Pros: nice people, bonus programs, make you feel important, benefits, excellent training
Cons: sometimes too much work/pressure with no incentive, budgets could be bad, hard to get rid of bad workers to protect turn-over
Drury Hotels is owned by the Drury family and they incorporate a lot of family values into their business. If you do a good job, care about your work, and prove yourself worthy, there is opportunity for advancement within the company. The provide excellent training and support. When I worked for them, they had a bonus program from ALL employees where
– more... you would get a bonus check for how well your hotel did based on guest reviews. It was an excellent idea to make everyone work hard together as a team so you could ALL benefit from happy guests AND extra money!
I feel like Drury taught me a lot that is helping me through my current career. The Front Desk is an excellent place to start for young people who aren't sure what they want to do with their life or want to work part-time as they go through college. There are a lot of departments and they tend to cross-train everyone in at least 2 departments.
Management was good and bad. Sometimes my staff and I felt like our manager didn't care or wouldn't listen. Or maybe it was Corporate who made up a stupid new procedure that made us say, "Have they even WORKED in a hotel before?! That's a terrible idea!", and then we would have to follow the new rule because it was part of our job. Speaking of which, Drury boasts some of the lowest turn-over in the hospitality industry, so they will go to great measures NOT to fire someone. I worked there for over 4 years and only saw 3 people get fired. 2 were for attendance. They have a pretty fair attendance program using points, but some people would "play the system" knowing they could get away with adding on a few points because some from 6 months ago were going to "drop off soon". Corporate had an idea program where if your idea saved the company the most money/quickened a process/was awesome, then you won a gift card. The VP and a team sat down and went though ALL the ideas and RESPONDED to ALL the ideas. If a guest sent in a really good survey about you, the VP would hand-write a little message on it with a sticker and mail it to the hotel. I thought that was a really nice, personal touch! Sometimes (if you were REALLY awesome), Mr. Drury himself would send you a letter.
I feel like the hardest part of the job was just trying to keep up with the workload. Sometimes they have unreal ideas about budgets so the management has to do a lot of extra work with no compensation. Pay is good for Front Desk and even Housekeepers, but management is just okay. Because of all the extra hours I put in, I did the math one day and I didn't make much more than Front Desk because I was salary. That was kind of depressing. I feel like I got scolded for things I couldn't control (their budget was too low and needed more money to pay people extra hours because it was busy). Overall everyone worked pretty well as a team and since they take a lot of time hiring employees, most of the people were nice enough to help each other and different departments to get their work done.
With that being said, I think the best part of the job were the co-workers. We had fun (because it said in the handbook that was part of our job), we helped each other, we learned, laughed, and cried together. Plus they paid for my Bartender's License to serve at their daily happy hour. Bonus! – less