Thursday, July 4, 2013

The Land of No Free Time and the Home of the Overworked

The morning session was spent learning advanced Excel functions, such as inserting charts and graphs. We learned of the importance of visual data representation, as it allows people to quickly and easily locate and evaluate important information. 

Since today was the Fourth of July, our usual lunch hall, Trilliom, was closed. Instead, Mark and Reneta had order the class box lunches, and the entire class was made to enjoy a meal of sandwiches and chips within the Statler's cafe. 

The afternoon session centered around forecasting and transient displacement. Forecasting is predicting the booking and pricing trends of any given time period based on the data collected from previous years. We can then collected information to predict future trends.Transient displacements is the amount of individual rooms are lost when booking group reservations. We learned how to discern when is it a good time to book a group reservation, and when it is not. 

We watched a video about the importance of customer service. During the video, we learned the five steps of successful employee-customer interactions:

  1. Welcome the customer
  2. Use the customer's name
  3. Take care of the customer's needs
  4. Thank the customer for their business
  5. Invite the customer back


From 4:00 PM to 8:45 PM, I was working in the Statler's computer lab, hurriedly trying to finish my CHESS Report. For the CHESS Report, we had to analyze our hotel's demographic distribution, competitive strengths and weaknesses as compared to other student's, and spending costs. With every passing moment my anxiety and stress level grew. Would I be able to finish in time? Will it be good enough? These were just some of the many questions that came to mind as I clumsily typed up my work. At 6:00 PM, Mark had all of the students leave the computer lab, as he had no intention of letting us work through dinner. He said that he would reopen the lab at 6:30 PM, and so the class and I begrudgingly left the building for dinner. I returned to my work at 6:50 PM, and thus I resumed by pitiful struggle to complete my report before the impending deadline. I could find a bit of solace in knowing that all of my classmates were having similarly hard time. 
Although I was able to to finish on time, I was not satisfied with what I turned it; it was completely rushed, and thus not up to par with my usual work. 

Today was a long, tiring day. Even though today was a holiday, we were just as busy as ever. Thankfully, we have tomorrow off, so I hope to be able to relax and recover from

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