Blog Post

Rendevous Hotel

When you’re responsible for managing one of Christchurch’s best-known hotels, reliable machinery is absolutely critical. We spoke to Rendezvous Hotel General Manager Faisal Sayed about how D&M Solutions has made life easier for his staff and his guests. 

Before working with D&M, the Rendezvous team had consistent reliability issues with their lifts, primarily due to an outdated lift controller. The frequent breakdowns left the 22 storey hotel struggling to service their guests; with only two lifts on site, any downtime meant frustrating delays for guests and additional stress for the hotel operations team. 

“Somebody would hit [their suitcase] on the lift, it didn’t have the ability to absorb the bang, and it would just break down on the spot,” Faisal says. “The system at the time was not good enough to take all the pressure.”

“It became quite normal for us to have one lift out of order every two days or so. There were massive negative guest sentiments.”

Rendezvous initially engaged D&M Solutions to install a new lift controller, which significantly reduced the number of breakdowns while also improving speed and performance. Faisal says the controller replacement was a large piece of work that required “some serious skills” - and the D&M team was up to the challenge. After the replacement, the D&M team installed a new lift at the hotel and began the ongoing management and maintenance of the lift systems. 

“We have had a couple of breakdowns, but it has been leaps and bounds from where we started,” Faisal says. “[D&M Managing Director Stuart Mitchell] is a very helpful guy, very passionate about what he does. We’ve got a great relationship from a contractor/supplier perspective.”
D&M’s reliability and customer service quickly opened doors to a wider relationship managing other hotel services. They began carrying out the hotel’s electrical maintenance and upgrades, including changing transformers and replacing halogen heat lamps with LEDs in the hotel’s restaurant kitchen. 

After being consistently impressed with their commitment and level of work, Rendezvous contracted D&M Solutions to take over the maintenance of the hotel’s 50-tray car stacking system. 

The car stackers had been responsible for plenty of previous headaches; Faisal remembers mornings spent standing red-faced in the parking lot with guests who were unable to retrieve their cars from the stacker. He admits being slightly sceptical when the D&M team took over the contract, saying initially it was “hard to believe they could manage it.”

“They proved me wrong and in the last year they’ve been managing it very, very efficiently,” he says. “All of those embarrassments have been taken care of now, we have a good system in place.”

Throughout all of the work that D&M Solutions has done with Rendezvous, Faisal says he’s most appreciative of the “extraordinary competency” of the D&M team.

“I want a contractor who knows exactly what they’re doing, is competent enough to know what they’re doing, and is passionate about resolving any issues,” he says.  

“They just make it simple and fix it as soon as possible. The swiftness to resolve a problem, that comes from the competency of doing the job - that’s extremely important.” 
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Blakely Body Corporate Services

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