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The SA Butler Academy grossly misleads its students and hospitality industry clients!

Having had the misfortune to connect with The South African Butler Academy, and its Recruitment Head Adriaan Coetzer last week in respect of their graduate Hettie Novacovic, we have done more homework on this dishonourable and unprofessional butler training and recruitment body based in Cape Town.

A phone call to Coetzer, to chat to him about Mrs Novacovic’s short-lived employment with us, was professional and honest, Coetzer agreeing that Mrs Novacovic had acted unprofessionally by not arriving for work without giving notice, was late for work twice in four days, did not follow instructions about the breakfast serving time or any other instructions for that matter, did not own up to damages she caused to our property which cost us a call-out fee for the pool company, did not want to interact with our guests over breakfast (one couple asked her to leave the table, something we have not experienced in our 17 years of operation!), she refused to shake hands to welcome our new guests, was unable to manage the housekeepers, left to go home midway during guest check-in training, prepared a dreadfully kitsch table for our wedding anniversary guests we wanted to spoil (contrary to my request of how I wanted it to be made special for them), was closed off to any communication with guests and ourselves, documented (unbeknown to us at the time) everything she had seen and learnt with us in the four days on her iPad, and generously took a coffee and a breakfast break herself while the rest of the staff were focused on getting the rooms ready for the new arriving guests.  Coetzer agreed that appointing her was a liability for most potential employers, as she has a husband on pension, who has to be ’employed’ too, but may not earn any income so as to not lose his pension!   He accepted that Mrs Novacovic’s poor work ethic was a very negative reflection on the SA Academy of Butlers and its training standards!  She was dishonest about the rate she quoted for her daily fee, quoting the most qualified butler fee of R800 per 12 hour day, and therefore we reduced her hours to 8h00 – 14h00.  While Mrs Novacovic was not appointed via Guild Recruitment, the placement arm of the SA Butlers’ Academy, Coetzer welcomed the feedback telephonically.

Coetzer promised to have a chat with the butler graduate, having a meeting with her later in the day.  The e-mail response was one of a changed person, making wild unproven allegations, and disputing any weaknesses of Mrs Novacovic, to which he had agreed earlier in the day, which earned him a Sour Service Award! Mrs Novacovic had replied to our Gumtree advertisement for a half day assistant for Whale Cottage Camps Bay, sharing that she was annoyed by Guild Recruitment taking so much of her fee for their placement fee of 20% on the advertised butler rates.  She was therefore applying for jobs directly, and not via the SA Butler Academy recruitment service, an important part of the Academy’s misleading marketing to attract students.

The SA Butler Academy website (and its Facebook page) is riddled with typing errors, and is over-written with extravagant exaggerated claims:

*  It is a ‘non-profit’ training establishment – yet they charge R19500 for local students, and €5000 for international students inclusive of accommodation!

*   It is aimed at ‘hospitality candidates‘, who have a ‘desire to step into a lavish world of Wealth and Fortune‘ – yet Mrs Novacovic has no clue of the hospitality industry!

*   Its Principal is ‘world renowned’ Newton Cross, but a Google search only provides links to his Academy’s website!  Cross has trained as a butler in the UK, worked on some cruise liners, at Fancourt in George, and at Clarendon House in ‘Fresnay’ (sic)! It is claimed that he has worked for Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Michael Schumacher, Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, and ‘George Senior Bush (sic)’.

*   Butler student applicants should be fluent in English, but neither the Academy’s website, its Facebook page, nor Mrs Novacovic’s writing reflects this fluency!

*   The ‘Academy is the finest in the world’, and ‘the finest Private Sector training institute in the world and most certainly in South Africa’, but these claims are not substantiated on the website!

*   The Academy is World renowned for our modern approach to Butler Service in private households, resorts, exclusive yachts and passenger liners‘.  Again, no substantiation is offered.

*   The Mission Statement is the ultimate in exaggeration by the Academy, no substantiation reflected in its website or via Google: “The Academy is tantamount with professional Butler training which prides itself on the highest form of dedicated Butler Training. At The South African Butler Academy you will be taught how to run an effective modern private estate or household with grace and professionalism not just and estate but also a Yacht, Hotel Butler department and Boutique Resorts. The Academy course is 8 weeks of intense Butler training governed by experienced celebrity Butlers who are qualified as professional Butlers. The Academy will provide you with all the skills and certification to perform Butler duties. Our Training standards are exceptionally high and admired by International press and media. We are the world’s number one leading Butler Academy and the apex of all estates and households. Become part of SABA and celebrate service”  (our underlining).

*   The logo (provided cheekily by the Academy yesterday) reflects five stars – however the Academy is not graded by the Tourism Grading Council, and its use of the stars is therefore unlawful, SA Tourism having decreed that the star quality denotion is exclusive to the Tourism Grading Council!

