The Editor's Hospitality Blog

So you want to raise the profile of your hospitality business? Do you:

a/ employ a student to stroll up and down your local high street wearing a sandwich board advertising your company;

b/ rely on word of mouth; or

c/ establish a website that carries all the information your prospective customers need to know about your and provides an appealling shop window for your business?

If you voted "c", yours sounds like just the sort of business we are looking to celebrate in the Caterer Group's latest awards scheme. The Caterersearch.com Web Awards have been created to recognise the best websites in the industry and reward the organisations and individuals involved in designing, managing, marketing or promoting them.

Categories span the full range of hospitality operations, large and small, group and independent; and there are also awards for the digital marketing campaign and interactive feature of the year.

Websites will be judged on visual design, innovation, content, interactivity, ease of use, commercial success or potential and overall user experience. And, since our judging panel will base its decisions largely by scrutinising your site, the Web Awards are very easy to enter. All you need to do is send us your site address and a brief explanation of what you think is good about it, and we'll do the rest.

 For further details go to www.caterersearch.com/webawards.

Good luck!

I've recently been turning through an excellent little book called 100 tips for Hoteliers. Subtitled "What every successful hotel professional needs to know and do", it's written by Peter Venison, erstwhile GM of the Carlton Towers Hotel in London.

The book's format is really accessible: 100 tips over 150 pages, making it ideal for returning to in spare moments. The tips span the whole lifecyce of a hotel, from choosing a site and planning a concept to building and motivating a team and marketing your operation.

Here are ten tips that stood out for me. You'll have to get onto Amazon and order a copy if you want to check out the other 90 ...

1. Choose the right neighbourhood. Before you buy a property, make sure there are no nasty surprises nearby - a busy fire station next door, a refuse disposal company down the road ...

2. Visualise everything. Sense-check each decision made by architects and interior designers to make sure what they create is fit for purpose. "How can the customer reach those bath taps? Where can we hang or store the towels? How do we clean under that bed?" ...

3. Open full throttle. Soft openings are for wimps - pre-market your hotel in order to open with a full house.

4. Manage the moment. Resist the temptation to stay locked away in your office and get out into your hotel to experience first-hand the service levels guests are enjoying - or suffering.

5. Say thank you and well done. Money isn't everything: motivation is best fuelled by achievement and recognition.

6. Demonstrate you really care. "We have all experienced the head waiter who sidles up to a table, before you have even taken a mouthful of food, to ask if everything is all right, and then moves on before you have answered". Don't allow a similar insincerity into your dealings with guests.

7. Don't let meetings clash with your greetings. The more time you spend in areas of greatest guest activity, the more you learn - so don't spend too long closeted away in meetings. And never let a guest be told that you are "in a meeting".

8. Price it right. Pricing policies are crucial to your business, so understand and master the relationship between price and volume.

9/ Create confidence in others. "Good training is the art of teaching someone how to do something to the standard you require and with the confidence that will ensure that it is successfully implemented in a manner that will please customers and colleagues alike."

10/ Keep your feet on the ground. Don't become the guest - "because the tools of your trade include food, booze, and beds, don't be tempted to mix your work with your pleasure".  

If you could offer just one tip to an aspiring hotelier, what would it be?

Check out this video on the Microsoft Surface website. It details a new partnership between the software giant and Sheraton Hotels and Resorts aimed at enabling guests to access local information in hotel lobbies. Guests at five Sheratons can now sit at a 30-inch table, which doubles as a touch-sensitive computer screen, and surf information about local restaurants, bars, entertainment options and amenities.

Great for guests - but could this be curtains for the concierge?

Congratulations to Aidan Brooks, the twenty year-old chef from Hackney whose eponymous blog has justed celebrated its second birthday.

Aidan's first blog, back in August 2006, described a dinner of sardine salad and fruit salad he had just cooked for his brother and his brother's girlfriend. The meal was eaten "with a selection of wines to commiserate Phillips Idowu's failure to win a medal at the triple-jump earlier in the day. Still - there's always another day." Indeed there is: two years on, Phillips has just qualified for the Olympic triple jump final.

I like Aidan's blog because it provides a window on his life. Over the last two years we've seen him prpgress from being a trainee chef in London, to working full time at Barcelona's Commerc24.

Which Hospitality blogs do you go back to time after time? Let us know.

Avid Hollyoaks fans had much to contemplate after last night's episode of the Channel 4 teen drama. Jacqui was furious with Tina for secretly breast-feeding Max. Meanwhile, Kris and Zoe were bickering over ideas for their student TV channel; and Mandy hit on an idea for a wedding planning business. For those of us keen to see more young people consider a career in hospitality, a rather more exciting new plotline began to develop during the mid-episode ad break, when People 1st's multimedia awareness campaign debuted before those of the 2.2 million teen and twenty-something viewers who hadn't popped out to boil the kettle.

The campaign has some eminent supporters. McDonald's, Compass Group, Sodexo and Merlin Entertainments are among the hospitality operators that are backing the sector skills council's positive attempt to reach out to the nation's youth. Viewers were pointed to the campaign's website, where vox pops from industry workers extol the virtues of working in hospitality.

Tom Pearson, head chef of Loch Fyne Covent Garden, talks about the buzz, excitement and adrenaline of working in a restaurant; Compass HR resources performance leader, Anthony Kirby recalls bumping into the likes of Roman Abramovich, Stevie Gerrard and the Royal Family; and McDonalds manager, Laura Cross describes her job's fantastic environment and endless possibilities.

Vast effort has been exerted over many years to improve the industry's brand as an employer of choice. Still it remains tarnished by preconceptions of low pay, back-breaking work and unsociable hours. People 1st's attempt to appeal to youngsters on their own terms is a laudable attempt to bring a little lustre back to Hospitality's reputation.

Had you realised that its been six months since Valentine's Day? No? Not on my radar either.

But, apparently, today is the most unromantic day of the year.

According to Accolade, "a luxury new cooking appliance brand from Stoves", the last week in August has the fewest references to "I love you" on the internet, the University of Sydney carried out a study on moods and found that Wednesday was the lowest day of the week, people are currently suffering from post-bank holiday syndrome, and sales of Champagne generally take a plunge in August.