How long do human resources keep employee files after an employee has left the company?

For the entire file, we do it for a little over four years. We try to do right by people and not leave ourselves exposed, but that’s the federal statute of limitations for most lawsuits.

There’ll be at least some record indefinitely afterward, in case someone calls for a reference check or apply for re-employment. Even with hourly employees, we want to at least be able to confirm that they worked there. We rarely have people banned for life from re-employment (at this writing, the company is young enough that it still has more people banned for life from employment to begin with that we have banned for life from re-employment), but it happens . . .

Former employees, basically, we “triage” — those former employees who we’d welcome back if they were interested at some point in the future, those with whom we could talk about it; and a few who, forget it, don’t even bother showing up. Accordingly, we’re more incentivized to hang on to more complete records of management and salaried employees than we would be for unit-level, hourly employees.

Even then, there’s not that much to hang on to other than personal data, training records, and evaluations. As a matter of policy, if you work for us and get into trouble and get written up, we purge it from the file after a time — six months to a year in most cases — if you don’t do the bad thing again or get into any more trouble.

Originally appeared on Quora

What information do luxury hotels keep on guest profiles?

A guest profile on a good property management system will come with everything you see here. Make a reservation, or check into the hotel, one time, and that ‘file’ will exist for years — or until they change the system.

And that’s their ‘floor sample’, the screenshot provided to their prospective hotel company buyers. The ones I’ve used have an added button on the above screen where, with one click, we can bring up your photo and a sample of your signature (both of these come off your drivers’ license when we scan it the first time we check you in).

Hotels for sale: Sleep Inn, Little River, S. C.

Property offering

SLEEP INN -- HARBOUR VIEW
909 US HIGHWAY 17
LITTLE RIVER, SC 29566

Listing broker: Helen Zaver and Vikesh Zaver, Marcus and Millichap

TripAdvisor reviews: Bubble score 4.0

Property website:

• Sleep Inn at Harbour View -- Local website
• Sleep Inn at Harbour View -- Choice Hotels child site

The facility:

This property has a rather odd design for a Sleep Inn: you have to study it a bit to notice that it's a Sleep Inn prototype.

Hotel Management: What's a good multiple to use for ADR when trying to figure out the average daily rate for a 2, 3 or 4 bedroom suite?

For an entire hotel, average daily rate - ADR - is ADR (your total room revenue for the night divided by the number of rooms you rented that night, period, regardless of room type or room inventory). You can't really pro-rate it for two or three-room suites, because you can't rent just one room in a suite and leave the other unoccupied, or rent it to someone else. ("ADKey" is a term so not in use to describe a hotel statistic, that you can't even get any relevant hits if you Google it, which I attempted before I answered your question; but I guess you could refer to it as ADKey if you want, since that's about the size of it.)

ADR works better as a statistic if it is applied to similar room types; the more similar, the better. I could see applying ADR to an entire hotel with a mix of rooms and suites then, in addition, calculating ADR for standard rooms (and within that, ADR for doubles, ADR for kings, etc.), as well as ADR for suites (then within that, ADR for 'shotgun' suites like you'd find in a Comfort Suites or the older Embassy Suites, ADR for studio suites, ADR for one-bedroom suites, ADR for two-bedroom suites, etc.); as useful information.

First jobs, and inauspicious (however fortunately inconspicuous) beginnings . . .

Inspired by an article by Larry Mogelonsky at HOTELSMag.com
(Screenshot appears at bottom...)
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My own first job in a hotel was working for a group of drug traffickers, who were using a pair of Durham, N. C. hotels as a money laundering operation.

I am not making this up.

After I left that job, I was actually questioned by North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement (NCDPS - Alcohol Law Enforcement ) about their activities, told the ALE guys everything I knew (which amounted to . . . nothing at all other than that my former employers were people of highly questionable character, reputation, and wisdom - although by then, I wouldn't have put it past them at all to be involved in something like that, which was a big part of why I'd moved on to another job . . .). I then shared what I found out from the ALE guys with my former g.m. (we were still friends, and I was confident she wouldn't be involved in anything illegal); and while at first she didn't believe a word of it (she knew I didn't think too much of the company's 'owners'), I later learned from her, right after she resigned abruptly from that company, that I 'was right about them all along'.

The 400 in its younger days, as Durham's original Holiday Inn.

And I had been fixed up with that job by a Durham city councilman.

