I suppose the 'hotel' thing started with me during a working visit to 'Fountain Forestry plc' at Poundsgate in Devon. I was involved with the main administration database and administration training functions within this company; as I remember, often into the tiny hours. I was lucky though. Working from home, I was accommodated in a small local hotel: a very homely sort of place with an absolutely wonderful proprietor, who was old, considerate, very wise and damned good company. He thought nothing of serving me coffee and biscuits at two in the morning, just before he turned in for his day, I think. Just a bit sooner than me most of the time.
At that time – as indeed is the case now – I was used to listening to problems and frustrations. Always, because of the nature of my work I register key facts and occurrences effectively and relatively permanently. The director at 'Fountain' was an unpleasant person and I was not very inclined to make a concerted effort, even though I was being paid handsomely. In contrast, Ivor the proprietor at Luesdon Lodge – my homely little hotel in Poundsgate – was a peach, for whom I was prepared to endure a lot of inconvenience for little reward.
Predictably, the time came when the stuff of life formed the basis of usual conversation within the hotel: you know, when all of the trivial courtesy things have been done with. I learned of how such a small hotel – in the middle of the Dartmoor outback – remained in perpetual existence, when many others more central to urban populations were dropping out of the industry. All was largely due to a lot of hard work, but also, it was due to strategy and forethought. Ivor – through necessity - was a dedicated promoter, of 'trekking', 'rambling', 'sporting' functions which he also played a large part in organising. Then he got to fill his hotel for most of the annual period.
Here I got involved – by means of a couple of old Dell 486's – with the production of hundreds of mail-merged promotion letters and associated mailing labels, in a fully automated fashion: with considerable speed and with very little effort. The Dells produced in hours what Ivor could only previously produce by manual means, in weeks made up of very long days. Targeting was the most important factor within this activity and this depended considerably on the existence of 'records'; of who had come to do 'what' previously. Then, all of the 'rambling' promotion letters were sent out to known ramblers etc.
This is all very well, but some problems are characteristic, particularly the age old one of getting data – to make up important records – into a computer, in the first instant, taking into account that Ivor – even with his many virtues – was not very keyboard dexterous. Nor was he particularly adept at operating a database, to make it organise and to make it talk to a word processing application for the purposes of mail-merging. Well, the thing that I produced at the time, did the job particularly because pick posting features were built into it on a widespread basis, just to cater for Ivor's keyboard limitations. Yet things have moved on since, considerably.
In the meantime I have consulted with numerous hoteliers; all of whom have displayed their own particular idiosyncrasy. One wanted to see room vacancies at an instant whilst dealing with enquirers on the telephone. Another was concerned about coaching arrangements and the need to inform patrons – within personalised mail-merged letter outputs – of pick-up venues and pick-up times, and so on. Recent Internet technology has also allowed for the automatic placement of room vacancy diaries on the World Wide Web with associated response forms directly linked to hotel administration facilities, to allow for semi-automatic booking update directly from the web. Of course the vacancy diaries automatically update day by day.
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