Burj Al Arab

Executive Summary
The hotel Burj Al Arab continues to baffle the competition due to the nature of their services and the quality that they provide their customers with. Being a hotel that has been created in special circumstances, keeping up with the needs of the market is something that needs to be done if the company is to succeed in the competitive hospitality industry. There are different factors in the environment that need to be considered if the new strategy is to be successful. These factors are macro and microeconomic factors. The macroeconomic factors are those that the business cannot change such as political and legal factors. The macro-environmental factors need to be considered for the hotel to understand the type of challenges that are yet to be faced if a new strategy is introduced. The macro-economic factors are those that the hotel has a way to control.
The internal business environment determines how effective the change will be on the profits that the business has. The hotel has to come up with ways to guarantee the growth and acceptance of the new strategy, through making the users aware of what can be done to guarantee that many users are comfortable with this method of ordering. The changes that the hotel is implementing should be adopted by other companies to allow the hotel industry to move from a paper-based industry to one that is technologically operated. While all this is done, the risks that the hotel is likely to face due to the implementation of a new business strategy should be mitigated to guarantee the success of the new ordering system. Getting rid of the business risks allow a business to have higher chances of success.

Glossary
E-menu- A menu that is used over a computer to help get the customers to access the items that are offered in a restaurant.
Personal Touch- The extra attention that people put into actions and services to make the recipient feel special.
Hospitality- the act of being friendly and welcoming to others

Introduction

The hotel to be discussed is the Burj Al Arab, one of the tallest hotels in the world and is located in Dubai. The hotel has gained fame due to its height and the type of interior design that has been used to complete the fifty-six floors. Another thing that makes the hotel more popular is that it has been built on an artificial island. The area in which it was built allowed the hotel to attract attention and become one of the sites that people visiting Dubai want to see. The hotel is one that incorporates ten more restaurants inside, which often end up being overbooked due to the quality of service and food that people get to enjoy. The type of services that people receive in this hotel has allowed the hotel to be rated a seven-star hotel by many critics.

Many hotels end up being brought down by the reviews that people leave about the hotel on the internet. This pushes many of them to come up with ways to improve the services that people receive while dining in this establishment. Though the Burj Al Arab has gained popularity all over the world, the hotel is not exempted from the challenges brought about by being a service center. Some of the ways being considered to improve the services that people receive include the use of an e-menu. The e-menu will bring about a more efficient ordering system, and at the same time reduce the use of paper at the hotel (Eid 2013, p. 23). This will be an advantage to the hotel as aspects of pollution that are caused by paper will be reduced. Being a big establishment, reducing the usage of paper menus will help keep the environment around the hotel cleaner.

Analysis of E-Menu Strategy

Several factors need to be considered when implementing the new strategy to the hotel. The strategy to be implemented is the use of electronic menus. The introduction of a new business strategy to such a major establishment is bound to have effects on the macro and microenvironmental factors. The micro-environment factors refer to the forces that a business can control while the macro-environment factors are those that a business cannot take control of. Some of the micro-environment factors include the suppliers, the intermediaries that affect marketing, the public, competition, and the customers. The hotel Burj Al Arab needs to have control over their micro-environmental factors if they are to survive the macro factors. The use of the e-menus will make the services that the customers receive good services at their own comforts (Stephenson 2014, p. 725).
Micro-Environmental Factors

The people who dine at the hotel need to feel that the services they have been receiving are worthy of the seven-star rating that critiques give to the hotel. The electronic menus also allow the customers to have access to the items being offered by the hotel without having to use an intermediary. Some of the people that go to hotels would prefer to interact directly with the chefs and not have to wait on the staff to get the service that they deserve. Therefore, having a system that allows them to order their food directly and get their request to the chefs provides better services to the customers. This allows the company to deal with the competition aspect that faces the Burj Al Arab (Pereira-Moliner et al, 2012, p. 83). Being that competition is very great in the hotelier industry, the hotel has to come up with ways that ensure it remains at the top of the global competition. The provision of adequate services to the customers allows the hotel to beat the competition.

The marketing strategy that is used by the Burj Al Arab should allow the hotel to interact with other potential customers by showing them the quality of services they are likely to enjoy if they visit the hotel. The hotel needs to come up with a way to show more users how to get quality services out of their dining experiences. If more customers get to ask for quality services, the method that most will be for is the use of the electronic menu. Most of the aspects of dining have been transformed from manual operation to electronic operation. The dining aspects such as booking of reservations and offering of reviews on the hotel are all done electronically. The major part of dining is the ordering of meals (Yüksel 2012, p. 56). If hotels are able to transform this process into an electronically operated one, they will reduce the aspect of waiting that is created while people are waiting for people to collect their orders.

Needing to have more people wanting to escape the paper menus will help in the creation of paperless hotel industry. This will be good for the environment and will help in getting more restaurants to operate effectively. The public is also a part of the microenvironment that needs to be considered when implementing this new strategy. Since the members of the public have a stake in the creation of more efficient restaurants, they need to help get the members of the public aware of the changes (Stephenson 2014, p. 728). This is through the use of the media such as through advertising the new ordering methods and showing how the new strategy goes hand-in-hand with the policies that govern this particular sector. The micro-environmental factors will allow the hotel to anticipate the challenges that this new strategy is likely to have on its success.