Why are hotels often slow to innovate?

Because we don't have to if we don't want, so why the heck should we? 

Investment is risky. Leave things be, and we can still have enough people come in the door at a rate we kvetch and whine isn't high enough, to keep the property running in the black and get a low return that we kvetch and wine isn't high enough. And people have little to no patience with results that aren't immediately apparent. 

That's the way most people do it, anyway. Asking me why they don't innovate is like asking me, why would someone not eat, or why would someone not breathe? I can only speculate. But there are a lot of natural human flaws that get in the way, so some of this stuff even comes up for me more than I should let it.

So here goes with some speculation, based on my observations and experience over the years:

Why does it take so long to check in at hotels? (It seems like they should just need to swipe a credit card and maybe check your id, but the person behind the desk ends up hitting keys on the computer for 5-10 minutes sometimes. What are they doing?)

This is what the check-in screen on a typical hotel computer looks like. And on most of those, nearly all the fields are required . . .

And that's on a good system. At least it . . .

What happens to restaurant/bar tips paid on card and how/when does the money get divided out between staff?

In a hotel, there's a line item on the night audit form (and any cash reports from restaurants or bars within the hotel that get fed into it), that is either deducted from the hotel's daily deposit (which will include all cash and credit card receipts for that day), or included among a list of cash paid-outs that is itself totaled up and deducted from the hotel's daily deposit; labeled "Charge Tips". It will be equal to the sum of all server tips charged to a customer's credit card.



This allows any tip amount due a server from a customer's check paid with a credit card to be paid, that day, from the cash drawer, without causing the daily deposits to come up short.

Originally appeared on Quora

What book should I read to learn about hotel management?

Hopefully, more than one book. 

No single person, not even I, knows enough about it to tell you everything you'd want to know. It's like asking what book you'd read to become a good automobile mechanic. Or what book would you read to beat the stock market (I picked up one a few months back about just how impossible it is to do that, or for anyone in government to regulate it without doing more harm than good, for that matter, because while everyone has little bits and pieces of information and understanding of it, no one knows enough about the whole of it to do it successfully: The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street: Justin Fox: 9780060599034: Amazon.com: Books   ).

And if hotel management is something you want to get in to, you'll want to be the kind of guy who'll add something, make a contribution, of your own if you're going to build something that'll stand out from the general lot of them - otherwise, at best, you can hope to be just another guy running just another Hampton Inn. You'll also want to be the kind of person who'll walk around, see things, watch things, read through printouts of numbers that most other people would consider quite dry and boring, ask questions (and over time learn to ask the right questions), and make best possible use of the answers. Believe it or not, watching Hotel Impossible on The Travel Channel (http://www.travelchannel.com/tv-... ), and learning to make like Anthony Melchiorri, can help here. I'm a fan of the show, and I'm not ashamed even to admit that I learn things from it.



That said . . . let's start with the basics.  Get the latest copy (or the next-to-the-latest: it's a college text and priced accordingly, and I don't like the margins that college bookstores, and publishers and other retailers of college texts, make on required texts . . .) of  Check-In Check-Out: Managing Hotel Operations (8th Edition): Gary K. Vallen, Jerome J. Vallen: 9780132059671: Amazon.com: Books (there's a 9th edition that was released in 2012, vs. 2008, but it's $110, and the only thing of serious importance that's happened since is a mortgage crisis and real estate crash that affected hotels as badly as residential mortgages; but is irrelevant to operations and management, the topics in which you show an interest and in which no major advances have occurred.)  

Why do high-end hotels insist on charging for Wi-Fi service or "resort fees"?

It's sleazy, black-hat marketing. They count on you to pay it rather than kick up a fuss. Often, they will remove the charge if you persist in objecting after they make one attempt to 'explain' it to you (they try that much because some people will, however willingly or grudgingly, come around with an attempt at explanation). It's like that catch on FreeCreditReport.com and similar sites that you don't notice in the fine print, that signs you up in some sort of 'savings club' having a very unclear, if any, purpose, at a $3.00 monthly charge on your credit card bill: a lot of people let it slide, at least for a few months, rather than call them up, wait on hold for twenty minutes, and demand to cancel the 'enrollment'.



