In the UK in the first decade of the 21 st Century, following a period of exponential growth, the budget hotel market is approaching the mature phase in the product life cycle. This phase of development in a market is usually associated with the implementation of strategies which strengthen and underpin market share and which develop competitive positioning. This serves to emphasise, via differentiation, unique brand benefits or propositions which in turn engender strong brand loyalty in their customer base. In this context, the paper considers the strategies of the market leader Whitbread’s Premier Inn which has secured its market leadership through a combination of generic growth and prudent takeovers, and which had already achieved significant loyalty through the introduction, in January 2001, of their unique 100% ‘good night guarantee or you money back’ promise. Not known for resting on their laurels and, in furtherance of their objective of moving from Great to World-Class by 2010, Premier Inn have implemented guestcentric brand standards measured via an external professional brand audit programme, and a guest satisfaction feedback system which surveys over 1 million guests a year to support this worldclass intent. This will be realised when 90% of guests are recommending Premier Inn. Currently (January 2008) over 84.4 percent of guests would be happy to recommend and well over 90 percent would choose Premier Inn again. In order to meet customer expectations, world-class hotel brands must have a good understanding of their customers and what they want; have consistent delivery of product and service across all units, in particular, bringing all outlets up to standard and through this, grow emotional engagement with their customer. Introduction Like many large hospitality and retail organisations, Premier Inn expands and grows through geographical dispersion, creating challenges for consistent implementation. Yet, consistency is the key component of successful branding. Although advertising and public relations affect brand and image, ‘the consistent delivery of an offer is the fundamental principle from which brands originated’ (Young, 2003), and ensuring the details of that product offering meet customer expectations is essential. To deliver the customer experience, Premier Inn utilises a suite of tools as part of its quality management programme – the 100% Satisfaction Guarantee (recently renamed Good Night Guarantee), brand standards and audit, and the guest recommendation Survey (see Figure 1). From Great to WorldClass – Service Quality Management at Premier Inn Figure 1 Premier Inn launched the Good Night Guarantee in 2001. It acts as a differentiator for the brand, winning the National Business Awards customer service strategy of the year, and embraces a number of benefits such as driving brand consistency; enabling all employees to take action; and the provision of valuable information to the business as to what to fix and what really matters. It performs the role of a customer audit – setting ‘clear performance standards’ and generating ‘reliable data when performance is poor’ focusing the entire organisation on customer perceptions Good Night Guarantee (previously 100% Satisfaction Guarantee) Launched January 2001 Brand Standards & External Brand Audit Implemented March 2002 Guest Recommendation (Customer Satisfaction Survey) Implemented March 2006 Great to World-Class Guest Obsession and possible failure points (Hart, 1988). The financial pain of the Good Night Guarantee compels Premier Inn to try to eliminate potential service breakdowns. For 2007 invocations averaged 0.4% of bookings and cost £1.4 million which can be off-set by the marketing benefits gained. Building on the Good Night Guarantee, the Premier Inn brand standards audit was implemented in 2002 and is a critical business tool for controlling consistency and improving the gap between standards and delivery, particularly regarding the harder static aspects of the service. Since its introduction, fewer customers experience problems, and it has inspired exceptional standards, such as cleanliness, upkeep and maintenance. Moreover, it provides a robust tool for ensuring consistent brand delivery in a dispersed business run by different operators, and for integrating new businesses or acquisitions. The intangibility of services increases a sense of risk for customers. In growing hospitality brands, like Premier Inn, with dispersed locations, and delivery generally dependant on low-level unsupervised employees, there is a significant role for quality audits in delivering hard standards. However, their appropriateness for monitoring human interaction aspects should be carefully considered against cultural and organisational contexts. An unbalanced focus towards audit control can lead to a ‘compliance-for-compliance sake’ mentality, with employees hiding behind standards, or not taking responsibility for ensuring satisfaction in their obsession with control. In some instances employees simply do not feel empowered to enhance the standards in the interests of guest care. Furthermore, scripting of softer standards can create a robotic guest experience for fear of losing audit points. The audit should play a central role, but it is a tool, not an end in itself, and Premier Inn has made a conscious decision to introduce ‘hardline' standards, which must be delivered, and 'guideline' standards, which are opportunities to flex the standards to respond to guest needs without fear of being penalised by the audit. Since quality management and customer satisfaction involves both organisational delivery and customer response, a more balanced holistic approach to service quality management is essential. To monitor the softer human encounter and