How to Run a Great Hotel: Everything you need to achieve excellence in the hotel industry Paperback – 24 July 2009

This book is a great tool to give you an overview of managing a hotel, from planning implementing and reviewing to helping you keep your promises to staff. It gives you practical advice on actions you can take to help your hotel (at whatever size) to excel. It is honest, uncomplicated and a really useful guide to the bigger picture of managing a hotel. It is an excellent book for those in a training position (like myself) to give great insight into topics that even experienced professionals would probably find useful. Cannot recommend this enough!

As a hotelier with a 30 room hotel, I found this book remarkable. Not only does it provide in-depth advice on the practicalities of running a great hotel it provides food for thought for the arbitrary aspects of the culture of hotels and provides clear and achievable markers for success.

quite informative

Having read the authors previous book the promise of common sense appealed to me and if you're after practical, results driven advice, this book delivers! It gave me a really helpful reminder of the building blocks of good management as well as raising a few smiles as I recalled all the things I know, but have stopped doing! Since reading it I've put more structure back into my everyday management and it has reminded me to access what really works and all importantly, to pass this on to those around me. I would recommend this book to new or experienced managers, who like me, could benefit from some renewed clarity and direction.

Was at my wits end thinking about how I can improve me organisation and in turn the property.I didn;t want a 'function' book and this was perfect. Well laid out. Good decent understandable language and great examples.I even emailed the author and asked him to send me pdfs - which he did.Well worth it for any hotelier who wants to create a vision and strategy for the business going forward and wants his employees to help push!

An absolute "must-read" for any professional in today's challenging hotel industry or any one aspiring to join. The author's extensive, first-hand experience as a consultant in how to lead a successful hotel business is evident from the relevant and practical advice the book provides. An extremely well-written menu for success.

I co-own a small resort in Thailand, which was created from scratch 3 years ago, and has evolved more through large amounts of passion, than by proper business planning, into an establishment that is listed in Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, and has made #1 on Trip Advisor.I was drawn to the title of this book, as excellence is what we are constantly aspiring to.Having read the book, I can say it offers exactly what I was looking for in terms of sound, easy-to-read advice on the business theory aspects of running a hotel, and in clear language that is easy to explain to the team on site. We have made particular use of the Tools & Resources section, in particular the check sheets around guest expectations, which is all content that you sort of know, but don't necessarily focus on properly and systematically in order to drive to be the best that you can be. Mr Larkin was kind enough to send me soft copies of all the appendix templates as well. The author clearly understands business theory and it's practical application to the hotel sector.I like the way that the book provokes thought, by posing questions about your business that need answers if you aspire to be the best. Obviously you have to tweak all this to your own environment, but you'd expect that anyway. It makes you take a step back from the all-consuming operational day-to-day running, and think about your establishment as a proper business, what you want to achieve out of it, and the key aspects of strategy and planning that will help you achieve that, which for us were largely ignored in the excitement and "lifestyle" focus of setting up a business in paradise. The section on the linkages between your Vision/Mission, Goals, Strategy and Actions to take in the next year was very useful to me in establishing proper operational targets for the on-site management, that help me achieve my objectives as an owner.In summary, I highly recommend this book.For further practical reading, I also found Michael Gerber's "The E-Myth Revisited (Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)" very useful for the small business/(hotel) that wants to make the next step up the ladder of success.

I should have read all of the previous reviews carefully, rather than just glancing at several that said 'good book' and ignoring the one 1 star, and accepting the title at face value.This is all about content.The book is probably great if you want inspiration on managing staff to run a business, that happens to be a hotel. Quite general theories on staff motivation and so on.I was looking for a 'how to book'. How many staff to run a restaurant? What roles? How do they fit together, and with other departments? Breakfast buffet or plated? How to make up a bed. Launder in house or out? And so on, with what I thought were really practical questions.So I suppose I'm critical of the book title not the content. You can't run a hotel from reading this.If you are young manager looking for theory to support your development of staff management, this book can be for you.If you are looking for theory to support your practical knowledge of running a hotel, look elsewhere.