We're giving up precious (not really) blog space to give some free advertising to our new favorite hotel, Gloria Angkor Hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia!
Service excellence is difficult to describe, but you know it when you experience it. What we do know is that service is an attitude and not about a series of activities to be performed. It involves anticipating needs and exceeding expectations.
We've also observed that spending more money doesn't necessarily improve service quality. Crappy service exists in high-end resorts. Excellent service exists in budget accommodations.
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| Entrance to hotel. |
Gloria Angkor Hotel wins our service excellence award. At $20/double/night, we're not sure how they do it, but clearly, they have strong service-oriented leadership that ensures every staff member provides the highest level of customer service within their means. We have been impressed.
On our third night, we had an opportunity to share some canned Cambodian beers with the General Manager, Kim. He has prior staff experience working in 5-star hotels and hotel management. He is passionate about providing excellent customer service and is very serious when he says he wants Gloria to rank number one in TripAdvisor. Amazingly, it's within their reach as they hover at the #4 spot after only 10 months in business.
The attention to detail is impeccable. GM Kim was telling us that the fragrant flowers for the cool towel service and such cannot be found at the local market. Every day, he sends one of his staff to collect the flowers from a tree at a temple. Recently, based on customer feedback about breakfast, he decided to add croissants. Of course they cost more, and the staff was appalled at the expenditure, but it makes a subtle difference.
Other examples include:
- Being welcomed with a welcome drink, cool refreshing wet towel, and a snack upon check-in.
- Water, snack, and cool refreshing towel each time we returned from a trip to Angkor or from town.
- Free tuk tuk rides into town.
- Tuk tuk drivers carried around ice cold water and wet wipes for the customers.
- Excellent full-service breakfast with 4 choices.
- Daily, they printed the day's HBO and Cinemax movie offerings on cable TV. Nice touch.
- Before we retired to bed, they would hand out a Cambodian bedtime story, translated and printed into English. These are traditional stories told to Cambodian children before bedtime.
- An actual king size bed! Usually, a double occupancy room is 2 twin or full size beds, and occasionally a queen, but never a king at any budget hotels.
- Personal tuk tuk driver for the day to take us to Angkor or in our case, run errands around town as well.
- A parting gift of traditional Khmer sash/scarf. That was above and beyond and highly unexpected.
There were so many more experiences, but we can't remember! There were too many to recall.
As a relatively small hotel at 35 rooms, we really got to know their very friendly staff. One guy had been working at the Gloria for only 1 month. He learned English by going to a private English school. We were discussing how people compare Angkor to Machu Picchu, and he'd never heard of Machu Picchu or Peru for that matter, so we showed him a picture. He promptly looked it up the Internet that night! He was very personable and eager to learn. We thought how his world will expand just by being able to talk to travelers about other things he's never known.
GM Kim says he cannot compete with the higher-paid more experienced staff at luxury hotels nearby, so he hires inexperienced people with the right service attitude/potential and trains them himself. Their experience at Gloria gives them an opportunity to move onto better paying hotel jobs. He also hires university students and helps them with lodging and food so that they can work while earning their degree.
Sophya is one of the servers in the restaurant who just received her degree in business management by supporting herself through school with 2 jobs. She wants to continue with a master's degree, but the minimum cost is $400/year to attend university. It's difficult to afford school as there is no tuition assistance or loan programs and only earning $50/month. Wow. We had long intellectual discussions about the past, present, and economic future of Cambodia. Very smart lady...
Mr. Sa Rouen was our tuk tuk driver for 3 days. We also had canned beers with him (there's a theme...)! He was the first full-time driver hired by the hotel so his tuk tuk bears the name "Sa Rouen #1". He's the boss-man of the other tuk tuk drivers. You'd never know he is 39 years old with 3 kids! When we said we were leaving tomorrow, he told us that when we come back, we have friends at Gloria.
Well, we could go on and on. They made us feel like we were part of a large Cambodian family, and that is difficult to replicate. This hotel has something very special going on, and has truly embraced their motto:
Built from the Ground. Service from the Heart.