Quick question: are your hotel operations reactive or preventive? If the answer is reactive, you are losing time and money. And if you say preventive, our great tips will help you be even more efficient. In both cases, keep reading.
Introducing technology may feel cold and unwelcoming, but remember that hotel tech is not about less hospitality but better hospitality. When you free your staff from tedious tasks and unnecessary paperwork, their time and energy can be rerouted to provide a superior guest experience. And that is the essence of proactive operations: improving guest service to take hospitality to the next level and garner repeat bookings.
Why are Reactive Hotel Operations an Issue?
With reactive hotel operations, you are solving problems as they occur instead of taking steps to minimize or prevent bottlenecks, unnecessary costs, guest complaints, equipment malfunctions, etc. Moving towards proactive hotel operations allows you to optimize your housekeeping and maintenance departments fully.
The key lies in data. Although this buzzword has been on the hospitality’s radar for quite some time, few hotels translate data into actionable results. With the right housekeeping management software, relevant data becomes instantly accessible for you to leverage in ways that drive exceptional results.
Four Steps to Save Time & Money with Proactive Hotel Operations
Below, you will find four steps to save time and money with proactive hotel operations.
1. Check Who’s Reporting Maintenance Issues
If most of your maintenance issues are reported by guests, you’re taking a reactive approach to hotel operations. Frustrated guests tend to leave bad reviews, which affects future profit, so your aim should be to catch maintenance issues before the guests do. That is where housekeeping management software comes in. Having an all-in-one platform for housekeepers and maintenance staff to report issues and solve them as soon as possible can lead to 60% more issues being recorded. Imagine providing your hotel with a competitive edge and increased efficiency…
2. Optimize Your Budgeting Using Data
Hotels that leverage housekeeping and maintenance data can decrease unexpected (and often incredibly costly) expenditures. This is why having housekeeping management software is crucial. Instead of wasting money on reactive actions, you’ll have much more accurate estimates about every piece of equipment and when to fix or replace it. This proactive approach can be applied to keeping track of inventory too. It lets you note what you’re running low on and replace missing items on time before an inventory shortage can affect your guests’ experience. With a proactive approach, your budgeting will become smarter as you can purchase items on time, in bulk, and at better prices.
3. Plan Your Housekeeping Schedules According to Guest Demand
On top of ongoing staff shortages in hospitality, every minute of your staff’s idle time costs your hotel money. To prevent losing time and money, you should optimize your staff’s workflow, create more balanced workloads and schedules, create clear operating procedures, and delegate routine tasks. Flexkeeping’s new feature lets you stay proactive and keep your hotel running like clockwork.
With Automated cleanings, you can create custom and complex cleaning schedules based on many parameters collected from reservation data. Now, you can customize your housekeeping schedules based on length of stay, room rate, number of guests, room status or attribute, etc. The possibilities are truly endless!
4. Leverage Data to Provide Better Staff Training
Daily reports from housekeeping management software are an invaluable source of information for switching to proactive hotel operations. Among other valuable data, reports how you have the most frequent problems, the most and least productive team members, top failed checks and who’s responsible, etc. Armed with this information, you can quickly identify the housekeeping and maintenance department’s strengths and weaknesses and optimize quality control.
The goal is not to punish staff but to provide them with better training and empower them to do their jobs better. Once they know how to complete a task, every issue can be handled promptly and more efficiently. Not only that, but staff retention rates improve when people are allowed to expand their skill set.
Remember, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Only a 360º view into your hotel operation will give you complete control of your performance & costs. Keep your hotel operations proactive and reap the benefits of bulletproof strategic decision-making.
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