Macau Matters | University industry collaboration

Richard Whitfield

I am currently coaching hospitality students at a local university in research projects to develop service blueprints for banqueting services in hotels. I have asked student teams to each find a hotel banqueting manager to interview to investigate how banquets are managed in practice.
A service blueprint is a well known and popular method for analyzing and understanding the interactions between customers and service providers. It provides a graphical way to summarize the sequence of what happens during a service encounter, who the customer interacts with, and what background work has to be carried out to support the service delivery.
I have several reasons for wanting students to do this research. Firstly, students learn more when they are actively involved in their learning, rather than simply listening to lectures or reading textbooks. Secondly, universities are good at teaching theory but are often ill-prepared for “real world” work and this research gives students a taste for what practical banqueting management is all about. Thirdly, I want to see how well banqueting management in practise matches what is in the textbooks.
Universities often hear complaints that graduates are not “practical” or well prepared for business roles. This kind of applied research is one way of addressing these concerns. A better approach is for students to do internships, but as I have complained about before in these pages, the labour laws in Macau stupidly prevent international students from doing internships here, and many of the students I am coaching are from Mainland China.
Banquets can be an important part of the operations of hotels and hotels are a major industry in Macau. Hotels and hotel management can also be an important “export” industry for Macau – providing consulting and other hotel services to the region. It is in everybody’s interest to help build up this local industry, and applied research is one useful way of achieving this goal.
I have been quite pleased with the response from hotels concerning this research. Most hotel banqueting managers have been very helpful and have spent significant time with the students. I am sure that they see this activity as part of their community service obligations. Unfortunately, some have not been helpful and others have been secretive about sharing information – for some reason they consider their banquet event order forms to be secret, but this kind of document is very widely used in the industry and can easily have customer names and other details blacked out.
I believe that it is in the hotel industry’s best interests to cooperate with university research to build up the industry as a whole, to maintain good relations with the local community and to make contact with prospective future employees. I am pleased to see that most hotel banqueting managers in Macau understand this and are willing to contribute.