HOTEL MAN OF THE HALF CENTURY
Following the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines
INTRODUCTION 3
PERSONAL HISTORY 3
PERSONALITY TRAITS 5
HOTELS BEFORE ELLSWORTH 7
HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO HOTEL BUSINESS 9
HIS CONTRIBUTION TO THE HOTEL MANAGEMENT IN MODERN TIMES 11
CONCLUSION 12
REFERENCES 14
INTRODUCTION
He was an American influential and pioneering hotel businessman, born in 1863 into a poor family in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Although he did not receive much from his family in terms of financial resources, he could manage to be famous of hotel development and management. He is known as the father of American Hotel. He made a great amount of contributions to the American hotel business. He made important innovations and we still observe his influence on the hotel business world. He managed to create hotels providing the customers with compact services. In the past of the hotel business, there were some barriers to development. He proved that every problem in business could be solved by developing innovative thinking. He developed his business and he became the owner of the hotel chain known with his last name “Statler”.
PERSONAL HISTORY
He was born in 1968 and passed away in 1928. He was the third child in a large family with 11 children. He did not have good education opportunities in his life. He married twice. His first marriage was with Mary Idesta Manderbach in 1925 and the second marriage was with Alice Seidler. He adopted four children with his first wife. He struggled when he was young. He worked at different industries.
When he was a 13 year old teenager, he worked as a bellhop at a very rich family house at Wheeling. Without any formal education, he climbed up the steps. He was a good learner. In his first service job, in two years when he was 15, he managed to be the head bellboy and then a clerk.
He started working by himself and saved enough to do a business. When turning back from a visit to Wheeling, he realized a building that became his restaurant in Buffalo in the following time. Buffalo was not a place where the people would go out for dinner. Thus, many of his friends warned him that he might fail. However, he insisted on the idea of running a restaurant and he failed. No one stopped by his restaurant. He did not stop trying. He tried to do new things. He hired varying chefs. Some of them were famous and some of them were regular cooks. He tried different foods and cuisines. He developed service techniques. He designed different lunch and dinner tables. Also, he tried to create a better pricing approach for the people. He invented “buying ticket for dinner or lunch in advance”. That was his reservation system. He had discounts for the people who paid in advance. Consequently, he redesigned the restaurant business completely. He believed that if the proper design could be developed then everything was possible.
His insistence on the restaurant business in Buffalo worked. He had something for everybody in his restaurant. Unexpected in Buffalo was coming true; people were coming to his restaurant. He developed campaigns for his business. Consequently, he developed his skills in developing and running a service business. He also learned how to do innovations. Creating small and large changes in business contributed a lot to his success.
After his successful restaurant business, he opened his first hotel. It was a temporary hotel for the people visiting the Pan-American Exposition. The Pan-American Company has started a large fair in Buffalo and the fair was attracting many people to the city. Ellsworth realized the increasing demand for the accommodation. He opened a temporary visiting house. The first hotel managing experience opened a new door for him. After his first try in 1901, he opened his first hotel 1908 in Washington. He continued opening new hotels in the different cities. Every hotel he ran taught him new things and he developed his innovation skills. In different locations, he face different people who he served and he had different problems. He was not accepting conventional ways of thinking. He always found a way out of trouble by thinking marginally. Everything was possible for him.
He is known as the father of the American Hotels. He deserves this title because he changed how a hotel serves its customers in the U.S.. His innovative ideas were the greatest contribution to the hotel management. He knew how to make things work. His personality traits were completely different from the ordinary people. He was risk-lover and that is how he won the battle each time.
PERSONALITY TRAITS
He became successful in his business. His personal traits were the key for him to success: thinking marginally, being insistent and consistent, not giving up easily, and evaluating other people’s ideas smartly. Each trait provides more power to him.
He always thought marginally or in another word, instead of following a set road, he tried to understand all the possibilities. Traditional people prefer following a certain road that their parents followed. Staying in the lines of tradition make them feel safer. However, all the problems continue and they accept these problems as normal. Normalization of the problems makes it impossible to find solutions. He was not afraid of being criticized and possible failures. For instance, when he tried to run the restaurant business in Buffalo, many people warned him that the people in Buffalo proffered eating at home. The other people could not understand that the people did not find what they were looking for and because of that they were staying home. Ellsworth, by designing a proper restaurant and services, could manage to attract the people to his restaurant. If he would observe the other restaurant samples and experiences around him, he could change his idea of opening a restaurant to opening another traditional business with a low rate of return.
