Core Services and Supplementary Services at Ramada Resort Accra

1.Using a service company that you know very in Ghana explain the role played by supplementary services in differentiating service?

2.What marketing and management challenges are posed by the use of intermediaries in servicing setting?

There are two types of services which are offered by a service organization i.e. core services and supplementary services. Core service provides the outcomes which are expected by the customers justifying the related nominal charges. Apart from this, supplementary services are the additional services which facilitate the use of organization’s core service. Supplementary services play an important role in the organization to differentiate its core services from its competitors in the service industry. For this discussion, Ramada Resort, Accra is taken into consideration. Ramada Resort Accra is a beachside resort that is situated at Teshie-Nungua in a major city of Ghana-Accra. It is the perfect location that offers different types of hospitality services like holding meetings and conferences, social and business functions (Ramada Resort, Accra, 2018). After its establishment in the year 1999, the service organization has expanded its services and infrastructure to have 180 rooms and chalets, two restaurants, three conference rooms, a bar, a spa, a gym, swimming pool and salon. It has employed 91 employees who contribute to the peaceful aura of relaxation for its guests and visitors.

Currently, Ramada Resort, Accra is operating its business as a 3-star hotel and offering both core and supplementary services to its guests and clients. It is promoting its services by using a slogan “stay close to nature” that indicates its mission to provides the guests with a peaceful environment for relaxation and offer western services with the best of Ghanaian hospitality. Primarily, this service company seeks for attracting the incentives, meetings, events, conferences and targets the business travellers to stay at their rooms (Etzel, 2015). The core service at Ramada Resort is accommodation or stay in hotel rooms and space for business meetings and conferences. Under its core service, it offers different categories of rooms like single chalet, double chalet, executive chalet, single standard room, double standard room, twin room and family villas.

Apart from this, supplementary services of the resort include the below-given services:

• Bar and restaurants
• Salon, gym and spa
• Laundry services
• Free breakfast
• Free Parking
• Outdoor swimming pool
• Airport shuttle
• Children’s playground
• Fitness centre
• Business centre
• Hot Tub
• In-room services like satellite television, Air-conditioning, International Direct Dialling telephones
• Working area in room
• Private balcony
• Travel Guide
• Pick-up and Drop-in facilities

At Ramada Hotel, supplementary services play an important role in differentiating the core services from its competitors. Inclusion of supplementary services facilitates and enhances the core services of this hotel. Thus, the service company has two types of supplementary services i.e. facilitating supplementary services and enhancing supplementary services (Ladhari and Michaud, 2015). Facilitating supplementary services are the services which are required for delivering the service to guests and they assist in using the core service. Enhancing supplementary services add additional value to the customers. At Ramada Resort, facilitating services are information, payment, billing and order taking whereas enhancing services include hospitality, consultation and safekeeping. By offering supplementary services, Ramada Resort is able to add more value to its core accommodation services (Xu, and Gursoy, 205).

Facilitating and Enhancing Supplementary Services at Ramada Resort Accra

Being a part of full service at Ramada, supplementary services play a beneficial role in developing interest and awareness among guests about its hospitality services. Through these services, the resort is able to attract more guests by offering different benefits and comforts. For instance, under information service people can get the service details, room category and prices of rooms, location and packages from its website https://www.ramadaresortaccra.com/rooms. The payment facilities are very easy and convenient at this resort as they offer various options to facilitate the customer bill payment like credit card, debit card, net banking and on-the counter (Cvelbar, Grün and Dolnicar, 2017). It attracts the customers towards its services as they feel very convenient and comfortable.

In addition to this, one of the primary supplementary services at Ramada is quality of its hospitality services that can enhance or decrease the guest satisfaction. The resort ensures that effective training is provided to its employees so that they can treat with their guests nicely. It provides quality food and room services to each and every guest. It assists the organization in affecting the guest perception positively and increasing their repeat intention to visit Ramada Hotels. These services enable the visitors and guests to use the core services more effectively. If there will be any deficiency in supplementary services then it may negatively affect the perception of guests towards service quality of Ramada Resorts. It enhances the accommodation services of Ramada Hotel. As mentioned above, this resort offers various additional amenities to its guests like TV, Wi-Fi, private balcony, working area. It enhances the guest experience during their stay at Ramada (Jang, et al, 2018). Guest satisfaction is one of the major objectives for any hotel. Supplementary services add more value to the core services at hotel and provide increased guest satisfaction. Eventually, it increases the guest base of the hotels. Through this, it is able to generate more revenues and profits in Ghana hospitality industry. To implement supplementary services, the managers at hotel need to make some difficult decisions as these additional services are offered to guests free of cost. It may increase the cost of services for organization but in turn it increases their profits. By differentiating its services, the service company is able to gain more competitive advantage over its competitors such as Next Door Beach Resort, Diplomat Beach Resort, African Royal Beach Hotel and Savannah Beach Guesthouse (Byrd et al, 2016).

Role of Supplementary Services at Ramada Resort Accra

Thus, it can be stated that supplementary services play an important role in the service delivery process at a hospitality organization. By developing its core and supplementary services, Ramada Hotel is able to enhance its brand image in African hospitality industry. Supplementary services at organizations assist in enhancing and facilitating its core services so that it can retain its existing guests and create new customers (Sichtmann, and Wilken, 2015). It can be noted that services organizations develop the necessary expertise in their services so that they can execute it to be the core and primary service. They can increase their profits and revenues by rendering their services to their targeted audiences. In this way, supplementary services add value to core services and provide differentiation and competitive edge to the chosen hotel.

