Dubai, UAE, Thursday, 12 October 2006

Food and Beverage Managers Turn To Undercover Operators To Plug Mounting Losses

The opportunity to lose a lot of money from careless or dishonest employees in the food and beverage part of the Hospitality industry is staggering. It’s not unusual for a loosely run bar to lose as much as 5% of their profits to over-pouring, under-ringing, or overly-friendly bartenders who give away drinks in the hopes of enticing bigger tips from grateful customers.

That’s why a growing number of food and beverage managers are turning to integrity- and mystery shopping professionals like Dubai-based International Hospitality Check (IHC). Unlike mystery shopping, where undercover customers report on customer service experiences, food quality and employee attentiveness, specially trained integrity shoppers also go undercover but they’re looking for much more.

“Our integrity mystery customers are carefully trained to observe all employees who have access to bar stock and the cash register. They observe transactions between bartenders, servers and other customers in order to detect acts of employee dishonesty that costs our clients money.” according to Paul Bol Raap, Managing Director of IHC. “And there are plenty of tricks that they need to be on the lookout for,” he added.

One of the most commonly observed dishonest activity occurs when a regular customer or a personal acquaintance sits at the bar and orders drinks directly from the bartender who “forgets” to ring up the drinks or rings up every other one.

Another common ploy is for the bartender to pour a top-shelf brand of liquor and ring up a less expensive “well” drink. Spotting these types of dishonest transactions requires the keen eye of a well-trained mystery customer, and that’s just exactly what IHC provides.

Carelessness and inattentiveness to company policies can also eat into profits when bartenders “free pour” rather than using measuring devices to control the amount of liquor per serving.

But sometimes it’s the customer who is on the losing end of the transaction. This especially true in instances where the bartender charges the customer for the top-shelf drink that was actually ordered, but pours a less expensive brand and pockets the difference.

Not all employees are dishonest, of course, and the mystery customers frequently turn in “no infractions found” reports which confirm the good news to the managers that hired them. There, however the perception of control is a major management tool.

“Most of our clients use us on a regular basis, and we rotate our mystery customers so they do not become familiar faces to the client’s staff,” Bol Raap said. The company maintains a large number of free-lance people from a wide variety of nationalities. Many are multi or tri-lingual which makes IHC the perfect choice for the international market that they serve.

Bol Raap invites any food and beverage manager who wants to get a handle on his or her revenue loss challenges and shrinkage problems to visit www.internationalhospitalitycheck.com or contact him directly.

- Worldwideservicecheck FZ-LLC-
Internetcity, P.O. Box: 73030
Dubai (UAE)

Tel. 971 (4) 367 6535

Paul Bol Raap, Managing Director
International Hospitality Check
Tel: 32(0)477/599993
p.bolraap@internationalhospitalitycheck.com

International Hospitality Check (IHC®) is one brand of -Wordwideservicecheck FZ-LLC-.
IHC® is a full-service Quality- & Service inspection company, which serves mainly the Hospitality- and Leisure industry.
IHC® operates globally, with desks in BRUSSELS, BUENOS AIRES, DUBAI and SHANGHAI, based on their core, MYSTERY CHECKERS/-Consultants

For more informations please visit www.internationalhospitalitycheck.com.

This release was published on openPR.