The Ritz-Carlton Case: “We are Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.“

Abstract

Service excellence and customer satisfaction are deeply interconnected and real driving forces behind top class hospitality organizations and especially most important strategic tools of best-practice hotels. The service excellence begins with what the senior leaders think and then transform to help others understand and implement it in true spirit right then, it is not one step act; it should be a constant search and movement for excellence. The whole organization should be involved and geared to achieve it by leveraging everything in possession. The Ritz Carlton Hotel is truly a learning organization. To grow continually it has learned a lot from others who had produced some legendary results. The leadership in past had studied Motorola, Westinghouse, Xerox Corporation, Federal Express and IBM, and also used the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award evaluation process to refine, adopt and to drive their internal process innovation. The Ritz Carlton Hotel is the only hotel which has the distinction of winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the only service company to won it twice in 1992 and 1999. In this reason, it is really worthwhile to think over the characteristics of marketing strategies. I developed the Ritz Carlton Hotel Case based upon interviews with ex-Ritz Carlton staffs to share the business philosophy of CEO embedded in marketing strategies.