Hotel housekeeping is about presenting a clean, sanitary, and welcoming environment at your hotel, putting your brand’s best foot forward at all times. Nevermind fancy amenities or attractions, you need to ensure your guests feel comfortable first and foremost.
Housekeeping in a hotel essentially comes down to being an invisible task. If a guest never raises a complaint about the condition of their room or their service, then you’ve got your housekeeping right. In a way, housekeeping is about making a guest feel like they’re checking into a room that’s being stayed in for the very first time – it’s ‘their’ room.
This doesn’t just happen – it takes strategy, planning, great execution, and communication. You can’t afford for rooms not to be ready in time, to be under-prepared, or overlooked by mistake.
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Hotel housekeeping is important because it can make or break your hotel brand and reputation, eventually your occupancy and revenue.
We’ve all stayed in accommodation where the room… was left in a less than desirable state. Knowing the dissatisfaction of staying in a room that isn’t clean, the condition of your property should be one of your top priorities if you want to experience long term success. In fact, more than 85% of guests cite cleanliness as their main focus when reading reviews.
Slipping up in this respect can pose a real threat to your business. That’s why this blog will try to make sure you have all bases covered. Let’s explore everything you need to know about mastering your housekeeping.
The main responsibility of anyone performing housekeeping duties is to ensure there is no evidence of previous guests, and that every room is completely clean from top to bottom. This includes the room itself, the bathroom, and any wardrobe or storage areas.
Daily housekeeping tasks typically include:
A general routine is to strip the room first, removing anything that is dirty or has been used. No one wants to check-in to a room that has a wet bath towel hanging on the rack!
Next, you should do an inventory check to ensure all items that need replacing are gathered before the next guest arrives. Commonly, you’ll need to replace all the free goodies you have provided in the room as well as towels and linen.
After this you should be ready to clean. Ensure you have all your supplies readied and bring everything into the room together. This will save plenty of time.
Once the room has been thoroughly cleaned, put all the new items into place. Do a final check to make sure the arriving guest has everything they need and was promised upon their booking.
Strategy is important in all walks of life. Sure people can become successful through luck, but generally it helps to be prepared. Housekeeping is no exception.
You need to know your rooms and amenities inside out to be an efficient housekeeper. You need to know how long it takes to completely turn a room over. This way you can calculate, based on how many rooms you have, how much time each day should be dedicated to housekeeping – and how many people. Once you’ve worked this out, you can set up an effective routine and schedule according to guest check-in/check-out times.
Here are some more general tips and tricks for effective housekeeping:
Pay close attention to inventory management too – Are there ways you can save time or money when it comes to room supplies? For example, reducing the selection of snacks if most guests seem to prefer particular options over others.
Most of all your housekeeping should be governed by three principles: prioritisation, preparation, and sustainability.
It may be obvious but it’s important that you equip yourself with the right tools and supplies. Not all cleaning products are made equal and the same applies to electronics such as vacuum cleaners. To achieve a 5-star experience for your guest, you need to research and test different products to get it perfect.
You need to consider the gloves you use, the brands and types of cleaners, the deodorisers and air fresheners, vacuums, brooms and dusters, scrubbers, polishers, and even the equipment trolley or cart you use. Understanding what works best may be trial and error but once you have it set you can adjust budgets and plans accordingly.
Here are some more room cleaning tips you may find useful:
And never forget to remove all your supplies from the room when you’re done. Guests might raise an eyebrow when finding the room extras include mould killer.
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See how you can easily manage housekeeping tasks, view each room status, track schedule progress, and improve guest experience.
Since the constant juggling of numerous tasks can easily overwhelm, it helps to implement a housekeeping solution that has the ability to lighten the load with built-in automation. Being able to forecast factors such as the number of incoming guests or how many staff members are needed for a specific shift, can prove vital in maintaining quality of service.
Choosing to adopt hotel housekeeping software for your small property is a positive business choice, given half of all negative feedback received by hotels is attributed to the readiness and cleanliness of rooms. It’s also been found that 80% of guests would rather give up the internet for the duration of their trip than stay in a dirty hotel.
The ‘best’ tech products on the market make it fast, simple, and affordable. You want software that prioritises ease of use, the ability to be intuitive, and is able to perform many tasks autonomously.
If you’re already using any or all of a property management system, booking engine, channel manager, payments solution, and now housekeeping software the last thing you want to do is operate these independent of each other. You’d end up spending all your time jumping from dashboard to dashboard to update data. The process would be just as clunky and time-consuming as when you were still using pen and paper or excel spreadsheets to run your business
A vital functionality you’ll want out of housekeeping software is being able to view the status of room cleans in one place, delegate the cleaning of the rooms and other tasks to cleaners, and better prepare for upcoming guest check-ins. All-in-one systems like Little Hotelier include all these features wrapped into one bundle.
Automatically integrated to work seamlessly together, you can save time and manage everything from a single dashboard, switching between functions in a matter of clicks. With Little Hotelier, you can do these and more:
By Dean Elphick
Dean is the Senior Content Marketing Specialist of Little Hotelier, the all-in-one software solution purpose-built to make the lives of small accommodation providers easier. Dean has made writing and creating content his passion for the entirety of his professional life, which includes more than six years at Little Hotelier. Through content, Dean aims to provide education, inspiration, assistance, and, ultimately, value for small accommodation businesses looking to improve the way they run their operations (and live their life).
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