It is the claim We are proud to have a legacy in the market as our clients are kept confidential and above all “disclosure” is our highest priority” (our underlining).  Clearly they may have meant ‘discretion’ or ‘non-disclosure’, which ironically is the most dishonest of all the SA Butler Academy claims, with it publishing the slanderous feedback of Mrs Novacovic on its website, reflecting the unprofessional nature of the Academy and its graduates. Any potential employer of a SA Butler Academy graduate should fear that ‘discretion’ is not guaranteed by The SA Butler Academy or its graduates, and in particular by Mrs Novacovic.

Discretion is the most direct association one would have with a butler, and it is reflected in the Florida-based Institute of Modern Butlers’ Professional Butler Code of Ethics, which highlights Integrity, Confidentiality, Service, Lawful Behaviour, Dedication, Personal Development, Respect, Professional Relationship, and Promotion.  The SA Butler Academy and its graduate Mrs Novacovic have breached this international Code of Conduct in a number of respects.  Interesting is that the SA Butler Academy does not have a Code of Conduct!

At a cost of R19500 for an 8 week course, it would appear that The SA Butler Academy students themselves are being taken for a ride, as this time period is not long enough to teach any student the full theoretical spectrum of hospitality, customer service, staff management, table service, silver service, etiquette and protocol, security, home automation, interpersonal management skills, culinary training, household management, and executive housekeeping, all elements of The SA Butler Academy curriculum, and certainly not at a practical level!

Mrs Novacovic made no effort to learn my job, which she was meant to take over, lurking in the kitchen and washing the dishes most of the time, the most expensive dishwasher we have ever employed!  Our staff are served breakfast during the course of our very busy mornings, prepared by our chef, a different egg type daily, which Mrs Novacovic enjoyed too, and they are provided with lunch too.   I love writing this blog, and do so mainly at night, as there is no way that I could do it justice in writing it while sitting in a busy Reception dealing with the guests that we accommodate daily, e-mail enquiries and correspondence having priority during the day.  We deny Mrs Novacovic’s false and libellous allegations, deplore her attempts to discredit ourselves, our staff, and our guests, and reserve our rights to take action against Mrs Novacovic and the SA Academy of Butlers for defamation.

Needless to say, we would warn any potential butler student, and any potential employer of a butler via The SA Butler Academy’s Guild Recruitment, against any dealings with The SA Butler Academy!

POSTSCRIPT 27/2: We have received feedback from a number of our blog readers and past guests that their comments in support of ourselves have not been allowed on the SA Butler Academy blog, another proof of its unprofessionalism and one-sided presentation of information!

POSTSCRIPT 4/3: The SA Butler Academy has taken note of our comments about its exaggerated claims and spelling errors, having removed all the quotes we featured in the above blogpost.  Profiles of the owner Newton Cross and his partner Adriaan Coetzee have been removed.  An attempt has been made to remove the illegal use of the five stars in its logo!

POSTSCRIPT 4/7/17:  We were summonsed early this year by the SA Butler Academy with an intermediate interdict, demanding the removal of this Blogpost, four years after I wrote it. This came after a written request by the Butler Academy that I remove the Blogpost, which I was not prepared to do. Last week the judge hearing the case rejected the Butler Academy demand. I am extremely grateful to my superb advocate, for this outcome. The Butler Academy is threatening a further legal case, to claim compensation for alleged defamation, a case which is likely to be heard in 2018.

See the Blogpost of 29 December 2020 below, which summarises the misleading Marketing allegations against the SA Butler Academy, and which confirms that we won the court case brought against us by the Academy in 2017, in attempting to have this Blogpost removed. It remains on the first page of Google, causing the Butler Academy huge harm due to the negative picture which I have painted about the Butler Academy, and about its untruths.

POSTSCRIPT 29/12/20:  On Sunday 27 December 2020 Carte Blanche broadcast an 11 minute insert on the Marketing misrepresentation of the SA Butler Academy, a program which was instigated by its former 2019 Singaporean student Lin Yang, who is trying to get a refund on her 2019 course fees after being expelled by the Academy on her third day of the course, due to alleged lateness, a tireless warrior in this battle of the past 18 months. She and I, as well as an anonymous student, were interviewed by Carte Blanche presenter Derek Watts, as was Newton Cross and Braam West from the SA Butler Academy. The program left the viewer with the impression that what I had learnt in 2013, when I wrote this Blogpost about the misleading marketing of the Butler Academy,  is still true today! The link below contains a link to the Carte Blanche insert, as well as my summary of the SA Butler Academy misrepresentation story as told by myself and Lin Yang, with another anonymous student too. 

Carte Blanche exposes SA Butler Academy Marketing deception, first exposed on WhaleTales Blog in 2013!

