Inside the blue box - The data that runs Breakfast at Tiffanys

An interview with Alan Hynes, Opening Manager of The Blue Box Café - Harrods 

Harrods, The Dorchester, The Langham Hotel… and Breakfast at Tiffanys.  No, these aren’t Holly Golightlys London haunts, these are the spectacular establishments that Alan Hynes has managed during his impressive career, and we have him here with us today to discuss what makes the wheels turn behind the scenes in these high-class environments.

So, let’s get started on discussing the analytics behind the allure.

Alan, you’ve worked in such esteemed places of hospitality ranging from The Grill at The Dorchester, to The Blue Box café at Harrods, where you must see a lot of guests every day. How you do you take record of these numbers?  We use off the shelf reservation tracking systems such as Open Table and excel sheets to record our guest numbers.

All high-end restaurants run seasonally, but how do you know exactly when to implement your ordering process?  Ordering is done on a par basis, which is where we look at previous orders and make an educated estimate on weekly sells. We then check how many upcoming bookings we have and we cross check this against last year’s covers to see if we’ve arrived at a similar approximation. 

After this is done, we see if we have any events coming up and order what we anticipate for each specific function.

How do you currently spot the patterns in popularity of menu items? We use menu engineering to record how popular some dishes are. This helps us track the number of specific dishes sold and profitability and helps us see which dishes need to be pushed to achieve maximum sell .

“My luxury hospitality career has been curated over 7 years, so I’ve seen some impressive technological changes and improvements within my field.”

Do you think there’s been any significant improvements to the analytics systems used within hospitality, throughout your career?   My luxury hospitality career has been curated over 7 years, so I’ve seen some impressive technological changes and improvements within my field, even though I acknowledge this there is still a lack of awareness of these platforms and lack of training to implement them. 

I personally believe that a lot of people come direct from hospitality schooling, where support and systems are spoon-fed to each individual – whereas to succeed and grow to the next level, there is a need for us to dedicate time on finding and improving systems which isn’t currently the expected norm in hospitality. 

How do you log average spending in the restaurant, and do you use that information to tailor your up-sells? Average spend comes through your financial documents as it isn’t available to be pulled from a system, and we are lucky to have a great finance team that share these documents in easy to understand insights. From these we have a clear idea of which items are most popular, and where to tailor our offerings.

In an ideal 5* world, what would the perfect hospitality system track and analyse? Now, this would be a dream! I would ideally have two separate dashboards, one for employee satisfaction tracking, and HR support, and another for guest tracking, booking and feedback.

For employees, my ideal system would be one that tracks individual performance of employees, can view hours worked, training needs for the team, and a happiness barometer – all in a clear view.

Our Thoughts

Hospitality is an industry full of extreme ups and downs due to; seasons, events and even macro economic events (due to currency fluctuation making certain destinations cheaper to travel to). Given the amount of variables that impact the day to day success of establishments, it is an inherently difficult business model to operate successfully. Interestingly there are a number of tools out attempting to help, but as with most off the shelf tools they lack the customisability needed for truly effective data driven decisions . Alan has touched on two key benefits of custom solutions in his dream system; Centralising data from different domains and analysing these in a single place to empower managers to make more informed decisions across the board without the constant need to receive data from other departments (not everyone is as lucky as Alan when it comes to responsiveness of other teams sharing data).

An ideal solution would need to account for the variables that are important to the organisation. For example: a hotel in a ski resort may need to include weather data in their predictions as visitor numbers may drop when there are poor snow conditions but weather is unlikely to have as much impact for a hotel in a city that has a temperate climate.

Why do custom analytics solution make sense?

Most organisations, especially SME”S, shy away from custom solutions for fear of expensive development and maintenance and don’t have the workload needed to justify an in-house team but this doesn’t have to be the case! In fact, because of our platform as a service model we are able to produce custom analytics quickly and the development cost is usually recovered within 12 months, which when compared to the cost of a subscription to an off the shelf tool is a huge money saver.