Friendly service key to hotel’s success

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32788, 13 December 1971, Page 6

Friendly service key to hotel’s success

(By

FRANK SNOW)

Friendly service and “homely atmosphere” rather than formality and elaborate surroundings are paramount in a hotel’s standard of cater ing for the tourist trade, says Mrs Marshall who, after 51 years, association with Greymouth’s Revingtons Hotel, last Monday handed over its ownership to Mr and Mrs C. B. Lewis, of Temuka.

Born on the West Coast 75 years ago, Mrs Marshall, a widow, has lived in Christchurch for the last 20 or so years. Her husband, Mr Allan Marshall, died only a year ago.

Over this period and up to its recent sale, Revingtons was conducted by a staff house-manager, a position which over the years had several appointees. For the Marshalls, of course, it had entailed considerable coming and going between tte city and Greymouth.

As Mrs Marshall put it: “I don’t really know in which of the two places I spent the greater part of my time —probably Greymouth. One thing I do know is that my getting out of the hotel business is a big wrench, for I’ve been in the game for virtually my whole life.” In reality, from early girlhood. She was born in No Town <2O miles from Greymouth), a long-gone goldfields settlement, where her father, Mr James Thornton, an Irishman, was a gold miner. Her parents had seven children. Two died in early infancy, leaving two sons and three daughters she being the youngest and the only survivor of the five children.

“Hotel life started for me at the age of six, which was just after my father died in 1902 and my mother decided to go into the hotel business. She started off as licensee of the Union Hotel in Nelson Creek, which at the time had four hotels. “Two years later she took over the Railway Hotel, which recently closed down, in Ngahere, where we stayed for about 16 years. My two older sisters, Anne and Bridget, and myself used to help mother run the hotel, just as we had done in Nelson Creek. “It was during these years of my girlhood and young womanhood that I gained a first-hand knowledge of—and a love for—hotel life. Mother had very fixed ideas about running a hotel. She put accommodation and meals before the bar-room, and was prouder of what she sent out from the kitchen than what she took over the bar. “I recall her often saying she’d rather pour a man a cup of tea than draw him a glass of beer. “She took over Revingtons on lease in 1920, and in 1929 bought it. Meantime, I had married, and Allan, who belonged originally to Port Chalmers, and myself helped her run the hotel up to the time of her death in 1930. Shortly after, we bought the property from the family estate. “This was all in the days of the original wooden building, built in 1876, and which we decided in 1938 to replace with the present brick build-

•ng.” The original building was named tte Post Office Hotel, owned and run by Mr John William Oliver from 1876 to 1885, when it was taken over by Mr Tom Jones, a former hotelkeeper in Kumara and then Barrytown. In 1886 it

was bought by Mr William D. Revington, who changed its name to Revingtons. The hotel has accommodated numerous notable guests, including the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh (in 1954), General Birdwood, Earl Jellicoe and a succession of Govemors-General. “The person responsible for building up tte hotel’s good name was undoubtedly Mr William Revington himself. He was a man who believed in and lived up to the highest codes of hotelkeeping. He kept a good house.” Commenting on today’s trends to keep abreast of New Zealand’s fast-growing tourist traffic, she emphasised the importance to hotel management of the human factor, particularly in respect to management-staff relationship. Without harmony and complete understanding at this level it was the guests who in the long run suffered most. “After all,” Mrs Marshall said, “a hotel’s staff as a whole is the true measure of its standard, since they are the ones directly responsible for personal attention to guests’ needs and services. The manner in which such duties are performed largely depends on guidance and example at managerial level. “Which is why I say these factors—the human element —are of more importance to hotel guests’ comfort and relaxation than are lavish furnishings and luxury-wise showiness, which, to my mind anyway, can be very much overdone.” In support of these views, Mrs Marshall showed a letter she had received three weeks ago from an American couple living in California, who had recently toured New Zealand.