One of my own pet peeves in that area is that dollar per night extra charge that gets tacked on to your bill for 'insurance' on the contents of your in-room safe, whether you use the safe or not. Most people don't notice it. Even the contract with the safe supplier provides that the hotel is supposed to take it off if someone complains about it. There may even be a case where an in-room safe was broken into, someone made a claim on that insurance, and the insurance paid off the claim, but I'm not aware of any.

What is RevPAR in the hotel industry?

REVPAR = "revenue per available room".

It can be applied to economy or mid-market hotels, where room revenue is nearly all of your total revenue, but doesn't tell you a whole lot other than that you're not doing a very good job of filling your rooms, if it's much lower than your average daily rate (ADR) -- as though the occupancy percentage isn't the giveaway on that.

It becomes a more useful figure when room revenue is only part of your total revenue; because your total revenue will include food and beverage -- restaurant and lounge -- meeting and banquet space, and any resort fees (real resort fees, from things guests actually use and know ahead of time they're going to be asked to pay for, like maybe a golf course), a casino (if you were so fortunate to have one forty years ago, when they were the thing to have; as opposed to now, when they're anything but); and income from retail operations on property and any extra-cost services (laundry and valet, phone, wi-fi if you charge for it).

Even then, unless you're also looking at CPAR (cost per available room) and GOPPAR (gross operating profit per available room), as Mike Holovacs pointed out, you're only seeing part of the story -- for both the entire hotel; and for each department and revenue stream, and costly service or amenity offered, within it.

Which hotel management system is the most common in the U.S?

Micros-Opera (OPERA Property Management System ). InterContinental Hotels (which includes Holiday Inns) uses it. Carlson uses it. Wyndham Worldwide has it (and one other, cloud-based system) for you to pick from.

Is it 'the standard'? No, and it never will be. It's too exorbitantly priced, both in terms of initial cost and monthly support costs. I've never known an independent hotel to use it -- it's marketable at all because, in every case I've seen it used, it's some franchise organization's required purchase.

I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole unless I'm running a hotel under a franchise that has it forced on me. I can think of two or three that are just as capable, at much lower cost. The one we're currently looking at for our next hotel (http://openhotel.com/ ), while having some things missing that I'd like them to add, or modify their system to accommodate, actually has unique features that were on my wish list from a few years back (Michael Forrest Jones' answer to Is there a demand for a well-designed hotel website service? ).

What are the best property management systems for small hotels?

Originally appeared on Quora

Why don't hotels allow you to tip the maid on your final bill?

It’s not an altogether bad idea, although it has its bugs to work out. We should maybe try it in properties that will operate under our own brands.

I would guess that the biggest thing in the way of it at most hotels is that the select service/limited service hotel business model — with which most hotels line up nowadays, although some full-service hotels remain — was designed, in part, to eliminate tipped employees in hotels.

Getting us away from tipped employees was just one part of the overall campaign to simplify the hotel operation, make it possible to make most of the revenue on rooms rather than food, beverage on banquets, eliminate the high-overhead restaurant and bar and see if people could make do with a complimentary, easy-to-prepare buffet breakfast instead, and keep everything at a single, moderate if not altogether low, price for the guest.

One thing they definitely wanted to get away from was the number of employees in a hotel — the doorman, the bellman, the wait staff at the hotel restaurant, the washroom attendant, the guy in the fitness room — who always seemed to have their hand out to the guests.

That’s respectable. Tipped employees can be a little much in the sort of establishment where it’s a problem (although I’m older and wiser now, and don’t patronize “gentlemens’ clubs” any more).

Hotel channel management software API: what solutions exist out there for a PMS?

One of the reasons that Open Hotel (http://openhotel.com/ ) is my PMS of choice is that I’ve found them to be pretty decent about working with third-party developers about exchanging APIs when there’s a reason to.

I got them talking with one third-party hotel CRM site.

And I even found one franchise organization that will let us use Open Hotel if they will accommodate a two-way API. Terrific - I’m not a big believer in hotel franchising anymore, and I’m developing my own brands, but occasionally I encounter an investor whose financing will restrict him to a national franchise. With that franchise, I can use the same property management system that I’d use in an independent hotel, or one operating under one of my own brands, and have a little more uniformity in the bookkeeping department.

There are a lot -- two or three dozen, anyway -- of new cloud-based PMX out there, competing for a very limited market of hotel business. And most of them drive me a little nuts, because there is so much that so many of them won't do.

And for a tech company that markets a hotel PMS, that's suicidal.