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Worldwide learning for Le Méridien Hotels & Resorts

A case study by Centra Software

Le Méridien Hotels & Resorts is one of the most widely recognised hotel brands in the world with more than 130 luxury and upscale hotels comprising more than 36,000 rooms in 56 countries worldwide. Being an international hotel chain, Le Méridien’s business operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week every single day of the year. Constant communication is necessary between hotels, regions and head office, despite the geographical distances and time zones.

Jutta Moore is Revenue Development Manager for Le Méridien, responsible for developing best practice in revenue & pricing to drive revenue performance for revenue management staff across hotels worldwide at all levels, ranging from Revenue managers to front desk clerks to Executive management. This is a constant and ongoing process, particularly as some locations experience higher staff attrition rates than others.

"We were finding that email was simply not enough to fulfil our communications requirements," said Moore. "In the past, with limited resources training programmes were conducted through one-off regional workshops. This meant that only one or two participants per hotel were able to attend due to the cost of travel and absence and any follow up training after the workshop was virtually non-existent. Furthermore, our Regional Revenue Managers were constantly travelling to various sites to train staff. As a result we were only concentrating on one part of the business at a time. This situation was further compounded when employees left the company, resulting in local loss of knowledge."

Le Méridien needed to accelerate its processes and delivery of training, as well as significantly increase introduction of new subjects, following changes to the company’s internal processes and structure.

"We needed to standardise our education process so we could deliver a consistent message to employees worldwide and facilitate success planning and internal transfers," added Moore. "We also wanted the ability to maintain ongoing training with refresher courses, as well as introducing courses for new revenue managers organised on a regular basis."

Le Meriden reviewed e-Learning technologies and identified a short list of suppliers based on functionality and technical fit. The company decided to create a network between revenue managers worldwide to get them all to the same level of knowledge, optimise revenues and share best practices. This programme became known as Le Méridien Revenue Masters and Centra’s Collaborative Learning Solution was selected as the e-Learning enterprise platform of choice.

"We selected Centra for its ease of use and rich functionality," said Moore. "Centra’s conference style software and voice and image quality were extremely easy to use – for both participants and presenters. Centra also has all of the facilities of a real classroom such as a white board, mark up tools, syndicate/breakout rooms, text chat as well as exercises, evaluation and surveys. It also has recording and play back facilities so staff can refer back to something they learned months ago for reference purposes. With Centra we’re also able to host concurrent sessions and share applications."

Moore and her team prepared their training materials in advance to allow pilot session at different levels prior to full deployment of the Centra system. This enabled the sessions were not too long or too short and were comprehensive and interactive enough for all levels.

"One of the most important things we did were ‘check-in’ sessions," said Moore. "This enabled users to familiarise themselves with an e-learning environment, double check their understanding and use of all of the tools and communication different functionalities, such as pre-enrolment, guest-enrolment and self-enrolment."

The Centra system went live on 1 April 2003 initially to 200 key revenue drivers in 96 hotels, then 250 additional participants from all hotels worldwide. Today, more than 900 employees are now using Centra, more than 20 presenters are now working through Centra and eight separate departments within Le Méridien are now using Centra for their own training requirements, such as product launches and one-on-one training as well as ongoing training of core IT systems.

"The result have been a tremendous success," said Moore. "We’ve seen an immediate return on investment just based on comparisons of costs to regional classroom training alone, which was not as productive or far reaching. Overall, we’ve had much better usage of our systems because Centra enables us to deliver knowledge centrally and consistently. We’ve also had excellent feedback from our participants."

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© 2004 Centra Software. Reproduced with permission. Any opinions or views contained in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Training Reference.

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