provide valuable information on expectation-delivery gaps, the Guest Recommend survey (essentially a customer satisfaction survey) was launched in 2006 as the key focus of Great to World-Class cultural change workshops. It has potentially been the biggest change in Premier Inn in years, driving a genuine service orientation and, in conjunction with the Good Night Guarantee and brand audit, placing the customer at the heart of the business. In 2005, following 8% like-for-like sales growth, a highly successful acquisition of Premier Lodge, and an ‘all-green’ Balanced Scorecard (all criteria fully met) the first in Whitbread’s history, Premier Inn were described by Patrick Hargreaves (Goldman Sachs) as "The best performing hotel business in Europe". But to take the brand from Great to World-class and maintain market leadership, Premier Inn seek to truly understand what customers think of their product and service and to foster a ‘guest obsession’ culture at every single hotel, engaging all employees in the journey. The guest recommend programme has exploited the use of technology to enhance the value and usefulness of guest feedback and become an integral part of local and strategic decisions. Moreover, it has been grasped by operational teams to coach behaviour at unit-level, and to heighten focus on the Good Night Guarantee. Critically, however in multi-unit businesses, the challenge lies in enabling employees to deliver great service without overly increasing expectations of the product or introducing complexity and cost. Consistency is still critical and a genuine service orientation is required rather than largescale changes to the basic brand specification. This exploratory case study employs an outside in approach to understand and explain, in a strategic context, the policies and procedures, which have made Premier Inn market leader in every sense. It will also determine how the guest feedback programme is about the long-term resolution of their standards and how its findings will influence daily working practice; inform all future new builds, acquisitions and refurbishments. In setting this super-ordinate goal of moving from ‘Great to World-Class’ evidenced through the achievement 90% of guests ‘recommending’ it is succeeding in energising and focusing all at Premier Inn towards one shared vision. This approach is fully argued by Frederick Reicheld, of Bain & Co (sometimes known as the Harvard guru of Loyalty) in his paper ‘The One Number You Need to Grow’ (Reicheld 2003) at its simplest and most profound he states ‘ Most companies – striving for unprecedented growth by cultivating intensely loyal customers... investing lots of time in measurement when the good news is that you don’t need expensive surveys, you only have to ask your customer one question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague ?” The more promoters your company has, the bigger its growth, the message to staff is straightforward; we need more promoters than detractors. The case starts with an analysis of the company’s market leadership; there follows a review of the potential for variation within service industries; where dissatisfaction is experienced this is met by refund under the Good Night Guarantee; in turn this led to the capture of data on expectationdelivery gaps which exposed the of challenge of service quality to organisation; here the hard audit culture emerged and needs to evolve into a guest-centric culture supported by energised and enabled staff who focus on the one shared vision of the whole company. It examines and evaluates the unique guest feedback system implemented by Premier Inn to support its growth through recommendation. The survey is delivered in conjunction with Premier Inn’s business partners ORC International – 1 million e-mail questionnaires are sent to guests who have stayed each month, a commendable response rate of 35 percent is achieved, with over 98 percent of the 45-question survey being completed. A number of processes including reward and recognition are supporting to embed guest obsession as a key plank of the Great to World-class strategy. It concludes with an

A gainst a background of steadily declining beer sales, the Director-General of Fair Trading’s Beer Orders of November 1992 ordered the break-up of the complex monopoly which was found to exist in favour of brewers who owned tied houses and who had tying agreements with free houses. As a direct result, some of the largest players withdrew: for example, in 2001 Bass and Whitbread divested their low-margin and shrinking brewing interests in the search for more profitable areas for investment. This dramatic restructuring of the industry led to the development of national chains of Pubcos and, in clearing the field, allowed for the expansion, through consolidation, of some of the existing (though highly fragmented) regional, integrated brewing companies.1 This case study analyses, using concepts and models, the strategies employed over the last five years by East Anglia brewer Greene King plc to maximise the growth opportunities in this much-improved business environment. Greene King have been acting like Pac-man, routinely acquiring small regional brewers and then driving down costs by closing the brewery and transferring production of the acquired brands to their Bury St Edmunds brewing centre. The inherited beer brands are added to the Greene King portfolio, affording them the much wider distribution and exposure to both the on-license and the rapidly developing off-license trade. The pub outlets acquired are, if appropriate, absorbed into the Greene King network of managed and tenanted houses. That this business model works is shown by the almost doubling of turnover and profitability in the last five years, 2002–06.