My eyes started welling up as I watched Undercover Boss. A maintenance guy was in charge of training the CEO of Choice Hotels. As the CEO struggled to clean the pool, the maintenance man told him about having two jobs, seven days a week. The CEO's back ached just at the thought of two maintenance jobs without breaks, but the maintenance man said it was worth it because his children were working towards becoming doctors. It's shocking how much people are willing to do for their kids and how so many people struggle to provide their family with what they need. We also watched Hotel Impossible, another hotel-related reality television show. This time, a failing hotel in South Beach was asking for help. They had a gorgeous location and cheap prices, yet no one went to their hotel. When help came, the husband was reluctant to listen to other's advice.
After a brief break, we got to play CHESS! I wasn't too sure what to change at first, but I started to pick up once I saw the amount of rooms on each day. There was no problem with selling rooms on busy days, so all I had to do was make sure to not overbook my hotel. If you overbook a hotel, you have to get that person a room 15% more than the price they were willing to pay. On slow days, you can do things like advertise more or book more entertainment. The program is set to stop after "two weeks". This means that you can adjust the hotel days to be anywhere from one minute to sixty minutes. After the two weeks, we all had to share our hotel's average daily rate, revenue, occupancy rate, and profit margin. I didn't have the highest daily rate or highest occupancy rate, but I had the highest profit margin and revenue which is most important. My margin was $7,400. Other students got to charge high rates and they attracted customers, but they were spending so much money on amenities and advertisements that they were barely making any profit. It's important to have a balance between quality and expenses. By the end of the game, I had an average margin of $10,600.
We had another group lunch at the Trillium. Our next part of class was Microsoft Word again. We learned how to make templates today. By using templates, we can maintain standardization and quality control. This lead us to our next assignment, creating a memo template. We all spent two hours making a personal memo template.
Before office hours, we had a presentation about oral presentations. Mr. McCarthy gave a great speech, but the powerpoint he used was not. It was made 16 years ago and there were several mistakes in the powerpoint. I caught some of them, but we found more mistakes after going over the whole presentation as a class. The TAs also gave two presentations, one demonstrating the correct way to present and the other, the wrong way.
Eight hours of class passed, so it was time to check-up with Mr. Chan-Law. The six ILCers checked-in with him to make sure we were all safe and present. We also discussed some places we could visit over the weekends.
Lastly, I washed all of my clothes! I went to my hall's laundry area, but the washers smelled! And not like fresh linens either! I looked at the soap inside and it looked like an egg without the yolk! I heard Rochelle and Tomi did laundry at Risley earlier, so I called to ask them if theirs was clean. It was, so I took my clothes over there. It was tough getting into their dorm because they had a lot more security locks than my dorm. We only have one and anybody with an ID card should be able to get in. At theirs, they had three checkpoints, and the detector could sense which dorm you were supposed to be in. As a result, I had to call Rochelle down. I spent time waiting with Rochelle and Tomi. Their building was a lot different than mine.
My group has started doing research on our hotel and experimenting with different options in CHESS. We all have something different to bring, so I hope that our simulation results will continue to grow! I learned so much about someone's lifestyle indirectly and I learned more about Word. I also did laundry outside of my home! Everyday just continues to brings us different experiences and knowledge.
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