Lean hospitality service in tourism sector: Increasing productivity by implementing a lean management system in a hotel management

Reducing labor costs is an important issue in the tourism and hospitality sector, which has grown steadily in recent years, but reducing service costs is a risky move in this sector where service is at the forefront, because quality service is now being examined more than ever by the customer. In spite of economic conditions, tourism enterprises need to make their business processes more efficient and eliminate wastes in order to reduce costs and provide quality services. For many years, the manufacturing industry has successfully applied many modern methods and tools to improve the quality of its products, make processes more efficient and optimize productivity. Lean Management System is one of the methods used for increasing the productivity in the production sector. Lean Management is a very flexible and universally applicable management technique with customizable tools for many different fields. Lean Management should also be applied in areas such as tourism and hospitality industry within the service sector, but unfortunately Lean practices are not common in these areas. In this thesis, advantages and disadvantages of tourism sector, general principles of Lean Management Method and its applicability in tourism sector, how to follow the implementation phase and the difficulties encountered are discussed. In the application part of the thesis, Lean applications in the units of a large-scale hotel which will be on the path of restructuring by deciding to switch to Lean Management with a strategy change in 2015, which has been serving since 1997, are included. Although the lean applications were carried out in all units of the hotel, "Food and Beverage Service Unit" was selected as one of the areas where the most wastage occurred. In practice, the system of how the Lean Method is successfully implemented in accordance with the accommodation sectors in order to increase the efficiency of the Food and Beverage Service Unit of the hotel is explained with a systematic approach. Keywords: Lean Management, Lean Hospitality, Lean Service, Productivity, Tourism Sector