The Czech Republic, unfortunately, has developed something of a reputation for poor service that has been difficult to shake. Service can often be erratic, staff can be surly, and waiters, on occasion, can be unscrupulous in their dodgy calculation of bills.
Bad service can ruin a good evening. Just ask food critic Laura Baranik, who reviews restaurants for her popular blog The Prague Spoon and the Czech daily Lidové noviny and has experienced her share of miserable service. Take, for instance, the time she ordered a dish at a local restaurant and the sauce came to her table smelling and tasting unmistakably rancid.
“It was obvious something had gone off, and I sent it back,” Baranik said, adding that the waitstaff reacted to her complaint with a lack of concern. “They didn’t say anything. They didn’t apologise.” What made matters worse was that the exact same dish was brought back to her moments later, with the same putrid sauce, only mixed up with some new spices. Despite the restaurant’s charming atmosphere, Baranik was so appalled by the lousy service that she has never dared to return.
“I feel there’s a tendency sometimes not to admit when a mistake has been made,” Baranik said, noting that it’s only natural for errors to occasionally happen. “It’s all just how they deal with it. If they had said ‘I’m sorry’, then I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But instead, you sometimes get the attitude like ‘You should be glad to be eating here’. “
The Czech Republic, unfortunately, has developed something of a reputation for poor service that has been difficult to shake. As guidebooks and travel websites point out, service can often be erratic, staff can be surly, and waiters, on occasion, can be unscrupulous in their dodgy calculation of bills. But in recent years, the proliferation of high-end restaurants and luxury hotels in Prague has raised the bar, prompting a surge in demand for well-trained and experienced service staff. Meanwhile, hospitality schools are scrambling to keep up.
According to Zuzana Roldánová of Prague’s Institute of Hospitality Management, a total of about 2,000 students are now enrolled in the institute’s Bachelor of Arts and Master of Business Administration degree programs, with the majority focusing their studies on hotel service. That number has steadily grown over the last decade, along with the school’s capacity, to the point where the institute has now reached its limit, she said. Yet at the high school level, a shrinking student population caused by so-called weak birth years has prompted a decline in enrolment for hospitality-focused secondary schools nationwide. At the Hronov Vocational and Secondary School of Hospitality and Travel Industry, which prepares its students to become cooks, waiters, innkeepers and shop assistants, enrolment has fallen to about 400 students from roughly 600 two years ago, instructor Jiří Musil said. That trend may indicate further challenges to employers in the hospitality industry in coming years as the pool of trained workers contracts.
Education versus attitude
Paradoxically, the current economic downturn, which threatens to cripple some of Prague’s hotels and restaurants, is, at the same time, playing a part in helping to correct the overwhelming demand for quality service staff, said Nad’a Pohlreichová, human resources manager at the Radisson SAS Alcron Hotel. “Obviously not all the hotels and restaurants are going to survive the situation,” Pohlreichová said, noting that the ones that do won’t be forced to compete so fiercely for skilled workers. “In a way,” she added, “I think it is somehow motivational for employees to get better education and to get better training.”
At the Alcron, about 80% of service employees have gone through formal hospitality training at school. Yet Pohlreichová is quick to point out that education accounts for only a fraction of what she seeks when hiring new service staff. A positive attitude and a willingness to learn make up for a lot, especially as the Alcron, like most other international establishments, also offers its own in-house training. “I don’t really care too much about the schools they went to or whether they can make 120 cocktails. For me the main thing is their attitude,” she said. “I always say service is something you cannot learn. You have to be a born service person. You can teach them all the technical stuff, like how to carry plates and how to check in guests on the computer, but you cannot teach anybody a [positive] attitude toward guests or customers.”
At the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Prague, human resources director Petra Horaková echoed that sentiment. “In my opinion, the personality of each [employee] is a key to success, and many times, it’s more important than a formal education,” she said.
Communist hospitality
Undoubtedly, the Czech Republic’s communist past is in large part to blame for the low quality of service that the country has put up with until now. Under communism, there were essentially no quality hotels or restaurants to speak of. Moreover, permission to travel was restricted, cutting off the public’s exposure to international hospitality standards, Pohlreichová said.
Service industry jobs were generally considered the work of the unskilled and uneducated, yet ironically, they were also among the most lucrative. “A waiter could make much more than a doctor,” said David Pátek, the Alcron’s food and beverage manager. He stressed, however, that while waitstaff could generally make more, they were not actually paid more, as the job afforded them the opportunity to supplement their incomes by pilfering goods from state-controlled restaurants, and hotels and other illegal activities.
When Pátek decided to go to hospitality school about 15 years ago – a decision inspired by a classmate’s father, who enjoyed a respectable job as the manager of a hotel in Brno – the stigma surrounding the service industry still remained. “In the beginning, it was a strange game playing in this hospitality business [because] people [saw] people working in restaurants as thieves,” he said. “I think it’s now how it should be,” he added, noting that service workers currently earn incomes that correspond with their training, experience and job performance. Long gone are the days when restaurant and hotel staff could accumulate small fortunes from dubious activities.
The fall of communism brought about a massive transformation in the service industry as the country became a sudden tourist destination, Horaková said. Initially following the Velvet Revolution, she said, “people did not have a tendency to improve service or offer something above standards, as the income from tourists was enormous”.
But when international luxury chain hotels began entering the market, they imported staff from other countries who could train local workers, and introduced more sophisticated standards of hospitality. Employers’ demands are much higher now than they were even a decade ago, when speaking English would have been enough for a prospective employee to land a job at any of Prague’s hotels or restaurants, Pohlreichová said.
Besides a positive attitude, employers often look for staff who have had experience working or studying abroad, as they tend to have more of a broad-minded outlook. Most importantly, Pohlreichová said, they seek employees who take pride in their work. Unfortunately, she said, Czechs still do not value service work as much as they should and hospitality students often tell her that attending to guests is merely a steppingstone to becoming a hotel or restaurant manager. “They say, ‘I will be a waiter for some limited time, but obviously, I don’t want to be a waiter for life’,” she said. “And you ask them, ‘Well why not?’ and they say, ‘Well, I can do much better’.”
While that mentality is slowly changing, it is still rare to encounter professional waiters and attendants who have been doing their jobs for years, as you might find in France or Switzerland or even at high-end establishments in North America, she explained. When interviewing job candidates, Pohlreichová noted that most people tell her they studied hospitality because they like travelling and meeting new people. “Very rarely people will tell you, ‘Oh, because I love service; I love helping people’,” she said. “If I hear this sentence, I know this is the right person.”
