Humanizing hotels with creative service

Hilton's Qian Jin creates more room for digital and women in the hospitality field

Qian Jin, president of Hilton Greater China and Mongolia, one of the prominent hotel chains, is a firm believer in the "think global, act local" maxim.

Qian joined Hilton in 2017 armed with 33 years of experience in the hospitality industry. Almost 30 of them were spent with the Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc alone.

In his view, the biggest change in the last three decades has been the emergence of the Chinese people as the key customer group.

"When I joined the industry in 1980s, almost 99 percent of foreign brand hotels' customers were foreigners. But now, more than 80 percent of our customers are Chinese," said Qian.

With Chinese customers' disposable incomes growing fast, they are more demanding about hotel services, hoping to receive special spaces, local food and relevant cultural experiences, according to a joint survey by Hilton, Kantar and Nielsen.

"To better satisfy Chinese customers' needs, in the years ahead, we will improve the proportion of Chinese general managers by 15 percent to 85 percent by 2025," said Qian, adding this is an important part of the company's strategic plan for 2025.

By then, Hilton aims to launch 1,000 hotels in China. As of today, Hilton Group has 200 hotels in China that are open to business. Some 430 more hotels are either under construction or in the pipeline.

Plans are afoot to create more than 100,000 new jobs for Chinese across the region to serve hotel guests before 2025. Qian is particularly bullish about the prospects of female employees' development and promotion. He aims to double the number of female general managers before 2025.

Women's leading role in a family's consumption decisions and their leadership in the hospitality industry inform Qian's decision. According to a survey, 68 percent of travel decisions are made by women. "Females are a very important part in the services sector in which they usually outperform their male counterparts in a number of aspects. So, helping female employees to rise to managerial positions (in the hospitality industry) is highly necessary," Qian said.

Hilton has expanded rapidly since 2017, with the annual growth rate exceeding 50 percent in the past few years. One of every three hotels that are under construction in China belongs to Hilton Group.

Last year, Hilton opened 51 new hotels in China. According to Hilton's 2018 financial report, the company's net income was $225 million for the fourth quarter and $769 million for the full year.

Qian believes a hotel can stand out if the management pays attention to the following three aspects: customer orientation, continuous innovation, and being true to employees' values.

"This industry, in essence, is about people-to-people business." Therefore, customers' needs, if understood intuitively or through close observation, could go a long way in building a bridge between customers, team members and top managers. "This approach is deeply rooted in Hilton's DNA," said Qian.

He recalled a real-life experience to illustrate the point. When he checked in at Beijing's Waldorf in February, he found out that there was a tiny bottle of eye drops placed on his table with a note from the young hotel manager. In the note, she said she had noticed Qian's red eyes due to the dry weather in Beijing during his stay and hoped the eye drops will bring some comfort.

"This is what we called humanizing service, which always creates pleasant memories," Qian said.

He believes Hilton is at the forefront of the current golden age of traveling. The era has a lot to do with Chinese tourism's rapid growth in recent years.

There were around 149.7 million outbound Chinese travelers last year, up 14.7 percent year-on-year. And 5.54 billion people traveled around the country, up 10.8 percent, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. China's tourism sector has contributed 9.94 trillion yuan, or 11.04 percent, to the GDP.

According to a China Industry Research report, the country's hospitality industry is expected to expand rapidly in the coming six years, against a background of China's economic restructuring and consumption upgrade. Demand for lifestyle and leisure-oriented hotels will be tremendous.

"From the metropolitan cities to smaller cities, we have a complete chain of brands catering to customers' different demands, ranging from mid-to-high end, such as Doubletree, Conrad and Waldorf. We just launched Canopy in Chengdu as Hilton's first lifestyle hotel, which aims to meet younger generation's demands," Qian said.

To keep pace with younger generation's digital habits, Hilton has promoted the use of digital keys in hotels.

It also launched Hilton WeChat Mini Program with Tencent last year and a multilingual Hilton Honors app.

"All these digital things improve work efficiency, provide guests more space to choose, making our guests get closer to our hospitality industry, which is the advantage of providing digital, intelligent services based on internet and smartphones," Qian said.

However, Qian believes intelligent services cannot be deemed as a straight substitution for everything.

Humanized service, he stressed, is the most important thing. "Service industry has to do something creative to be remembered."

Zhang Hanzhi contributed to this story.