Outsourcing valet services frees hotels from operational stress, enhances guest experience, reduces claims, and unlocks commercial opportunities, supporting premium pricing and increased occupancy through seamless, professional, and a trusted service delivery by experts.
Q: Tell us about the services you offer hotels.
- Fully outsourced valet & concierge services, end to end.
- Skilled labourhire
- Valet Technology
- Training
- Driveway Management Consulting
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First Class Valet offer a fully outsourced, end-to-end solution that includes valet and concierge services, skilled labourhire, paperless-smart phone driven valet technology, staff training, and driveway management consulting. Whether you’re after hands-on support or expert guidance, we work with our clients to find the best solutions for their hotels and venues.
Q: What are the main reasons your hotel partners choosing to outsource these services?
Each client is very different depending on their needs. We aim to be flexible in our approach to solve the biggest painpoints for our clients. Here are the top reasons why our hotel partners outsource to First Class Valet:
- Better service offering: Current service offering for their guests are usually poor or struggling. This is usually shown through poor NPS scores, lack of skilled labour, poor management, lack of technology.
- Upgrades in Services: In other cases, some hotels simply want to offer a better experience for their guests, and don’t know how to start a valet program – they just want an expert to do it.
- Cost savings: It is more cost-effective to outsource the services to an experienced partner due to a massive reduction in claims, liability, and employee incentives.
- Relief: The client’s site/operation is too difficult to manage, they want relief. They need someone to make it easy for them so they can get on with their own job. Collaboration needs to be seamless.Â
- Experience in the hotel industry: Our First Class Valet brand is well recognised in the hotel and accommodation industry. However, we also work in other industries including shopping centres, car dealerships, airports, clubbing and gaming, etc. Because of this, there are transferrable learnings and methods which brings a rich amount of experience to our hotel operations. FCV has a cross section of clients in the hotel sector such as W Sydney, Crown, Kimpton, and Emporium Southbank.
- Recruitment & Training: This is a big point of difference as most hotels need to scale up or down seasonally. FCV have a pool of valets that work at 27 different sites around the country. FCV are able to cycle through our various locations, and deliver a mix of experienced valet attendants to work and lead the new valet attendants, ensuring a strategic mix is accomplished for a safe and operationally sound environment, without disrupting the rest of the business.
Q:Tell us about the benefits and the challenges for hotels when outsourcing this aspect of operations.Â
Benefits:
- Skilled labourhire = lower claims. Hotels know minor incidents may happen as a part of the job/operation, however having high incident rates, or major incidents are an absolute problem. We have seen hotel claims numbers reduce significantly when enlisting our services.
- Increase in Room Rates – With a professional valet program, hotels can charge more for rooms as well as more for the valet product. A valet parking program complements premium offerings, and is often now an expectation of guests.
- FCV bring our expertise to every site. Having been in the business for 11 years, our methods have been tried and tested, and we have learnt from them.
Challenges:
- New site: as with any location, the FCV team need to understand the new site/asset and risk associated. This usually means specific onboarding/site induction training is needed
- Finding the right staffing mix: FCV have a good understanding of the right mix of staff for each site however sometimes, attrition happens based on site specific risks and culture. We spend a lot of time recruiting the right people with the right skills for every site we onboard. Integration can sometimes have challenges when outsourcing completely or simply providing short term labour hire services.
Q: How do you collaborate with hotels to ensure that your teams are delivering a consistent experience to the standard of their hotel?
- Hotels generally take a measured approach by noting their NPS or service level scores at time of outsourcing their operation to us, then internally monitor scores, feedback, and mystery shoppers (as per usual). The hotel then shares the relevant information with us regarding guests’ welcome experience, as well as collaboratively setting KPI’s for our team to meet or exceed.
- We conduct scheduled meetings to solicit measurable and real time feedback on the program.
- If hotels adopt our technology, reporting is a key tool in measuring the success of the valet parking operations.
Q: What is the impact on the bottom line for hotels.
- Reduced Operational Costs: Reduced operational costs occur because the hotel is relieved of the liability. All costs are managed by the operator.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Enhanced customer experience which leads to higher reservations and the ability to charge more for hotel rooms.
Management Time: Managing Valet Parking is very time consuming for management. By outsourcing it, management time is diverted to other areas of the hotel which require focus, and First Class Valet takes care of the valet parking.