Recommendation Report On West Indies Yacht Club Resort
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Purpose of the report
The vacation industry in British Virgin Island (BVI) is developed into a profitable, but highly competitive market. One of the major players is the West Indies Yacht Club Resort (WIYCR), operates successfully since its inception in late 1980s. However, recently some problems became alarming, seriously affect the operating performance of the resort. Investigation is needed. I, Patrick Dowd, am honor to be the investigator. The purpose of this report is to discuss the problems in the resort, why they exist and the corresponding solutions.
Problems in the resort
WIYCR is troubled with internal problems that started to affect its normal operation. Expatriate turnover rate is nearly high enough to be problematic; there is a three-fold increase in guest complaints recently; relationship between expatriate and local staff is poor; and there appear to be low employee motivation.
Analysis of the problems
Management
In WIYCR, management team is divided into two parts: head office in Chicago and resort management in BVI. Due to the lack of sensitivity of BVI vacation market, the Chicago office had over-booked the resort by 20 percent without telling the guests. Therefore, during the peak season the number of guests is much greater than the carrying capacity of the resort. There was no enough staff to serve the guest, even there were no enough rooms available for guests, so they had to stay on boats for few nights until rooms become available. Complaints from guests are inevitable. Moreover, since Chicago office continues its over-booking practice over the past 3 years, ignoring the opposition from the Rooms Division Manager and staff under the department. This partly contributes the current low staff morale.
Culture
The structure of the resort is as follows: managers are mostly expatriates; while local staff works at lower-level positions. Their cultures are very different. Therefore, lack of cross-culture sensitivity is the other cause of the problems. Here I will use the model developed by Hofstede (1980) to analyze the culture difference in the resort.
* Individualism / Collectivism
In the Caribbean culture, there is much more collectivism tendency because people are viewed largely in terms of the groups. The individualism is very low in the Caribbean, people are not concern with personal accomplishments and career acceleration, they rather prefer to work in the group. The quality of time spent with family and friends is valued much more than money issue. This can be best illustrated by one local staffÐЎЦs saying: ÐЎЧIÐЎЦm just not interested in leaving my friends behind just to make a little more money.ÐÐŽÐÐ Normal working incentives such as job promotion and wage increase cannot motivate them. Also, they donÐЎЦt to be the outsider of the group, donÐЎЦt work harder than others because they are afraid of being discriminated by other locals. So, it is hard to push them to do better.
* Power distance
BVIÐЎЦs people have very strong power distance. In high power distances societies, people are expected to obey and show extreme respect for people with higher position, but without close relations. Because of this, there is lack of decent communication between expatriates and local staff, misunderstanding is easy to happen, and this will cause tension between the two groups. Caused by misunderstanding, the relationship between local staff and expatriates is poor, but it is avoidable.
* Uncertainty avoidance
The Caribbean people have a very high uncertainty avoidance. People in Caribbean do not like uncertainty; moreover they do not know how to deal with it and try to avoid any conflict that might lead to making any decisions. Since managers give vague instructions