The Midland Hotel, Morecambe
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Post update 191/1/10: please see response from English Lakes Hotels in the comments section below.
The Midland Hotel Morecambe was originally built in 1933 but after a being purchased in 2003 by my favourite developer Urban Splash , it reopened in 2008 and is now managed by English Lakes Hotels.
Having long been a fan of Urban Splash projects and a subscriber to their newsletter, I have followed the progress of this particualr project with interest.
And so, for my birthday at the end of August, my wife and I, along with two friends, went to visit.
The hotel itself is set right on the seafront and has stunning views both of the sea and the Lake District beyond. The refurbishment is clearly an amazing job, having modernised the hotel but kept and restored many original Art Deco features.
But, like many other reviews on TripAdvisor, we found the service to be poor.
From the welcome, right down to the settling of the final bill.
Firstly the car park entrance and exits to the front of the hotel are easily confused (ie not sign posted!) and the front desk welcome is no better.
Talking of signs, after a search for the hotel gym (following the signs) we eventually ended up a completely empty shoe box size room with no equipment. Apparently they do not have a gym!
So we retired to the Rotunda bar, which has a very contemporary feel about it (think cool and chic) but was playing 1940′s hits on the sound system – bizarre.
Service in the Rotunda Bar is also very slow and the staff are rude.
Fast forward to Dinner on Sunday night. My wife being meticulously organised called the hotel in advance to advise them it was my birthday on the Sunday and reserved a table for 7.30. Again this was confirmed on check in the previous day and re-confirmed on Sunday afternoon (as my wife provided them with a birthday cake).
At 7.15 we had a call from the restaurant asking why we hadn’t showed up for dinner as it was booked for 7.00!
As it was a my birthday we celebrated with a bottle of champagne – which took 45 minutes to arrive and was just placed in an ice bucket with no offer to pour it.
Without doubt, the food both at breakfast and dinner is very good, but considering the price c£15-20 for a main dish you’d expect it to be and also have top notch service. It doesn’t.
The final straw on checkout was that the hotel’s payment system was not working. As my wife had paid the deposit for both rooms on her credit card, the deposit was due to be deducted off our room bill which was confirmed at reception on check-in and again at checkout.
When my wife received the bill in the post a couple of days later she was horrified to see that the hotel had (unsurprisingly) failed to do this. When my wife called the hotel, they suggested that we call our friends and ask them for the deposit back. Considering our friends had paid a not inconsiderable sum to join us for the weekend, it’s somewhat embarrassing to ask them for the money.
When I called and asked the General Manager to call me to discuss these issues, he failed to do so.
At the time of writing there are 121 reviews of this hotel on TripAdvisor. The scores are as follows:
With almost as many reviews rating it as Average to Terrible as Excellent to Very Good. Serivce is clearly patchy.
My question is however, why is this?
My first thought was down to arrogance. Clearly this is the ‘best’ hotel in the best location in Morecambe. But Morecambe is badly in need of continued redevelopment and investment as it has been in decline for a number of years.
Therefore, if it’s not a ‘destination’ hotel, why would people take the trouble to visit? Given the long history of the hotel, many guests choose to stay to see the results of the redvelopment work. When these visitors have stopped coming, what is the future of the hotel?
My prescription for excellence
1. Decide who the guest is – ensure the surroundings (including the music) relate to form a consistent brand image
2. What does the resort hotel have to offer? Given the funky and cool settings – shoud the hotel not be offering services to match the needs of the guests?
3. Where are the managers? – You cannot lead by being in the back office -lead from the front and don’t let the front line staff have to deal with the problems.
4. Actively seek criticisim and turn your detractors in to your best friend.
5. Website – if you’ve looked at the website you’ll see it’s very web 1.0. – In a Web2.0 world, the website needs to be cutting edge and aimed at the guests it is targeting. The website reflects the faded glories of Morecambe. Unfortunately, it’s past it’s best. Create relationships on your website. Post recipes from the chef, news about what’s going on, profiles on the team etc. Allow people to share their experiences and respond openly to criticisim.
6. Train, Train, Train and Train again. A number of correspondents on Tripadvisor have commented that the staff are very young. I don’t think age has anything to do with it. They aren’t adequately trained to do the job. If the staff do not display the best customer service mentality and willingless to learn, then it’s time to change the staff. Sometimes to change the people, you have to change the people.
7. Keep Learning - I stayed in a hotel last year and was talking to the waitress about the service being very good. Her response was, that’s because we always aim to be better than yesterday. Each day we do a little bit more and tomorrow we’ll get a little bit better than today. Absolutely spot on. But that culture of continuous improvement needs to be right through the organsiation.
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We have just come across your twitter post about the Midland Hotel Morecambe and would like to acknowledge your constructive comments and update you on the progress we are making at the hotel since your visit in August 2009.