He became an insistent and consistent person. Analyzing his actions and his words indicates us that he was always after developing his business and business related innovations. Also, he was successful at reading the business conditions. His hotels became successful because he made the right decisions from picking the right place for hotel to designing the construction of the hotel and to organizing the services. He continued until he found the best among the alternatives in every project he involved.
He was a leader: a visionary leader and an authentic leader. He inspired many people in his time and after him. He possessed multiple leadership characteristics. He was a visionary leader showing other people that a good future is waiting for us. He was working in details that no one else realized. He developed a comfortable place for the people with extra things that no one thought about. He was an authentic leader. He was looking for creating well-developed organizations. Because creating better services were mostly depending on the quality of the organization. His standards in the organization were sustainable. After he set them in an organization, he could develop better services for the visitors.
He was a good learner. He worked at varying service supplier places. Every work was an important input to his career. He was also a good observer. He attended every event in the city and around the city. He was aware of what was happening in the place where he was going to run his business in the near future. Being open to learning - and even more than this, eager to learn new things - and being good observer created a good mix for a good entrepreneur. He read the opportunities around him when he was young.
Consequently, he managed to reach a point that many people admires in his life. His entrepreneurship model was essential in the hotel business. He started developing his personal traits when he was a teenager. He worked at different places and each time he managed to get a better job. Subsequently, he realized his passion about designing services for the people. His passion took him to a peak where everybody admired his success.
HOTELS BEFORE ELLSWORTH
The hotel management before Ellsworth was not developed at all. The hotel managements were strict about the economic issues. The main goal was to decrease the costs of the services provided to the customers. Also, the economic issues were very strict. They never cared how to comfort a customer while staying at their hotel or while paying the room fee, and so on.
Some of the applications in the hotels can explain how bad it was to stay in hotel before Ellsworth.
Some hotels embarrassed their non-paying customers by cutting their clothes. Also, some resources inform us that the hotel management could use humiliating treatments to the non-paying customers.
Many of the hotels had strict rules regulating how to use the rooms and the appliances in the rooms. For instance, it was forbidden to lay down on the bed with the boots. Or spitting on the carpets was prohibited. When a hotel worker caught a person doing the forbidden things in the hotel, the customer was teased in the society.
There was no private bathroom or toilets in the hotels. At each floor and even sometime at the whole hotel, there was one bathroom and one toilet. Thus, the customers had to share these facilities. Try to imagine that in the morning a customer wants to shave and he has to wait long hours until he is in.
The hotels were not caring the privacy in the rooms. A hotel worker could get into any room without any permission. Also, the hotel worker could fix something inside the room even the renter was in.
The hotel managements were trying to charge for everything. In another word, many appliances were counted as extra. For instance, for taking shower, a customer had to pay an extra besides the room fee.
Many of the hotels were giving low quality food to their customers. If the customers would ask a higher quality or some extra food, they had to pay more. Because of that, many customers preferred eating out of the hotel somewhere they could find better food for cheap.
Smoking was forbidden almost everywhere in the hotel. Considering that in that time many people were smokers, it was uncomfortable conditions for the smokers. The hotels had also rules for drinking alcoholic beverages. The women were not allowed to sit in the bar place. There was only certain kind of alcoholic beverages.
There were no air conditioning in the rooms and the rooms were heated with the stoves or open fire places. It was dangerous for the customers. They could get poisoned by the smoke of the fire. There were some reminders in the room to prevent this.
A customer paying low amount of money to the hotel had to stay in a room with more than one bed. Thus, it was quite possible to stay with someone else not acquainted. Considering that the hotels provided security services at minimum, it was very uncomfortable for the customers.
Considering all the negative sides of the hotels, Ellsworth realized the opportunity in the hotel business. Developing some basic services in the hotel business could make him successful. He never meant to compete with the luxury and expensive hotels. His aim was developing a regular nice hotel for the regular people.
HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO HOTEL BUSINESS
His experience in the field of delivering services to the customers helped him a lot to develop better services in his hotels. After working in different sectors, he worked in the hotels when he was a teenager. The hotel business was very attractive for him in this time, because the other jobs he worked had hard conditions. Working in a hotel was helping him develop his socioeconomic status. Starting from this point to the end of his life, he thought of doing developing better services in hotel business. His first hotel management try was successful even though it was a temporary hotel. He figured out major points that needed to be innovated.
