Thurs

Today was our last day of business tours. We started out with the Central Bank of Malta. They gave us a presentation of how the Euro came to Malta. Then after they took us into another building where they hold the coinage that forms Malta's currency history. Before this trip I had traveled to Germany and never noticed that the back of the Euro is never the same, you can tell where the coin is from thanks to the printing on the back of it. I was also surprised to know that although they had coins that date back to B.C. they don't possess an example of every coin that was used. Next we went to visit the Prime Ministers office. Although he was away on official business we did get a chance to look inside his office. Finally we went to our last visit at the Westin hotel. When we first got there to meet with the general manager they took us into a board room where he and the heads of different departments were there waiting to greet us. They started off by telling us about how everything the Westin does is centralized around customer experience. They empower their employees to make on the spot decisions so that the customer can quickly be addressed when a problem arises. This is somewhat different in the US with most companies. Here I think most companies are afraid to empower their employees in fear of losing control and not having enough trust in their employees. Due to this most customers become very irritated when a problem arises and feel like no one can ever answer their questions and that they are just given the run around. One big issue that we as students questioned them on is how they are coping with the drop in tourism numbers. An insight they gave us is that even though most hotels are dropping prices to attract visitors they refuse too. They said that once a hotel drops their price to spark interests it is very hard for them to take that price back up. It also sometimes give people a different perception of their quality. If one hotel drops prices it affects everyone. And because they don't drop prices even with the tourism sector hurting their numbers only fell less than 1% last year. One advantage that the Westin has besides their excellent staff providing excellent service is their location. They are on a part of the island that is like a peninsula. This provides their guest with amazing views from almost anywhere on their campus.