Challenges facing hotel industry in Kenya

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Hoteliers are constantly facing challenges in their everyday life. This is because of the shifting customers’ expectations concerning customer service, personal experiences, and hygiene standards. One single bad experience can turn customers from using your brand. This article highlights challenges facing the hotel industry in Kenya as well as how one can overcome these challenges.

For you to run a hotel business and make sure it thrives, you need to know the challenges facing the hotel industry. You also need to learn how you can overcome these challenges.

Hiring quality hotel staff

Hiring staff in hotels is one of the major challenges facing the hotel industry in Kenya. This is because of the inadequate skills required in the hotel industry. The youth graduating from universities and colleges are not well equipped with adequate skills.

Training new employees are the only way to overcome this challenge. Taking your staff for training on what is expected of them can improve their level of know-how in terms of hotel matters.

Copying with a change in market trends

Copying with changes in the market trends is a challenge to hoteliers because it requires you to catch up with the trends. Traditional marketing methods are no longer used in this industry. Customers and guests books hotels online and major payments are also done online.

Because of this, you need to learn and keep your customers engaged. This helps you in attracting new customers and retaining the current ones. Checking for reviews about your brand is important because it helps you know what your customers are looking for. This also helps you provide services as per your customers’ expectations.

Cost-push inflation

The rising price of consumables is a big challenge facing the hotel industry in Kenya. To overcome this challenge, hoteliers need to avoid wastage and keep control of stock. This is important because it will help in cutting daily costs incurred on consumables.

Change in customers’ expectations and preferences

Nowadays, customers expect more from hotels. To satisfy most customers, you need to have an entertainment program, free Wi-Fi as well as swift check-in check-out services. Abiding by customers’ wishes and preferences may be challenging because not all these services are available for the demanding customer.

Irregular cash-flows

One of the biggest challenges hotels face is an irregular flow of cash in and out of the business. This challenge is, rampant in most hotels because of huge credits. Making deals with big parties is good but because most of them delay payments is a problem.

To overcome this, you need to organize online marketing campaigns. This will help you attract online bookings with advance payments thus saving you from credit menace.

Maintaining an online reputation

Maintaining an online reputation and improving visibility is big challenge hoteliers face in their every day lives. Most visitors first check for reputation before booking a hotel online.

Maintaining an online reputation is a problem because hoteliers get so busy with hotel work. This gives them almost no time for maintaining their reputation online. This can be dangerous to brand and one can lose guests because of this.

This challenge can be overcome by keeping track of what your customers are saying about your brand online.

Change in technology

The ever-changing technology is rapidly changing the hotel industry. Keeping pace with the challenging technology is a great challenge hoteliers face. Nowadays, customers are expecting quick responses whenever they raise concerns.

Hotels have come up with chat-bots that are used to respond to multiple customers at once. This helps to save on time and costs as well.