Taking on the management of the hotel in April 2009, we always realised that there would be a great deal of effort and hard work required to complement the amazing refurbishment of the building itself with a consistently excellent level of service to our guests. Inheriting all the staff and procedures as well as the building itself, we are well on our way to rationalising the staff structure and implementing many of our long-established procedures that have been the rock bed of the service offered in the English Lakes Hotels family of hotels.
We have maintained a good working relationship with Urban Splash as, with any refurbishment project of that magnitude, there will always be ongoing snagging issues. Our team of maintenance engineers are fully committed to keeping the hotel in tip top condition. We have listened carefully to our guests in the last few months – our team of Directors having received copies of all guest feedback – and made some slight alterations in terms of furnishings in order to enhance the comfort of our visitors.
Since your visit with us, the major improvement to the service has been that we have installed a very experienced management team that have served customers for many years in the hotel industry and specifically in ELH. Mr Matt Stanaway, previously manager of the Waterhead Hotel took up the position of General Manager of the Midland in September 2009, closely followed by Mr Gavin Graham as Deputy Manager, also previously from the Waterhead Hotel. These gentlemen are fully accountable for the quality of the offering at the hotel and although we would never say we had ‘arrived’ we are certainly progressing on a daily basis.
I am glad to be able to report that the signs to the gym were removed shortly after the equipment was taken out, along with any mention of it in the guest directory. We took the view early on that the small room allocated as a gym was really too small to accommodate the needs of our guests and that on balance, it was probably better to focus our attention on the service offered by the Midland Spa.
We have now changed the original ipod playlists which I believe are now more conducive to their surroundings.
I do apologise for the mix up with the time of your dinner booking – too much time has elapsed now for me to investigate the exact details of the confusion, but I fully appreciate that it was unacceptable and potentially distressing to your party.
Indeed, much attention has been focussed on the service in the restaurant and all staff now have the benefit of training from our experienced Food and Beverage Manager, who took up post at the beginning of September. I would not expect guests to have to tolerate rude staff or long waits at this point in time. However, it is policy for any and every guest feedback to be investigated and followed up, with relevant training given where necessary.
Please also accept our apologies that the deposit paid by your wife for your friends’ room was not deducted from your final room bill. The computerised system was being updated at the time in question and the promise of deduction was clearly not followed through manually. The new system would not allow for this mistake, but we do regret the awkwardness of this situation caused through human error on our part.
I would have expected and hoped that the outgoing General Manager would have forwarded details of your call to either myself or the Operations Director and that should certainly have been the case. However, we can find no written record of your conversation with the hotel. As a company, it is not our policy to shirk our responsibility or fail to reply to any guest comments.
A particular thanks for your ‘prescription for excellence’ which we appreciated and in many points already adhered to within our Plus 1 culture. On taking over the hotel, our Commercial Director was aware of the need to ensure the consistency of the brand image. In the last few months we have hosted an Agatha Christie adapted Murder Mystery event, a series of 1930s dinner dances and this weekend we are holding a masked ball.
As a company we make it a priority to understand our guests and exceed their expectations. Every member of staff commencing employment with the company is made aware of the absolute necessity of going the extra mile for our customers. Although evident in our other hotels for years, and whilst the message is consistently re-iterated and reinforced around the Midland, we realise that this message must saturate and change the culture of the place which does not happen overnight. When other avenues have been exhausted we do adhere to your adage that ‘sometimes to change the people, you have to change the people’ but we now believe that on the whole we have a good team. I agree, we make no apology for the youthful staff presence in the hotel, but are committed to an ongoing programme of training and development.
Whilst every guest at the hotel is asked for feedback of their experience and we are looking at more efficient ways of collecting this information – customer forums, online channels etc.
Your comments about our website coincided with some work that had been scheduled to happen on the site. I hope you will notice some improvements since your post in October. It is very much work-in-progress and we have assigned extra resources to this task to ensure that the site is continually improved. Indeed, I am working on employee profiles at the current time which will be added in the near future.
In summary, please be assured that we are fully committed to the continual improvement of product and service at the Midland. We do not rest on our past reputation but seek to add value to every guest’s experience by getting to know their specific requirements and exceeding them +1. We also see it as part of our responsibility to act in an ambassadorial role for the redevelopment of the area and seek to be involved in initiatives that will draw the much needed investment to the area.
I am more than happy to answer any further queries and chat further and to this end I can be contacted at Plusone@elhmail.co.uk. I do hope that we will have the benefit of your feedback if you visit the Midland Hotel again at some point in the future.
Sincerely,
Tina Taylor
Plus 1 Manager
English Lakes Hotels
Matthew Needham Reply:
January 19th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Tina,
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I have updated the post refering to your comments.
A copy of the original post was e-mailed to your reception on the day the original post went live but never acknowledged.
Matthew