Sheraton Hotel - Erbil City

Sheraton Hotel

Sheraton hotel is a five star hotel located in the center of Erbil city. The hotel receives vast numbers of visitors daily. Therefore managing capacity in this hotel is very crucial and requires extreme efforts. Receiving customers in this hotel vary from time to time, as a result; there are many peaks and troughs in receiving customers in the hotel. Regarding the peaks of the hotel; the manager in Sheraton told, when having a conference, a fair, a celebration, etc. the hotel would be crowded and it will be occupied with customers and you cannot find any empty rooms. It is crucial to say that most of the times they would be informed about the occasions before it takes place in order to make enough preparations for it. So in this case the organization has a dependent demand that can manage their resources and capacity. Hence, they have a good forecast in their operations. On the other hand, during winter in Christmas times for example, the hotel receives fewer customers staying at the hotel because most of the people go abroad to celebrate Christmases, as the manager stated. In such a case we can say that the hotel does not have sufficient plan, because after realizing this occurrence the planning mangers should go for alternatives. In order to attract more customers, they can invite celebrities to the hotel to make parties in such occasions.

The manager of the hotel did not mention enough long-term capacity planning of the hotel; he only clarified the short-term ones. In one of the questions of the long term planning: he was asked: what are your plans if a new competitive hotel will open, what are you going to do? He answered that, I will tell them the hotel's prices and therefore they should not set the same prices! So they did not have sufficient long term planning. However, for the short term planning, the hotel has chase demand capacity planning which means that at times of peak demand most resources will be available, whilst at quiet times the resources will be reduced. As the hotel manager explained; during crowded times the workers of the hotel are asked to work overtime without any day offs (off course, with overtime payments). Demand management was not very appropriate in the hotel. For example, the Chinese restaurant which only serves dinners, it is not open during the lunches so this can be measured as an inefficiency of the place. Thus they should encourage new demands through offering lunch and/or breakfast meals.

In addition, Sheraton hotel uses some techniques to manage capacity in the short term, like improving the usage of resources by encouraging the staff to become available at peak times in demand, changing shift patterns, part time work and training staff to have multi-skills. Another way of managing capacity in the short term of the hotel is; sharing capacity.