Hi all! As some of you know, I studied Tourism and thinking about what to write, it has occurred to me to analyze Logistics a bit applied to my field.

This sector is intimately related to our subject: Logistics problems are those of transport, accommodation, the elaboration of a menu, the organization of a banquet or a congress, the location of a hotel, a travel agency, control the flow of arrival of people to a place (in order to not collapse the place), plan the arrival of a cruise and that can dock in the port, etc.

In this post we are going to talk specifically about hotels, since for a long time I worked for a very important Spanish hotel chain.
The hotels have many departments but to simplify it we are going to only talk about the accommodation and the restaurant.
The accommodation is an intangible service that can not be stored but there are items that must be replenished continuously (given the high number of stays of different customers and during a stay the orders of products that the client asks to the hotel, for example: towels, amenities , sheets, gels …). These products must be stored in a hotel area – usually in the basement – in a general store.

As for the restaurant, they are raw materials that are normally transformed into finished products and also require a place to store (commissary for raw materials and a wine and liquor store – good product conservation must be taken into account).

The department responsible for this is the commissary, which is responsible for:

• Orders to suppliers. Attending to the work forecasts, requests of the departments. and real stocks.
• Merchandise reception.
• Storage and proper storage. Seat tickets in permanent inventory.
• Distribute to each department the products they have requested.
• Departure control and allocation to consumption centers. This is done to control what each department spends.
• Replenishment of goods.
• Permanent stock control.
• Permanent verification of suppliers, products and prices.
• Other administrative work control of docs. (invoices, delivery notes, vouchers orders, ..), shipping to the Administration department, etc.
• Permanent inventory and periodic review (periodic inventory).
• Maintenance of the conditions and temperatures of each product.

Hotels spend a lot of the annual budget on this. Hence, the importance of exhaustively controlling all movements. Good management will achieve cost reduction and greater efficiency.