Final Hotel Design Project
Harry Shapiro
Hospitality Management
Services Marketing & Management
Activity Description: Provide a brief description of the activity
Students create a blog post that contains the conceptual design of a hotel that has a specific place-based location. They will design services for their hotel along with a service delivery system (Heskett, 1994), and elements of a servicescape (Bitner, 1992). They will also explore how information about this hotel will be brought to market; they must contemplate how they will create marketing messages for the hotel. They will use the hotel to explore the interdependencies between services management and marketing. Students will be given an example outline, and an example of a completed assignment.
This is the fifth of five related assignments and it will be used by the students as the input to a final summative exam.
Learning Goals: What do you aim to achieve with this activity?
Students will create a blog post. Critical Reasoning about Ethics will play a major role in crafting this post; such thinking will help students understand and balance the diverse needs of guests, staff and management.
However, there are additional and overlapping goals and objectives including place based learning, and storytelling. This activity will use a peer reviewed critical thinking (around Ethical issues) rubric to help the students understand the complex balance that must be achieved in consideration of the needs of the staff, the customers, the managers, and the owners when designing, managing, and marketing a service.
Ultimately they should be able to demonstrate that if staff are not properly treated, the guests will not be treated well and they will have a hard time marketing their property; inversely when they go above in beyond in caring for staff, not only will it help improve guest experiences it will help the hotel "market itself." They will also make it clear how the Servicescape of the hotel plays a role in the treatment of guests and staff, but also in how the hotel is able to "auto-magically create its own marketing."
Services management is often an futile attempt to brindle, constrain, and restrict the activities of staff while demanding impeccable service delivery — Heskett (1994) turns this on it's head by making it clear that management must first create an impeccable workspace for the staff (the Service Profit Chain) if they wish to have an effective and impeccable service delivery system. Bitner (1992) makes it clear that the space in which the service is delivered also plays a key role in the service delivery. Bitner's work pre-dates the Instagram Selfie, the smartphone, and the selfie stick — yet a property with an excellent servicescape will generate its own inbound marketing (Shah, & Halligan, 2005).
The final summative assessment for the course will ask students to draw from this assignment; this assignment is asking them to create their own Services Management and Marketing "crayon box" and during their final exam use it to draw-out the learning they have synthesized during the course.
Timing: At what point in the lesson or semester do you use this activity? How much classroom time do you devote to it? How much out-of-class time is expected?
Very little time is to be spent in class on this phase of the assignment. Classroom time will include a discussion of the assignment during week 10, a review of the assignment week 11, and during week 12 a showcase covering how the assignment will be used during the exam week. During week 14 the students will peer review each other's assignments using several rubrics. During week 15 the students will use a print-out of their post as part of their final exam.
Logistics: What preparation is needed for this activity? What instructions do you give students? Is the activity low-stakes, high-stakes, or something else?
The prior assignments should help students prepare for this assignment.
Prior Blogging Assignments
* Design a Dish
* Design a Signature Dish
* Design a Hotel (Group Assignment)
* Design a Customer Relationship Management Process (group)
* Design a Hotel (Individual Assignment) ← This assignment
The instructions are found here:
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/service-product-design/2018/04/15/example-individual-hotel-concept/
Assessment: How do you assess this activity? What assessment measures do you use? Do you use a VALUE rubric? If not, how did you develop your rubric? Is your course part of the college-wide general education assessment initiative?
Students will peer review with several rubrics including the Ethical Reasoning Value Rubric. The instructors assessment using the Ethical Reasoning Value Rubric will also be submitted to the school.
Since this activity is a precursor to the final and summative assessment for the course, the assignment will be "graded" during this assessment. The course is a writing intensive course.
Reflection: How well did this activity work in your classroom? Would you repeat it? Why or why not? What challenges did you encounter, and how did you address them? What, if anything, would you change? What did students seem to enjoy about the activity?
I have completed parts 1 – 4 (see below); it has worked effectively. Students have demonstrably been able synthesize the learning outcomes from the course into real world examples. A challenge to this specific was the negative reaction to the detailed nature of the assignment. This negative reaction was discussed openly and compassionately; I presented a counter narrative discussing how since this was part of the final exam, they were better off with an assignment that gives them five weeks to complete it vs. having to craft it only within the time allowed during an exam. Most students accepted the "open book" and "take-home" nature of the assignment. Prior assignments included
* Design a Dish
* Design a Signature Dish
* Design a Hotel (Group Assignment)
* Design a Customer Relationship Management Process (group)
Additional Information: Please share any additional comments and further documentation of the activity – e.g. assignment instructions, rubrics, examples of student work, etc. These can be links to pages or posts on the OpenLab.
Please share a helpful link to a pages or post on the OpenLab
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/service-product-design/category/one/