 

Chris von Ulmenstein, WhaleTales Blog: www.chrisvonulmenstein.com/blog Tel +27 082 55 11 323 Twitter:@Ulmenstein Facebook: Chris von Ulmenstein, My Cape Town Guide/Mein Kapstadt Guide Instagram: @Chrissy_Ulmenstein @MyCapeTownGuide

About Chris von Ulmenstein

 

Celebration: Reaching the milestone of 1000 blogposts!

Today we have reached an exciting milestone on our Whale Cottage Blog, in that this is our 1000th blogpost.  We thank our readers for their support in reading our blog, and for providing feedback, to help us improve as we developed over the almost three years. In numerology, 1000 symbolises multitude and perfection, we have learnt from Google, and we dedicate our next 1000 blogposts to be worthy of this definition.

Highlights have been making the Top 10 on the Most Controversial Blog category of the 2010 SA Blog Awards, achieving a cumulative unique readership of just under half a million in the last 16 months (about 30000 per month on average), and setting up the Food & Wine Bloggers’ Club last year.

So what have we learnt about blogging and our blog in the close to three years:

*   Restaurant news in general, and reviews and special offers specifically have attracted the greatest interest on this blog.   Our most widely read restaurant reviews, since we went onto Google Analytics 16 months ago, are for Tokara DeliCATessen, Sotana by Caveau, Gaaitjie, Pierneef à La Motte, and Duchess on Wisbeach.  It was the enjoyment of writing the review of Portofino restaurant, owned by Cormac Keane, that got us started with reviews, and we have written more than 100 reviews since then.  We have seen negative reaction to some of these, and have been banned from the Caveau group of restaurants (including Sotano), the Caviar group of restaurants (Beluga and Sevruga), Opal Lounge, and Café des Arts as a result.  Restaurants generally are poor at Social Media, and only a handful blog and/or are on Twitter.  This means that a restaurant’s information most often is provided by a blog rather than by the restaurant’s own website, which can be to its advantage or diadvantage, depending on the reviews that are listed on the first page of Google.  Other highly read blogposts are the Winter and Summer Restaurant Specials lists, the Table Mountain vote for the New7Wonders of the World, Prince Albert and Charlene Wittstock’s visit to Fresnaye in January 2009, and the Disney service training programme instituted just days before the World Cup. 

*   Tourism topics have also attracted attention, probably because there are far fewer writers on this topic.

*    Word spreads quickly if a blogpost is controversial, and brings in new readers to the blog.  Despite all allegations to the contrary, we have never written a blogpost to be controversial.  It is the reaction to it by our readers that causes the controversy. 

*   Comments have become harder to manage, and increasingly cowardly commenters write anonymously to slate the writer of the blog or the subject of a blogpost.  If one deletes such comments, one is criticised; if one publishes them, one is equally criticised!

*   While blog readers enjoy honesty, and probably read this blog for it, those that are on the receiving end of it plus their friends do react with venom, rather than using the feedback to improve their service and quality. The nastiness in ‘unSocial Media’, our new name for it, has been shocking, especially in a campaign by David Cope on Twitter, where anything goes!

*   Blogging has become very competitive, as bloggers chase readership, and want to be the first to review a new restaurant.  Achieving a first page Google listing for a restaurant, for example, can attract readership over time to the blog by new users when they Google the name of a restaurant.    

*   Readership is disappointingly low on public holidays and weekends.  Saturdays have the lowest blog reading numbers, dropping by up to half of weekday readership. Our highest readership of this blog was on 16 June 2010, during last year’s World Cup, when a tag for ‘2010’ was widely linked to this blog, attracting 9000 page views on that day alone. 

*   Although most readers are unknown to the writer, one carries a huge responsibility in shaping people’s opinions through what one writes.   We try our best to remain objective in presenting information at all times.  We have been blamed for wishing to destroy restaurants and new initiatives, yet supply news about restaurant openings and specials all the time.  Attempts were made last year by Michael Olivier (Editor of Crush!), David Cope (The Foodie Blogger) and Skye Grove (Cape Town Tourism PR Manager) to have this blog closed down.  We moved our blog hosting to America, to prevent this. 

*   Information as well as images are most likely to bring traffic via Google to the website, followed by Twitter.   Facebook is far less likely to draw traffic.

*   The weekly Sweet & Sour Service are enjoyed by readers, and many readers read the blog on a Friday, to check who has received the Sour Award, and then catch up in reading the blogposts of the pevious week.  The Spar Sweet/Limelight Sour Service Awards attracted an unusually high readership, and still do.

