s missions.
The development of SHTM’s teaching hotel was not easy. It experienced a bumpy road in the early development stage when PolyU’s decided to build a full-size, full service, upscale commercial/teaching hotel on the staff’s dormitory site in TST East. The local hotel community, fearing the competition, challenged the real purposes of the hotel and cast doubt about the chance of success. Against all odds and the loud negative opinion from the news medias, the university put up a financial guaranty for a bank loan to fund the development costs of the hotel, which was subsequently fully repaid as scheduled. Hotel ICON has proven to be a successful operating model that many other hotel schools prefer not or dare not to experience.
The General Manager of Hotel ICON is a full time hotel general manager responsible for the operations and profitability of the hotel. He is an Adjunct Professor at SHTM but his main duty lies within the operations of the hotel. He is given dual missions, to provide an unparalleled training to the SHTM students and to provide competitive services to hotel guests and customers. In both, the General Manager has so far delivered an outstanding performance.
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Questions: Based on the content of the textbook (Developing Hospitality Properties & Facilities by Ransley & Ingram) and the lectures given, please answer the following questions from hotel development perspective. Please note that you are not expected to spend more than 5 hours and more than 500 words per questions.
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