HOTELIER AWARDS 2012: Top five housekeepers named

Deepti Ahergupte, Renaissance Doha City Center Hotel

These finalists will compete for the Housekeeper of the Year 2012 title in the Hotelier Middle East Awards to be held on October 31 at The Ritz-Carlton DIFC.

Below you will find extracts and testimonials from the shortlisted nominations for each of the candidates...

Deepti Ahergupte, Renaissance Doha City Center Hotel

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About Deepti
Deepti Ahergupte started her career with Intercontinental Hotels Group as hotel operational trainee in 2003. During this tenure Deepti was promoted to different positions such as trainee HK supervisor and then to a fully fledged Supervisory role. Deepti then moved to Hyatt Hotels as housekeeping team leader in 2005. Her excellence in the Hk dept paved a way for yet another promotion to asst. manager -housekeeping in 2007. She continued to support the daily operations in this role till the year 2009. Later in the year 2009, she got an opportunity to join back the IHG as Asst. executive Housekeeper. In the year 2010, Deepti got an opportunity to join the pre-opening team of Doha as Asst. Housekeeping Manager to overlook the HK operations of all the three brands namely-Renaissance Doha City Center, Courtyard by Marriott and Marriott Executive Apartments with a total inventory of 584 rooms. In the year 2011, her passion towards the Housekeeping and having been able to open all the three hotels successfully, she was promoted to Housekeeping Manager's position in the month of October. During this tenure she has also won "The Supervisor of the Month" award. Once the hotel became operational and the results started showing up towards a positive trend in terms of Housekeeping services, service delivery standards, HK team's commitment towards work she was acknowledged for her outstanding services rendered by promoting her to the position of Asst. Director of services for all the three brands in the month of May, 2012.

Above and beyond…
Deepti strongly believes in developing associates internally. She promotes a lot of cross training within the hotel itself. This resulted in a lot of associates coming forward to do their cross training. Once the cross training is completed, as soon as there is a suitable vacancy in the other departments, she transferred her HK associates who were cross trained to that department to overcome the short staffing crisis in that dept. Currently there are around 6 HK associates who have been transferred to the other depts. like 02 associates to Security, 01 associate to Kitchen, 02 associates to Front Desk and 01 associate to Engineering dept.
As a part of pre-opening phase, Deepti realised that there are a lot of associates who are from non hoteliering dept across the hotel and hence it was imperative that they are aware about the Housekeeping dept as well as the services provided by the Housekeeping dept. She took charge of setting up an event in the Hotel Grand Ballroom in such a way that everything about Housekeeping dept. is under one roof. This led to the birth of an event called "Housekeeping Expo" which had several stalls set up by the housekeeping associates like bed making stall, chemical stall, equipment stall, amenities stall, flower arrangement stall, baby crib stall, bedding stall, bath linen stall, uniform stall, towel art stall etc. It was one day event wherein all the associates across the hotel were invited to visit the stalls. The stalls were manned by the Housekeeping associates who shared the details about their respective stall with the rest of the hotel team members. This event was the most successful event till today in the hotel. This was very well received by each and every team member of the hotel as well as the management.
Marriott International dignitaries were visiting our hotel to do a Hard Hat Conference to announce the launch of the three hotels in Doha. As mentioned , we were still in a pre-opening stage and most of the areas were unfinished. We were expecting a lot of media during this event and hence it was imperative that we prepare the areas well in advance for the conference. Deepti took charge of the entire event, formulated a plan of the walk through with the journalists. She then laid out a plan to work on all the defects for all the areas which were a part of walk through. She organized teams of people for each of the areas, set the expected standards and got the entire area ready an earlier day itself. The cosmetic changes, the impressions which were created by Deepti in terms of set ups, flowers etc made the attendees think as to why the hotel is not yet open in spite of being ready without knowing the fact that there is a lot which needs to be done behind the scenes.

Testimonials:
“Deepti is cited for her outstanding achievement in P&L results through the implementation of a very effective contingency plan which was centered on reducing costs. She was able to lower linen costs by 23%, optimum utilisation of manpower, concentrated on a more efficient schedule of her regular associates and reduced the outsourced labor cost."

"Deepti is not merely liked or respected by her team, but loved and revered. This is not only because she leads a fantastic housekeeping team but because she is also an involved member of the team. She shares in everything her team experiences."

"Deepti has introduced changes to working practices and procedures to ensure that her team members of room attendants are delivering what is required of them, by holding daily meetings and weekly cleaning projects. She continually monitors the achievement of targets and objectives."

"Deepti has also established an innovative housekeeping incentive, whereby team members receive recognition financially and performance-wise based on quality targets, and has the ability to “tackle 1001 small things and still keep an eye on the big picture operations of three properties”.

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