Sands Academy, Elevate Series: Leading Guest Service

Las Vegas Sands is the global leader in the development and operation of world-class Integrated Resorts, ensuring all of our properties deliver extraordinary guest experiences. Providing Team Members with the right tools and knowledge to produce the best experience is a responsibility of the company. Through Sands Academy’s Elevate series, team leaders were trained on how to identify ways to establish links between excellence in guest service and business practices and policies for their teams to follow during a course on guest service.

“Our goal for this class is not what we can do to make our guests’ experience better, but how we can coach our team to offer excellent guest service,” Janell Ives, specialist for Talent and Organizational Development, Human Resources, at The Venetian and The Palazzo, said.

Las Vegas Sands’ guests value three things first while staying at our resorts including value, cleanliness, and functionality. By delivering on these ideals to guests, Team Members are shaping and setting the bar for guests’ overall experience.

“Las Vegas has a very interesting product—it produces experiences,” Ives said. “The more we can define that, the better we can provide.”

One of the key drivers of guest service is establishing an emotional connection that allows guests to feel important, entertained, excited, pampered, and valued. How well Team Members know information will help elevate a guests’ overall experience. It’s also important for Team Members to handle situations that may go awry and have a problem-resolution mindset that allows for service recovery.

When it comes to hospitality standards, managers can ensure their team is on the same page by creating a vision for them. Communicating that vision of guest service repeatedly will be important in making sure Team Members know what is being asked of them. “SPEAK” is an acronym that is used to help define hospitality standards: speak first and last, personalize each guest contact, make eye contact and greet everyone as you pass, be alert for guests who need assistance and offer help, and keep the campus impeccably neat and clean.

“If you are not being alert or giving attention to the guest, then how are we providing this excellent guest service to all of our patrons?” Darnell Mays, Manager of Enterprise Analytics at The Venetian and The Palazzo, said as he referred to using the SBI method (Situation, Behavior and Impact) from the “Effective Feedback” class to help when providing guest service.

Mays noted that the Elevate series has been a nice balance of leadership concepts he already knows and what he can improve on.

“All of the classes have been helpful,” he said. “It’s the little things, where I think I probably should’ve said it this way or not said it that way. It’s constantly helping me tweak methods, and on certain things, reinforce the way that I handle things.”