Intermediaries are the people who place the buyers and sellers together without taking ownership of any product or service. They are the most important part of distribution channel of an organization. Company pays them a specific percentage of total transaction amounts. Unless the customers are purchasing the products and services directly from the organization that offers it, sales are facilitated by using one or more marketing intermediaries. These intermediaries are known as middlemen for that particular product or service. These intermediaries do many things than simply take an amount with each transaction. For different organizations, there may be different types of intermediaries but there are four traditional intermediaries that include wholesalers, agents, retailers, distributors and brokers. Nowadays, service sector organizations are also using intermediaries in order to provide its services to final customers. In today’s competitive business environment, there are various service sector organizations which are using intermediaries so that it can approach a large group of customers. They can assist the organization in delivering services effectively and increase their customer base. In this process, the customers do not need to contact the service organization directly. They can avail the services through these intermediaries (Nolden, Sorrell and Polzin, 2016). The example of a hospitality organization can be taken into consideration to understand the marketing and management challenges of using intermediaries. In its service setting, the hospitality organizations can use different intermediaries like tour operators, travel agencies, business and corporate travel agents, meeting planner, internet sources, search engines and tourist boards. Travel agents and meeting planners can become more important distribution channel and intermediary for the hotels. It offers various benefits to the organizations. They not only give the customers easy access to the services but also streamline the service delivery process of a hotel.

Intermediaries in the Service Setting

Apart from these benefits, the service setting may face various management and marketing challenges by using the intermediaries (Young, 2015). It can have an adverse impact on the marketing and management of an organization. Each and every organization needs to consider and focus on these challenges. These challenges of intermediaries to service setting are stated below:

• Inconsistent pricing: It is one of the major challenges that are posed by the use of intermediaries in service setting. On the website of intermediaries, customers can compare the prices of services with the competitor’s service prices. Sometimes, the prices of intermediaries can be lower than those given on company’s website (Schramm-Klein, Morschett and Swoboda, 2015). It creates confusion in the mind of customers and company may bear the loss of revenues because most of the customers will select to avail the services at lower and commissioned prices through intermediary.
• Lack of trust between managers and distributors: There may be lack of trust between managers and distributors due to differences in the culture (Rust and Huang, 2014). It can lead to the non-disclosure stock information and inappropriate service offering practices.
• Loss of revenues: The service organization like Ramada Resorts offers its services to the final customers through different intermediaries like tour operators, travel agencies. So, organization has to pay a significant commission to them. This commission is paid according to the hospitality services and guest stay at hotel. It can affect and decrease the revenues of hotel (Schramm-Klein, Morschett and Swoboda, 2015).
• Loss of margin: Due to use of intermediaries, the distribution can be the most expensive component for the service organization under its marketing mix. The companies need to pay an amount to the intermediaries in the form of commission. For example, there are various smaller and independent organizations which pay higher commission and credit card charges to intermediaries (Mishra, 2016). Larger companies can take better deals from these intermediaries because of more booking transactions.
• Ownership of customers: This is also a significant challenge that is posed by intermediaries on the service organization. They can take the ownership of customers as they have access to all the information of customers.
• In a service setting, the management needs to develop different managerial skills and abilities which are sufficient to manage and balance the intermediary.
• Marketing and promotion of competitors’ services: a service provider company becomes helpless when its intermediaries avoid its services and promote the services of competitors in order to earn better incentives and returns. Ineffective delivery of services can have adverse impact on the service importance and it can decrease the sales figures of organization (Dombrowski, et al, 2014).
• Loss of control: When a service company uses marketing intermediaries, it might be one of the organizations which they work for. So, there may be chances that intermediaries do not pay attention to communicate of one company’s message. In addition to this, some dominating intermediaries can dictate the pricing decisions to their owned service settings in some other destinations. It can affect the marketing and promotion process of that service organization.
• Service Wholesalers: In the distribution process, service wholesalers purchase the rights of a large volume of the service transactions (Pinto, Saur-Amaral and Brito, 2015). After that it is divided into smaller parts that are handled by other intermediaries like retailers. For instance, travel agencies book a large block of hospitality organizations at lower prices. Then they divide this block into small units and sell to the retailers. In this situation, the service wholesaler can return back the unsold services to the related hotels.

In this way, sometimes the use of intermediaries can be very challenging for a service organization. When there are various distributors of core services, the marketers think that distribution is intense. So the marketers and management should think strategically about this intensity which is appropriate for its services. In the success of any service sector business, there is a significant role of knowledge, cooperation and attention of its intermediaries. If they lose interest in particular services, that service is doomed. To overcome these challenges, the management of an organization should implement some strategies to manage its all the intermediaries (Lovelock and Patterson 2015). It should use more than one intermediary so it can avoid the situation of service ignorance from intermediaries. The service companies can rely on the internet sources more than physical intermediaries as they are not as expensive as other intermediaries.

References

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Cvelbar, L.K., Grün, B. and Dolnicar, S., 2017. Which hotel guest segments reuse towels? Selling sustainable tourism services through target marketing. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 25(7), pp.921.

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