Elevating Guest Experience
Project: Hotel-Wide Grooming Standards
Industry: Hospitality
Overview
In alignment with its reputation as a leader in premium hospitality, The Westin Sydney engaged Prep People to refine and unify grooming standards across every guest-facing department of the hotel. From the concierge team at the entrance to the chefs behind the scenes, the goal was to ensure every interaction reflected the Westin’s hallmark of exceptional service and professionalism.
Objectives
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Establish clear grooming standards across all guest touchpoints
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Improve team consistency in presentation regardless of department or role
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Reinforce the connection between personal presentation, service excellence, and brand identity
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Deliver engaging, motivational training to a diverse hotel team
Approach
Prep People collaborated closely with the Westin’s leadership team to develop a suite of presentation guidelines tailored to the hotel’s service model and employee roles. These guidelines were introduced through a series of targeted seminars led by Principal and seminar presenter, Laurel Brown.
With an emphasis on education, inspiration, and practicality, each session helped staff understand not only what the grooming expectations were, but why they mattered from shaping guest perceptions to reinforcing team pride and professionalism.
Seminar content was tailored for accessibility and impact, enabling employees from varied cultural and professional backgrounds to connect with the material in a meaningful way.
Outcomes
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Hotel-wide engagement: Staff from all departments, including front desk, housekeeping, food service, and kitchen, attended the sessions.
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Immediate results: Teams showed a noticeable improvement in presentation, consistency, and attentiveness to detail.
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Positive feedback: Employees described the sessions as highly relevant, easy to understand, and directly applicable to their daily roles.
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Cultural shift: The training helped reframe grooming as a tool for confidence and pride in representing the Westin brand
Conclusion
This engagement with The Westin Sydney demonstrated the powerful ripple effect of consistent grooming and brand alignment across all service roles. By empowering staff to become stewards of the Westin brand, Prep People helped cultivate a culture of excellence
“The Westin Hotel brand stands for exceptional customer service and exceptional customer service requires ongoing commitment to detail. The grooming seminars were undertaken by us in recognition that how well our people are groomed not only directly impacts upon the customer perception but also has the power to affect the attitude of our people in performing their respective duties. The training sessions were effective because they not only informed our people of the required standards [for grooming], but also reminded our people that we are all brand stewards.”
“We found that her techniques for grooming, tips and recommendations were specifically suited to our needs, extremely well delivered so that we were able to comprehend and digest the information easily, and the feedback from participants was very positive indeed. The result was a more motivated team who now takes more care in their presentation. Thank you Laurel for a most beneficial series of training sessions.”
Kathy Webb, H.R Director, The Westin Sydney
“It was a challenging assignment because of the variety of roles and numbers of personnel involved. The focus was on communicating the Westin’s high expectations to people of different backgrounds in a way that was engaging and motivational.”
Laurel Brown, Principal, Prep People