It was in July 2019. Another great summer day in Chicago. I had an appointment with the Chef Concierge of a top luxury hotel in Magnificent Mile. I stopped by the concierge desk to ask for him. Then I saw a Les Clef D'or concierge talking to a guest.
The guest was furious. She was yelling and waving her mobile phone to him, showing something on the screen. As you imagined already, he was sweating all over.
Half an hour later, he was sitting across me exhausted. "She was expecting a delivery from Amazon," he said. "Amazon shows that the package is delivered but we can't find it in the property. She is checking out now. We are still looking for the package. If we can find it we will send it to her, if we can’t we will need to reimburse her."
Our appointment was set through the director of rooms who was my customer in her previous property – the Chef Concierge didn’t exactly know why I was there.
When I showed him the capabilities of PackPorter, he bought it on the spot.
Parcels, courier packages, mail, crates, pallets. The hotels are receiving, storing, and delivering them to guests, events, outlets, and internal staff for decades. However, the volume is not quite the same for the last few years. 82% of 184 hotel top executives from New York, Chicago, Greater Miami, Seattle & Los Angeles agree that the volume of these packages started to impact their operations and guest satisfaction. Most common scenarios are:
- Some properties don't have dedicated shipping & receiving staff. If they don't have a big event space, the package volume is not high in the off-season. When international tourists start coming, things begin to get messy.
- Some properties do have shipping & receiving staff – usually, one person who is working from 8 am to 4 pm, weekdays. All goes well when this person is on-site. When he is off or calls in sick, that's when the pursuit and the delivery delays happen.
- During the peaks, the volume of the packages is filling up the main storage area, then the staff store the packages in multiple locations. Eventually, the retrieval of a package becomes a pursuit sometimes. Meanwhile, the guests are kept waiting at the front desk.
- Online shopping for electronics is very popular among international tourists - the US, the UK & Canada have better prices compared to other countries. Unfortunately, these high ticket packages are the ones that "get lost" after the delivery to the hotel. Without proper tracking in place, the person responsible for the loss never found.
- Some guests forget & check-out without collecting their package. Some guests send packages to the hotel well in advance - I witnessed as early as 3 months! And some event coordinators leave some of their stuff at the property once the event is over and they sit in the storage room for weeks. All these are eating up the limited storage area.
These challenges exist today and, certainly, they will not fade away, but increase each day. Hotels have to handle this workload, need to spend billable workforce hours to manage all these. Luckily, there's a catch - actually two catches.
- They don't have to spend all those billable hours if they use the proper technology to use that.
- They can make money (actually, profits) out of the package operations.
This is why we developed PackPorter. To help hotels fascinate their guests, manage the operational hassle effectively (with the least employee cost) and help hotels collect as much profit as possible.
Please reach us here if you like to discuss how PackPorter can be useful to your property. And keep reading our learning center to find out more.
A spoiler before this article concludes: PackPorter customers annually make between $30K to $100K+ "profits" on the package operations.
Olcay Yildiz is the managing partner of Starlit Corp. and one of the people behind the business concept of PackPorter. He loves new ideas and to be reached for suggestions or questions. His LinkedIn profile is www.linkedin.com/in/olcyldz.