Four Seasons Case Study

The first Four Seasons Hotel opened over 45 years ago. Since then the company has grown to 81 properties in 34
countries. Famed for its quality of service, the hotel group has won countless awards including the prestigious
Zagat survey and numerous AAA Five Diamond Awards, and it is also one of only 14 organizations that have been
on the Fortune magazine’s list of ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ every year since it launched in 1998, thus
ranking as ‘top hotel chain’ internationally. From its inception the group has had the same guiding principle, ‘to
make the quality of our service our competitive advantage’. The company has what it calls its Golden Rule: ‘Do to
others (guests and staff) as you would wish others to do to you.’ It is a simple rule, but it guides the whole
organization’s approach to quality.

“Quality service is our distinguishing edge and the company continues to evolve in that direction. We are always
looking for better, more creative and innovative ways of serving our guests’, says Michael Purtill, the General
Manager of the Four Seasons Hotel Canary Wharf in London. ‘We have recently refined all of our operating
standards across the company, enabling us to further enhance the personalized, intuitive service that all our guests
receive. All employees are empowered to use their creativity and judgement in delivering exceptional service and
making their own decisions to enhance our guests’ stay. For example, one morning an employee noticed that a
guest had a flat tyre on their car and decided of his own accord to change it for them, which was very much
appreciated by the guest.

The golden rule means that we treat our employees with dignity, respect and appreciation. This approach
encourages them to be equally sensitive to our guests’ needs and offer sincere and genuine service that exceeds
expectations. Just recently one of our employees accompanied a guest to the hospital and stayed there with him
for the entire afternoon. He wanted to ensure that the guest wasn’t alone and was given the medical attention he
needed. The following day that same employee took the initiative to return to the hospital (even though it was his
day off) to visit and made sure that that guest’s family in America was kept informed about his progress. We ensure
that we have an ongoing focus on recognizing these successes and publicly praise and celebrate all individuals who
deliver these warm, spontaneous, thoughtful touches.

At Four Seasons we believe that our greatest asset and strength is our people. We pay a great deal of attention to
selecting the right people with an attitude that takes great pride in delivering exceptional service. We know that
motivated and happy employees are essential to our service culture and are committed to developing our
employees to their highest potential. Our extensive training programmes and career development plans are
designed with care and attention to support the individual needs of our employees as well as operational and
business demands. In conjunction with traditional classroom-based learning, we offer tailor-made internet-based
learning featuring exceptional quality courses for all levels of employee. Such importance is given to learning and
development that the hotel has created two specialized rooms, designated for learning and development. One is
intended for group learning and the other is equipped with private computer stations for internet-based individual
learning. There is also a library equipped with a broad variety of hospitality-related books, CDs and DVDs that can
be taken home at any time. This encourages our employees to learn and develop at an individual pace. This is very
motivating for our employees and in the same instance their development is invaluable to the growth of our
company. Career-wise, the sky is the limit and our goal is to build lifelong, international careers with Four Seasons.

Our objective is to exceed guest expectations and feedback from our guests and our employees is an invaluable
barometer of our performance. We have created an in-house database that is used to record all guest feedback
(whether positive or negative). We also use an online guest survey and guest comment cards which are all
personally responded to and analysed to identify any potential service gaps. We continue to focus on delivering
individual personalized experiences and our Guest History database remains vital in helping us to achieve this. All
preferences and specific comments about service experience are logged on the database. Every comment and
every preference is discussed and planned for, for every guest, for every visit. It is our culture that sets Four
Seasons apart: the drive to deliver the best service in the industry that keeps our guests returning again and again.’