Pros
Brand recognition, employee rates, personal growth oppurtunities (depending on mgmt company and ownership), flexible schedule, also as the brand is a limited service product, it gives employees the oppurtunity to learn all aspects of the business within feeling so "big box" and only learning very specific areas of the hotel. The reason I rated high stars regarding compensation, work/home life balance, etc is only because my mgmt company and owners offer these items, the brand itself has nothing to do with how much we get paid or when we have time off or if we get promoted or not.
Cons
My mgmt company is fantastic and my owners are supportive however the brand standards, IHG rewards standards and communication from the brand to the hotel is not seamless or user friendly. Merlin offers too much info and rarely works properly making the day to day duties of the job and customer service challenging. Opera as a PMS is the worst I have used, it takes at least 2 weeks minimum of training in order to get used to it resulting in a more expensive training period as well as more errors. OnQ (Hilton) is by far better. Limited support from the brand, you send e-mail's to your brand reps in any department ( area manager, brand manager, quality manager, etc) and typically you can expect to continue to bug them a few more times before you get a response. Most high occupancy properties do not have time to deal with this, we reach out to our support staff and we have to wait for days, weeks. As we are waiting, we are getting fined for brand standard issues that we couldn't have corrected as we didn't have access to the appropriate information. From a larger standpoint, I would like to know why IHG was not listed in the top companies to work (24/7 Wall Street) for while our sister companies Marriot and Hilton were...from a recruiting and staffing standpoint, we will NEVER draw the best employees if we aren't the best starting from the brand and moving down. The best will eventually migrate to the best.