In the era when Ellsworth lived was the time of the development of scientific management. Economic efficiency and labor productivity were being questioned by the companies. To increase the economic efficiency of his hotel, Ellsworth calculated the optimal sizes of different rooms. This way, he had the most possible number of rooms in his hotel. His experiences from the restaurant management helped him understand the customers better. He designed and implemented some pricing strategies. His pricing strategies were including lower price levels compared to the other hotels. Many managers thought that he would bankrupt in a short time. However, it did not happen. He provided a financial stability in his business without using any credit from the financial institutions.
His one of major contributions was to design a room optimally and comfortably. In his time, all the businesses were spending effort to decrease their costs at the expenses of providing low quality service. He realized the trend in the market and he created a completely different application in his hotel. His hotel was one of the cheapest hotels in the city while providing one of the most comfortable rooms. He aimed at reaching a different segment of the customers. He did not desire to compete against the luxury hotels. He knew that the regular people could spend more in hotel room if they could find some extra services in their rooms. In the beginning, with an attractive pricing strategy, he exhibited the comfort of his hotel to the customers. Following this, he continued developing the quality and variety of the services in the rooms. For instance another hotel in his hotel class was not providing any full-length mirrors, fire doors, lights at the entrance of the room, hot and cold water in the room, morning newspaper, pen, pencil and paper in the room and many other things for comfort. Charging a small account of money and providing more and high quality things to the customers were not logical to many people in his time. However, he proved that people wanted to see such things in their rooms and more people stayed in his hotel.
Also, analyzing the rooms he designed indicates us that he created designs in details. He tried to make a comfortable room as much as possible. Considering that before his designs, the cheap hotels were not providing private bathroom, air conditioning and other simple things in the rooms, his innovations were a revolution.
His contributions to the hotel business were not only a better hotel and room design. He, also, made great contributions to the organization developing field. He worked in varying hotels before starting his business. He knew all the details about the hotels and the organization. His experience enabled him to understand every person in the hotel including both the customers and the workers. Considering that he created a complete organization by taking the customers and the workers into consideration, he developed one of the early supply chains as a service supplier. His organization in his hotel was a complete one. He developed profit-sharing model for the workers. He aimed at developing an understanding among the workers. The workers felt like it was their hotel. This approach helped Ellsworth develop better public relations. He also implemented training programs for the workers. Consequently, he built a learning organization. In his learning organization, the complaints from the customers were analyzed by the workers. Therefore, the organization contributed to the development of the hotel management. It might be considered as an excellence approach in service development.
He has been an important example of being a good leader. He always observed the happenings in his hotels and tried to understand his customers’ needs. He could think beyond the conventional ways. He developed a new way of being a good leader. A lot of good things can be said about him. However, his most important contribution to the science of the business management has been showing the great influence of a good leader on business development.
HIS CONTRIBUTION TO THE HOTEL MANAGEMENT IN MODERN TIMES
Ellsworth’s innovations have very essential place in the modern hotel business. However, his most important innovation has been in the approach to the developing hotel business. Before him, the hotel owners’ reference while making decisions was the profit. The basic idea to increase the profit was to increase sales and decrease the costs. Every hotel has limit of sales; therefore, many of them were trying to decrease their cost at the expense of cutting from the comfort. In another word, the hotels were forcing the visitors to create less cost if they were not paying for the extra services. Also, many services included in the hotel were counted as extra.
His approach to the hotel business has been an important contribution. His hotel management model has placed the human into the centre. The term human includes the customers, the workers and him. In another word, he considered every agent in the supply chain. Placing human into the center has changed many applications in the hotel business.
Another important key to his success was to develop a supply chain idea in the hotel business. He gathered everybody around a happy and comfortable hotel concept. His approach was not called as a supply chain; however, analyzing the details of his applications to develop the hotels and the organizations indicates us he created a supply chain for his hotels. The supply chain he created helped him develop better customer relations.
Finally, he proved that providing high level of quality to the customers makes the businesses successful. Thus, the simple old-fashioned profit development system might fail. However, developing a profit maximization setting that includes everybody in the supply chain can be more successful.
CONCLUSION
Ellsworth was a pioneering person not only in the hotel business but also in the management profession and science. Traditions, conventional profit-maximization, or other conventional rules were not in his sight. He wanted to develop a system with human in the center. His approach was expected to fail by the people in his time. He did the unacceptable and unbelievable things.
He proved that the only way to maximize the profits was the conventional approach. Treating the customers better always helps us develop our businesses. His approach was a complete and sustainable system. Every agent in the system was supporting each other. Thus, in his hotels, he could decrease the complaints of his customers. In another word, he cared the customers and the workers, and they cared his business.
REFERENCES
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