The hotel industry is a subset of hospitality in general and has seen a number of new approaches develop in recent years. Business environments and customer preferences have evolved considerably; and as with any customer-facing industry, successfully running a hotel is about knowing what guests want.
Dealing with large numbers of guests and having only minimal downtime means you need to organize tasks and coordinate staff in real-time to keep up. Things like a clean common area and fresh bedsheets are important parts of reputation management.
In your hotel, be proactive about:
Sustainability
One major trend in the hotel industry is an emphasis on sustainability, on the part of businesses and customers alike. With climate change in mind, many customers select their accommodations more carefully when they travel.
One way that hotels have become more environmentally mindful is through green cleaning; in other words, hotels and other hospitality businesses use environmentally sustainable products to maintain their premises. In many cases, the sustainable option is even more effective than traditional cleaning products.
Part of sustainability in hospitality is monitoring the energy your hotel consumes and reducing that amount where possible. For example, using energy-efficient lighting and low-flow toilets to avoid excess consumption.
Security
Security is often the biggest expectation of any hotel guest. Customers trust that they’ll have a comfortable and uncomplicated stay while they’re traveling, and the opposite is one of the most damaging things to a hotel’s reputation.
Ensuring guest safety means constantly being on the lookout for potential safety hazards, signs of pest infestations, and ensuring that appropriate safety measures are in place. Cleanliness can also be part of security. For one thing, green cleaning products often pose fewer health risks to employees or guests than toxic chemical solutions do.
Regulatory compliance
Hotels are real estate, meaning they are subject to things like zoning and land use laws like any other building. There are also health and safety guidelines with respect to employees and guests. OSHA’s rules for hotels are part of the requirements for all General Industry businesses.
Make sure you follow applicable guidelines with regular risk assessments, since being found noncompliant during an inspection can lead to your business being punished with fines or a suspension.
Adopting technology
Maintaining a safe, clean, and efficient hotel is much easier with technology to help. Most hospitality businesses rely on administrative and other software to make managing responsibilities easier. Such programs facilitate remote team management, speed up tasks, and avoid delays in communication.
Hotel technology includes physical equipment like cleaning robots, air purifiers, and smart devices. Investing in these saves your staff time when performing tasks in the future. New technologies can also be cost-saving tools; putting smart sensors in rooms allows you to easily adjust energy usage.
Running a hotel business with Lumiform
With so many different teams of staff responsible for different things in your hotel, and the fact that hotels tend to be understaffed, having a centralized platform where you can handle daily hotel management improves workflows immensely.
Using Lumiform, you’re able to leverage a combination of desktop and mobile app to create, organize, assign, and carry out tasks ranging from room cleanings to hazard assessments to pest control. Everything is based on checklists that you either download or create from scratch, and then use to complete workflows no matter where you are using the mobile app.
These automated checklists clarify, standardize, and speed up necessary hotel tasks like:
- Ensuring rooms are clean and have the proper amenities in-between guests
- Checking for and removing pests
- Finding and removing safety hazards
- Welcoming new guests
Use Lumiform to easily assign and update tasks so your staff is always informed about their roles and you can keep to a schedule with no hassle. This makes life easier for you and your employees, and helps you get more work done at the same time.