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Ellen Elkin, manager of the Hawaiian Village Beach Resort, a resort hotel on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii has requested your assistance on a queuing issue to improve the guest service at the hotel lobby. Ellen Elkin is considering how to restructure the front desk to reach an optimal level of staff efficiency and guest service. Observation of arrivals during the peak check-in time of 5:00PM to 7:00PM shows that an average of 50 guests arrive each hour. It takes an average of 5 minutes for the front-desk clerk to register each guest. Ms. Elkin is considering plans for improving guest service by reducing the length of time that guests spend waiting in line.

PLAN IV. The use of a self-service kiosk for check-ins is the basis for Plan 4. This kiosk could process guests in exactly 4 minutes. Since check-ins are automated the service time would be a constant 4 minutes. Because initial use of this technology is minimal, Ellen estimates that 20% of customers, primarily frequent guests, would be willing to use this machine – hopefully this percent will increase in the future. Ellen would set-up a single queue for customers who prefer human check-in clerks (the remaining 80% of the customers). This line would be served by only four clerks, because of the space requirement for the self-serve kiosk and the extra expense of the technology.

Determine the average amount of time that a guest spends checking-in under each of the stated options and compare to existing set-up. HINT: for Plans with multiple “systems” (eg. 30% corporate customers, 70% regular customers) calculate a weighted average time for that plan so you can easily compare performance measures to the other plans.

Below is the hotels current plan if you need it!

PLAN I. (CURRENT PLAN): At present, the hotel has five clerks on duty, each with a separate waiting line.