Increase Room Occupancy Rates with Motel BSC

Motel BSCs for the management team of a typical motel will be focused on four important areas – financial, customer, staff, and efficiency. The finance balanced for motels, like other businesses, will include financial outlays for all activities, for the construction of facilities, and procurement all materials and services intended to encourage the patronage of the public. The specific details of these outlays are contained in the motel’s projected budgets. Budgets can be annual, semi-annual, or even monthly. In addition, a part of the finance scorecard is the sales expected to be generated from all the expenses. By mere comparison of actual disbursements against budget and actual sales against projected sales, the motel can tell whether allocation of financial resources is efficient or not.

The viability of a motel depends greatly on how customers view the quality of services being offered. Occupancy rates are the most effective measures in determining whether services are good or not, although this is not always true since the location of the motel can also play a significant role in enticing patronage. If the motel management team practices detailed planning, then it means that at the start of the year, the occupancy rates are already determined. Wide variances between projected occupancy rates and actual occupancy rates are indications that customers may not be pleased with services. This is assuming that the projections were realistic. In any case, it will be best for hotel management to take the extra effort to get feedback from their very own customers. The feedback should also include some recommendations on how services can be improved.

Customer perspectives are closely related to staff and efficiency. The latter of the two is assumed to be aligned with the former since motels are supposed to anticipate customer requirements. Thus, having staff that is unhappy or not qualified for the tasks assigned to them will always result to poor services and disgruntled customers.  A balanced scorecard for staff should include at least three areas: recruitment, which ensures that only the qualified are taken in; staff training, which ensures additional and upgrading of skills, and monitoring, which ensures that good performance is recognized and rewarded. Evaluating employee performance should be based on pre-determined criteria contained in job descriptions, including a system of objective rating. Without this system, staff evaluation will be arbitrary and can result to a lot of turnover. In fact, many companies that are aware of their staff being their main asset consider staff or employee turnover as the most important measure of HRD efficiency.

The efficiency balanced scorecard refers to maximization of resources. This means the implementation of strategies that will return maximum profits at least cost. So, when sales fall short of projections, the questions that come to mind are: have the sales people been remiss in their assigned functions? Are the strategies effective? Are the sales people capable? In developing a valuable balanced scorecard for efficiency, in this case sales efficiency as evidenced by occupancy rates, these things must be considered. The motel BSC is not much different from other businesses, as all businesses are focused on getting patronage by providing the best services.