Macro-Environmental Factors

The macro-environmental factors refer to the factors that affect the external business environment. The factors that make up the external factors include political, economic social, technological legal and environmental factors. Since the hotel Burj Al Arab serves a global clientele, the factors that affect the global business market are bound to affect the hotel’s success. The first factor is the environmental factor. The environmental factor encompasses factors such as pollution, customer tastes, and preferences and other issues that affect the business environment. The Burj Al Arab is coming up with a new way to have their customers ordering meals using technology instead of making use of paper menus. This is helpful to the environment since the customers are able to get what they want at the touch of a button. Under normal circumstances, some hotels end up disposing of their physical menus once they become outdated or the menu is changed (Wearne and Morrison 2013, p. 63). This proves to be harmful to the environment since some of the materials that are used to create the menus are not biodegradable. This, therefore, leads to many forms of pollution being caused and contributed to by the old menus. Another macro-environmental factor that is likely to affect the implementation of the new menus is the technological factor.

The technological factor is best understood by checking the new opportunities that are caused by the use of new technology. With the creation of the e-menu, the hotel gets to create an opportunity for new IT companies to help in the creation and implementation of the new menu system. This helps in making the hotel more efficient and allowing the users to order their meals using the simplest method available. Technology is on constant development; with different methods of technology coming up, businesses have to come up with ways to incorporate the technological advancement to their everyday working of the company (Dockalikova and Klozikova 2014, p. 420). With the developments being observed around the globe, hotels need to come up with a way that ensures they do not become outdated. Therefore, since technological advancement is not a factor that the hotel can control, it has to be modified to help better the hotel.

Another factor in the macro-environment that needs to be included in the implementation of the e-menu is the social factor. Socio-cultural factors allow people to understand what types of cultures have been accepted in a particular business method. The hotel industry is one that has cultural aspects being put in place and followed through by the rest of the hotels that compete in the industry. Use of paper menus is one of the cultural factors that is very predominant in the hotel industry. The changes that are being proposed by this particular hotel will bring about a change in the industry and the norms that people associate with eating at hotels. Making use of the new ordering system will allow people to get rid of the challenge that is caused by ordering through paper menus (Yüksel 2012, p. 52). Some of the challenges that the cultural method of ordering using paper menus has caused include lengthy periods being used by waiters and other members of staff to deliver food. This has caused many hotels to shut down and lose popularity since people spend too long between making their order and receiving their orders.

The new method allows people to directly place their order and have a defined time between when they make their orders and when they are able to receive their food. The hotel has also implemented this method while retaining the aspect of human interaction between the customers and the staff. As the population that is targeted by the hotel is mixed there has to be a mixture of both new ordering methods and the old system (Dockalikova and Klozikova 2014, p. 63). As the hotel is trying to make use of new methods of ordering, and get rid of the use of paper menus, they have to transition the developments into the hotel operations. The ordering method can be transformed whereby the customers that still want a personal touch get to have the members of staff providing the customers with the needed services while using the e-menu.

Risk Factors

Some of the risk factors that need to be considered when starting this new business strategy are that the customers may not be receptive of the new method. Some customers are set in their ways and using the new method to order food in such a large hotel may not be easily accepted. This may drive away many of their customers who are not willing to learn the new system. This will result in many of the customers going to the competition, which is not easy to control. Another risk is that the hotel needs to get ample investors to back the transition from paper menus to an effective electronic ordering system. Being that the hotel is over fifty stories high and encompasses many other hotels within the building, making use of the electronic menu system needs a lot of funding (Molina-Azorín et al, 2015 p. 43). Funding poses a great risk to companies since it is not always easy to have such amounts lying around for unprecedented needs.

Failure to secure efficient amounts of funding results in the hotel going below the standards that the hotel has already set for itself. Operational risks also cause many companies to go under. Operational risks affect the day-to-day running of a business. The e-menu is likely to affect the operation of the hotel since it is new and not many people may know how to use it. The changes that are to be made have to be implemented slowly, to allow users to get used to the new methods of operation. The risks that face the new method of operation in the Burj Al Arab are a considerable number (Molina-Azorín et al, 2015 p. 46). If the hotel hopes to make the needed changes and keep the business running correctly, all factors have to be considered and taken care of in the right way.

Conclusion

Technology is changing the method of operation of hotels in the hospitality industry. Large hotels such as the Burj Al Arab have to make use of technology if they hope to compete with the new entrants into the competition. The e-menu will contribute to the growth of the hotel during this new age, and allow the hotel to have a future.

References

Dockalikova, I. and Klozikova, J., 2014, November. MCDM Methods in Practice: Determining the Significance of PESTEL Analysis Criteria. In European Conference on Management, Leadership & Governance (p. 418). Academic Conferences International Limited.
Eid, R. 2013. Managing customer trust, satisfaction, and loyalty through information. IGI Global.
Molina-Azorín, J.F., Tarí, J.J., Pereira-Moliner, J., Lopez-Gamero, M.D. and Pertusa-Ortega, E.M., 2015. The effects of quality and environmental management on competitive advantage: A mixed methods study in the hotel industry. Tourism Management, 50, pp.41-54.
Pereira-Moliner, J., Claver-Cortés, E., Molina-Azorín, J.F. and Tarí, J.J., 2012. Quality management, environmental management and firm performance: direct and mediating effects in the hotel industry. Journal of Cleaner Production, 37, pp.82-92.
Stephenson, M.L., 2014. Tourism, development and ‘destination Dubai’: Cultural dilemmas and future challenges. Current Issues in Tourism, 17(8), pp.723-738.
Wearne, N. and Morrison, A. (2013) Hospitality marketing. New York, NY, United States: Routledge.
Yüksel, I., 2012. Developing a multi-criteria decision making model for PESTEL analysis. International Journal of Business and Management, 7(24), p.52.