Your hotel’s bar
The bar area is also something that is going to play a key role in increasing turnover for the hotel due to the number of guests that will congregate in the bar area in order to relax.
The role of the bar manager is to make sure that this part of the hotel runs smoothly on a day-to-day basis, but as the hotel manager, it is still your job to oversee things to make sure that the bar comes up to the standards that are expected. You will not be expected to run this part of the hotel in most locations, but it is still a requirement for you to understand the process of what is involved in order to form a key part of your skill set.
There are a number of things connected to the successful running of a bar.
For example, the bar manager will have to keep track of the stock levels, but as the hotel manager you should spend time looking at stock levels, determine if there are any issues with suppliers, and also spend time looking at the financial side of things as well as marketing to determine how things could be improved.
The bar manager should be responsible for training staff, and in some locations, they will be responsible for hiring the staff to begin with. You should also be involved in this process due to you being in overall charge. However, once they have been hired, it is then the responsibility of the bar manager to make sure that they are adequately trained. You should also be made aware of what has been done in this area so that you too have the confidence that they can do the job as intended.
The bar manager will be involved in the bookwork side of things, so making sure that the finances are in order should be something that you need to discuss with them on a daily basis. This is where having confidence in their abilities really does come into play as they should be able to inform you if takings are up, down, or the same at any given time to allow you to assess the effectiveness of the bar. They should also be able to alert you to any changes so that the appropriate action can be planned and then put into place in order to boost takings if that is one area that is suffering.
It is important that you have in place a bar manager that is capable of handling other members of staff, driving sales, and the key thing of all has to be providing customers with the kind of experience that they would expect to have. Knowing that you have the correct person in place to run this side of things will make a real difference to your own stress levels, so working closely with the bar manager is an essential part of your job.
An additional role that may be covered by you is the need to market the venue outside the hotel in order to draw in more guests to the bar itself. This can be done in line with the outside marketing of the restaurant as any hotel should be willing to draw in customers to enjoy its services even when they are not guests that have a room. This can add a substantial sum of money to the turnover of the bar and it is certainly something that should appear in your life of things to do in order to boost the profile of this part of the hotel.
It is also important that you are sure that the staff that are hired are perfect for the bar and that adequate training is completed to make sure that they are capable of being professional at all times.
It is clear that you must have absolute confidence in the ability of the relevant managers to allow them to get on with the job in hand without too much interference by yourself. If you constantly interfere, all that will do is undermine their own authority and that is something that cannot be allowed to happen.
There are a number of factors to take into consideration with this, and it also lets you understand how important it is to feel confident in the staff that you have put into place. This entails you having a good general understanding of this aspect of the hotel. It is advisable for you to spend some time studying these areas to allow you to do the job to the best of your ability. However, this will be easier for any individual that has some form of a hospitality qualification as the basics will have been covered within that particular setting.
Finally, in some hotels, it is entirely possible that both the restaurant and the bar are run by the same individual, but that depends on the size of the facilities and also if there is a willingness to cut staff costs. However, in this instance it would just become even more important to make sure that you are hiring the correct person since so much will rest on their shoulders.
Christos Pashiardis – Managing Partner, Consultant
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