Manila Hotel - Hits and Misses

During my childhood in the Philippines,

Manila hotel is the premiere destination to have your guest to stay in, to have the most glamorous parties in town… Decades later bigger hotel brands with their impeccable 5 star services has come to the Philippines so its time to check back on how Manila Hotel is doing

The building itself needs renovations, from the outside it does not look very appealing to stay into, it is no longer the preferred accommodation for the jet set or the business traveler. Arriving into the hotel, even in a posh car the bell service is actually no service. Not even an offer to assist guests with their luggage. Security personnel were not courteous either in screening luggage that comes into the hotel… It seems they have sacrificed customer satisfaction for the sake of perceived security. The reception is no better with the staff snobbish and impolite and there seem to be a lot of distrust to their guests….

Inside the hotel, the decors brings you back to the time of the Spanish regime in Manila. Its like stepping into a time machine giving you the all the opulence during the time of Marcos and all luxury that comes with it. I feel nostalgic as I entered the room given to me, a flat sreen TV inside the bathroom brought me back to the reality of the modern age… Although the paintwork is relatively new, it can be improved to give the impression of a modern classic instead of antique. To my surprise the Spa is open 24 hours a day… a far cry from most hotels that closes in the evening. Sleeping comfort is superb.

Business services which is typically free in most moderns hotels are not free at Manila hotel, prating is 1.5 USD per page… that’s a lot of money for a piece of paper, well even more expensive than printing a dollar bill :-). Here Manila Hotel has a lot to learn, it has not discovered yet that high spenders are mostly business travelers (who dines in and prefers to stay and spend within the hotel premises to save time). Manila Hotel in itself now a days is reduced to delayed passenger sanctuary, not the kind of customers you wan in a luxury hotel.

Breakfast is great, it has not lost its old charm of providing spread from various regions of Asia and Europe. Services are good too, except when you are asked to sign a 25USD bill for breakfast. For all its charm Manila hotel has lost its title of luxury, it is no longer the place to stay… The bigger foreign hotel chains has done a much better job of providing excellent experiences to its customers, something that Manila Hotel needs to learn if it wants to stay on top of the Hotel business in the Philippines.

I won’t be staying in Manila  Hotel again unless its free or if I need to go to the Spa or the gym past midnight.

Making a difference through farming and community services

In the beginning of the year I had the opportunity to visit rural areas north of the Philippines, where I grew up as a kid. The place has changed a lot since last time I visited there 18 years ago. There were progress made, people are still happy but poverty is still abundant. Although most people survive with their basic needs through farming and foraging there are still a lot of people with no permanent jobs, no source of income. Most farms are tended manually, hard labour and no machines making farming ineffective and unproductive. Due to the lack of infrastructure there are a lot of hits and misses as well, some years are good, some years are bad with most farmers ending in heavy debts. Visiting the farms it dawned to me that we should be able to help the community, essentially give back to the community where I send some childhood years. Hence me and my brother hatched a brilliant plan of acquiring lands in the area, developing this lands and employing people. The ultimate goal is to be able to help over a thousand families in the area, that’s equivalent to over 5000 people, our way of giving back to the community and making a small difference on our own way in this very big wide world where we lived in.

Since I have my business to attend to we hatched the plan of having my parents involved. My brother will essentially manage the business, my parents will oversea local operations while I simply advise on business and strategic matters, essentially a very small portion of my non-working time to give back to the community. We are starting small helping 5 families to start with while keeping that ultimate goal in mind. How are we giving back to the community? Its essentially simple focusing on people, infrastructure and the environment.

• Build infrastructure to make farming much easier. Dams, water ways, power distributions, access roads

• Acquire struggling farms at a premium and employ the same farmers giving them a stable income on top of the premium paid for their farms.

• Develop the farms to become productive and sustainable

• Hire workers and pay them a much higher salary than what the local government pays their employees

• Provide housing for free

• Supplement their incomes with free food stuff

• Provide scholarship to deserving students

• Provide free health care and free medical outreach program by bringing competent doctors from Metro Manila during outreach programs

• Organize festivals for the community every after harvest, recognizing their hard work and dedication.

• Facilitate financial service, micro finance to start with

• Create clean, green and sustainable farms without harming the environment

• Replanting on deforested areas

This we do funded by our own pockets without any help from the government with the goal of being able to help a thousand families long term. Once we have proven success for this community services model we will expand, bringing in more external investments to the community from investors who share our principles, our ideals and our commitment to support and develop the community. If you are interested in participating to develop impoverish rural communities in the Philippines in your own small way please feel free to contact me.

Improving experiences for the most demanding customers

The summer has been hectic with customer  deployments, balancing work and personal life, kids and businesses. With all things happening here and there I neglected writing, even with all those extra time on long flights. Now finally on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Manila and have time to write about demanding customers. Customers who demand for the best, they are everywhere, like you and me. There have been a few surprises in exceeding customer expectations and there are bad misses. Let’s take SAS as an example, on a  flight to Stockholm the stewardess started singing, entertaining the entire flight, it was short flight but then again, they exceeded expectations. On the flight back SAS lost my luggage, then promised to send it to my flat after it arrives on the next flight. The bag arrived at the airport but they were not able to deliver since they can’t find my flat and only got it 8 hours later. Now I wonder if SAS delivery spend 8 hours finding my flat in a small city, how lost can they be in running an airline business and much more lost in delivering good customer experience.

The most demanding customers today can be found having mobile phones, of which they demand excellent services in every way. From providing voice services where the expectations is zero dropped  calls, very fast data speed and excellent customer service. Every mobile operator in the world strives to provide the best quality of service to their customers, however not all of them succeeds. In my previous post I talked about several apps on the market today that allows a mobile phone user to test their services and share it on the net. The question in doing that is what benefit is it to the actual user? Does it give him/her a better service? Or do he/she use it to justify moving to another service provider. It is true that service quality is a big driver in churn, however is much more than a slow data in a particular area, its all about the overall experience from services provided to interaction with a service personnel.

Now imagine, instead  of calling your service provider to complain about bad services or bad experience, would you rather simply tap your phone and it takes care of the rest? Including getting updates about the bad service you experienced all the way to getting if fixed. In this way we can demand of better service, we can demand of faster response and faster resolution, we can demand of being in the know, we can demand of the correct fixes instead of  customer service agent simply selecting the top 10 answer on their list of issues.

If a service provider is able to meet our demands, what's next?

Leaving Facebook - Never ever give your ID to FB!

CNN published an issue  in Facebook today... where FB users are most likely billed high on their mobile data due to autoplay settings in FB. Now I turned off autoplay on FB but then FB suddenly logged me out and starts to ask to upload my ID... Something I will never do in social media considering that they already know a of things about you, why would you give FB your ID.

Giving your ID to FB allows them to control everything about you,  from your permissions to bank account to government records and can be used by hackers to have access to everything about you and everything you own...

So if FB ask for your ID, you have been warned!