Four Ways to Improve Your Hotel Operations (2024)

In a fast-paced industry like hospitality, success is dependent on timely execution. But, managing the constant in-and-out of guests, long lists of daily operational tasks, and special events can make finding efficiencies challenging.

Using paper checklists to track whether or not tasks are complete provides minimal visibility into execution and limits team accountability. Add operating multiple hotels to the mix, and driving consistent team execution and reporting on performance is next to impossible.

If you’re looking for a solution to automate the daily tasks of your hotel staff and gain clearer insights into the performance of your hotel operations, you’re not alone. Nearly 40 percent of hoteliers are looking to replace pen-and-paper processes with software that will help improve their operations.

Mobile hotel audit software improves team productivity, reduces time spent manually filling out paper forms, and eliminates data entry, so teams have more time to spend face-to-face with guests. Plus, real-time, centralized reporting empowers organizations to action issues faster and easily make decisions to drive consistent performance across locations.

In this blog, we'll explain how to improve hotel operations by using hotel audit software to measure the performance of daily tasks such as:

• hotel housekeeping checklists
• hotel maintenance checklists
• pool inspection checklists

Converting from paper forms to hotel audit software will improve your hotel operations in four ways:

1. Automate daily tasks to keep teams focused on your standards
2. Streamline housekeeping and hotel maintenance processes
3. Create an efficient issue management processes
4. Empower teams to easily make decisions to drive business improvement

Accountability is a crucial driver of performance. Even if your teams are aware of their daily responsibilities, it's important to assign ownership of duties so that everyone focuses on their specific tasks during the chaos of the day.

Use hotel audit software to direct your teams when it comes to completing daily operational tasks so they can focus the majority of their attention on your guests. Schedule and assign recurring work like housekeeping, property maintenance, cleanliness, and food safety checks as often as needed. Teams will automatically be alerted by email when a check should start or when one has been missed, keeping them focused on meeting standards and keeping your operations running smoothly.

2. Streamline housekeeping and hotel maintenance processes

The cleanliness, ambiance, functionality, and amenities at your hotel all impact your ability to provide first-class hospitality experiences to guests. Using housekeeping checklists and hotel maintenance checklists are crucial to ensuring rooms are set up with everything guests need, cleanliness is up to standard, and building lights, elevators, and pools are working. The constant need for these checks require a lot of time from your teams when using paper processes.

Mobile checklists streamline the time it takes teams to measure housekeeping and hotel maintenance performance and help boost team execution. Your teams can easily complete checklists on their smartphone or tablet, fill out checklists faster, and submit the results in real-time - eliminating data entry and allowing managers to action results faster.

Empower teams to deliver efficiently and consistently by adding guidelines, photos or instructions to checklists. By providing a reference to your standards, you will enhance team knowledge and improve execution across locations.

3. Create an effective issue management processes

Finding issues and fixing them before they impact your guests, is a top priority for your managers. But, when there’s a lag time between checks being completed and managers having access to results, issues linger. The longer issues go unresolved; the more likely problems will be forgotten - especially without a centralized place to track issue management.

With mobile hotel audit software, you can submit results in real-time. You can set up auto-emails that contain a detailed PDF report of results or alert specific team members when issues are found. Instead of digging through emails to check the status of action plans, you can use a real-time communication portal to assign issues to team members, set due dates, discuss, add photos, and resolve. Plus, issues are all centralized, so managers have a clear overview of priorities.

4. Empower teams to easily make decisions to drive business improvement

Collecting actionable insights is the final, and perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to finding efficiencies and improving hotel operations. Measuring operations with paper methods often means data is buried in spreadsheets, inaccurate, and not centralized. With little to no visibility into the measurement of daily performance, you and your teams lack the insights needed to make decisions to drive business improvement.

Mobile hotel audit software collects and centralizes data from all locations in-real time, and presents the results in visual analytics that provide a clear picture of performance. You can easily view trends, root causes of issues, and top and low performers - without having to compile spreadsheets and charts. By identifying champions, you can encourage those teams to share knowledge and best practices across locations to help drive overall performance. By giving teams a constant window into performance, you will empower them to make the right decisions to drive execution.

Conclusion

Measuring daily performance is the first step towards finding ways to improve your hotel operations. How measurement is enforced, how results are shared, and how data is compiled are the remaining keys to finding efficiencies and improving your operations. By using hotel audit and checklist software to measure, enforce, share, and report you can improve your operations in the following ways:

1. Automate daily tasks to keep teams focused on your standards
2. Streamline housekeeping and hotel maintenance processes
3. Create an effective issue management processes
4. Empower teams easily make decisions to drive business improvement

This blog post was originally published June 09 2016, updated January 31 2018.