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Food & Beverage: The Aramark Era begins

Kraken27 said:
Hmm, it's a "yes & no" on this one.

The first thing Towers staff are told in training is "the guest leaves their brain in their car / on their coach when they arrive here". This is 100% true. Guests don't read signs (even safety ones). Back in the days of Virtual Queue / free FastTrack when you needed to retain your park entry ticket, the number of guests who had chucked it in the bin was sky-high.

The odds of guests looking at the top / bottom of the receipt to see see who that actual trading company is for anything, be it food or ride photos, is practically zero. They are at Towers, so it is Towers / Merlin as the parent company who are under-delivering if the service is not up to scratch.
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VQ/free fasttrack... some people were known to "lose" their original ticket to double book.
Allegedly.
Likewise with the BPB mobility access system.
 
djtruefitt said:
The big problem with Aramark is as a general visitor at towers you wouldn’t know Aramark run food and drink, other than the card reader saying Aramark and the receipt saying Aramark. But the staff all wear towers uniform, the branding is all towers, the units will all look the same etc

So if anything goes wrong then it the reputation of towers which suffers and not Aramark.

You often see it will picsolve when people moan on twitter about photos not working etc, even when towers direct them to picsolve you see them kicking off at towers.

At least with a known brand like McDonald’s etc, then if you’ve got issues you know who they are.
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But thats the same with many things, the M&S Simply Food at the station is run by SSP, same as the Burger King and many other places. The cafe at a museum will be run by a catering partner too but you'll rarely find out who it is. Many football stadiums also contract out to companies such as Baxter Storey (like Aramark but smaller and British)
 
My understanding is that Merlin have always paid the over 23 minimum wage rate for their roles, even if the employee is under that age.

Looking at this it isn’t the case with Aramark. I can’t see this fostering a great working environment. You will have staff working in similar roles, such as retail hosts in the Hydration Stations on £9.50 an hour and someone next door under Aramark on £6.83.

Can’t see it helping with the recruitment issues they already have. Especially for returning staff members that would end up getting paid less than they did last year.

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AT86 said:
My understanding is that Merlin have always paid the over 23 minimum wage rate for their roles, even if the employee is under that age.

Looking at this it isn’t the case with Aramark. I can’t see this fostering a great working environment. You will have staff working in similar roles, such as retail hosts in the Hydration Stations on £9.50 an hour and someone next door under Aramark on £6.83.

Can’t see it helping with the recruitment issues they already have. Especially for returning staff members that would end up getting paid less than they did last year.

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Aramark clearly forget that Towers is remote and has no public transport when they decided to drop the pay.
 
McDonald’s down the road pays slightly better, although hours might be worse.
I don’t see what the advantage of working for Aramark would be?


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Uk Living Wage Foundation has set their living wage at £10.90 and many supermarkets are already paying better than that.

Food service on the parks won’t be able to improve without sufficient staff and without decent pay won’t get the staff they need.
 
From speaking to a McDonald's manager the other day, most UK franchises are facing a recruitment crisis themselves. Supermarket workers come the spring will be on £10.50-£11 per hour and some of them will pay that flat regardless of age (I think it's morally wrong to pay a younger person less for an identical job). Of course there will be caveats to that, but still I can't imagine there's a big pool of people who would want to go and work in Burger Kitchen in such a remote location on a seasonal basis when they can just apply to their local McDonald's or Sainsbury's instead for a much higher hourly rate.
 
Do the Aramark employees get free tickets? That could possibly be the only thing that might sway it for some people.
 
I doubt you even get a free drink, let alone free tickets.

Another perk of McDonald's, you get a free meal and mostly unlimited free drinks every shift you work. I doubt you get that with Amarark too.
 
The pay per hour for those under 23 is disgusting.

In the current climate, why would anyone bother working at resort hotels in the middle of nowhere, with no accommodation offering, that has poor transport links and is notorious for dodgy service and stress. Add an absence of EU workers into the mix and it's surely a recipe for disaster.

At least in the park you have the USP of working in an actual theme park on rides, which not everywhere can say. Working in restaurants, well there's plenty to choose from.
 
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AstroDan said:
The pay per hour for those under 23 is disgusting.

In the current climate, why would anyone bother working at resort hotels in the middle of nowhere, with no accommodation offering, that has poor transport links and is notorious for dodgy service and stress. Add an absence of EU workers into the mix and it's surely a recipe for disaster.

At least in the park you have the USP of working in an actual theme park on rides, which not everywhere can say. Working in restaurants, well there's plenty to choose from.
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Totally agree with the above - I can't see Aramark getting many applications to join them at Towers - particularly from under 23's. Given the location of Towers & the relatively poor public transport links, to be able to work flexible hours you really need use of a car. Young drivers get hammered on insurance costs & on £6.83 an hour insuring a car is a no-no, let alone eating & heating.

The recruitment crisis is across the board in hospitality - potential employees will choose a job that is easy to get to via public transport if they don't drive. Companies like Center Parcs have similar issues to Towers in that their Villages are not always well served by public transport. The difference is Center Parcs to offer staff transport from a number of areas, all times to match shift start & end times. They also pay £10 per hour for front-line hospitality roles such as bar staff / waiting staff & offer pretty decent benefits. Due to the recruitment challenges, they have had the foresight to alter some of the restaurant hours / reduce food service times to try and ensure guests still get a good experience.

Will Aramark reduce restaurant / food service times at Towers to ensure a good guest experience? I think I can say with 99.99% certainty they won't. I would love to see the staff attrition levels at Aramark after a couple of weeks of open-season.
 
...and this ladies and gentlemen, is why a lot of people are genuinely better off claiming benefits. They'd surely be worse off working for a company like Aramark full-time and trying to pay their own way in the world than having their accomodation, prescriptions etc etc paid for by the state. Also, no transport costs to pay for. I don't agree with it, but I don't blame people either. The country is broken.
 
I could be wrong here, but wouldn't wage growth for the employees automatically stimulate price growth for the consumer and then contribute to high inflation?

That's from a wider viewpoint rather than Aramark specifically, though.
 
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