Looking forward, we plan to continue being honest, no matter what the cost.  We will endeavour to remain relevant, and to remain heard in the increasing Social Media ‘noise’, as more and more blogs are started, and existing ones reinvent themselves.   We will try to write shorter blogposts!   We will continue helping others to become better bloggers, and will endeavour to never stop learning from others too.

Thank you 1000 times for your readership and support!

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com  Twitter:@WhaleCottage

Restaurant Specials top of Top 10 Whale Cottage Blogposts!

Our Blog is two and  half years old, and we have been dedicated to keeping up our initial goal of writing a blog post a day, with only a few exceptions.  Blog writing is scary initially, as one does not know if anyone, and who, is reading the blog, until one reads comments from readers, if they reveal their real names.

Out of interest, we checked the more than 400000 unique pageviews of our blogposts for the past twelve months via Google Analytics, widely regarded as the most reliable benchmark of readership.  Our Blogposts with the Winter, as well as the Spring and Summer Restaurant Specials, have attracted strong interest, with the remaining Top 10 most read blogposts being a mixed bag, containing four restaurant reviews, indicating that blog readers love reading about restaurants.  We have just launched the Winter 2011 Restaurant Specials list.

The Whale Cottage Blog Top 10 blog post list in the past twelve months is the following:

1.   Winter Restaurant Specials for winter 2010

2.   Table Mountain a nominee for the New7Wonders of the World

3.   Spring and Summer Restaurant Specials : 2010/2011

4.   Prince Albert’s attendance at Charlene Wittstock’s birthday party in Fresnaye in January 2009 – the recent engagement and the forthcoming marriage of the couple keeps pulling traffic to the blog

5.   Restaurant Review of Tokara DeliCATessen (a surprise, but probably due to potential search confusion between the Deli at Tokara, and the Tokara Restaurant.  Ranked third on Google search for this deli).

6.   Restaurant Review: Sotano by Caveau – this blogpost caused a stir, mainly due to the rude response it received on Twitter from one of the Caveau owners

7.   Presentation by Disney before World Cup to frontline hospitality and tourism staff, to enhance service levels – it was a ‘Mickey Mouse’ presentation, of little value, and cost the taxpayer a fortune!

8.   The Stellenbosch Restaurant Route – the popularity of this blogpost, listing the significant restaurants in Stellenbosch, is rewarding, as the Stellenbosch Restaurant Route is something I created on this blog, to honour Stellenbosch now wearing the Gourmet Capital crown.

9.  Restaurant Review: Pierneef à La Motte – this is one of my favourite reviews, and was a pleasure to write from the generous background information I received from Hein Koegelenberg, and in reaction to the amazing food that I have enjoyed there.  Experiencing it for the first time gave me goose bumps, knowing that this will become an Eat Out Top 10 Restaurant for 2011.

10.   Restaurant Review: Gaaitjie Restaurant in Paternoster – our review is regularly read, ranked first on Google for this restaurant. 

In the past month the Top 10 most read Blogposts were as follows:

1.   President of Ferrero Rocher dies in cycling accident in Cape Town – this is not normally a story we would write, but we wanted to correct early headlines that stated that Pietro Ferrero was ‘killed in SA accident’, implying yet another crime statistic, which was completely incorrect.

2.   The Consumer Protection Act, of vital importance to every South African business dealing with the consumer

3.   Departure of Chef David Higgs from Rust en Vrede – probably due to the lack of a statement from Higgs as to why he is leaving and where he is going, this blogpost still attracts regular readership

4.   Cape Town and Winelands Spring and Summer Restaurant Specials for summer 2010/2011

5.   Cape Town to become a 24-hour world class city, detailing plans for various development hubs in Cape Town, including the expansion of the Cape Town International Convention Centre

6.   Restaurant Review: Casparus Restaurant in Stellenbosch (right), an Eat Out Top 10 Restaurant prediction for 2012

7.   Restaurant Review: Dear Me in Shortmarket Street

8.   Tasting Room best restaurant in Africa/Middle East, reflecting the results of the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants

9.   Restaurant Review: Dash at the Queen Victoria Hotel, an Eat Out Top 10 Restaurant Award prediction for 2012

10.   Hotels in Cape Town offer wide range of winter rates, but discriminate against foreigners.

Google Analytics also measures clicks on tags, and the top tags in the past month, which led Google searches to the Whale Cottage Blog, were ‘Charlene Wittstock’ (very high source of traffic), ‘Prince William’, ‘Table Mountain’, ‘Marthinus van Schalkwyk’, ‘El Bulli’, ‘Cape of Good Hope’, ‘Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company;  ‘petrol price’, ‘SA Tourism’, and ‘Hemelhuijs Restaurant’.

We welcome your feedback about our blog, and the stories you would like to read more about.  Thank you to all our readers for your readership, support, suggestions, and comments.  

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com  Twitter:@WhaleCottage