With falling costs of technology, hoteliers are allocating higher percentages of their budgets to innovative vertical specific applications. May be there would be an age where robots would take over as room attendants.
Vaneeta Arora
The hospitality industry is facing several challenges such as shortage of labour and skills, delivering to match expectations, striving to keep pace with the changing system of global distribution, ensuring consistent delivery as per the brand promise and so on. The key in the hospitality business is to deploy right software tools to minimize risk management and make guests feel comfortable and safe.
Software solutions help you achieve the key objectives for your organization, whether your goals are revenue growth, expense control, improved decision-making in support of strategic planning, increased productivity, financial and regulatory compliance or sustainability.
With the help of software you can track and maintain your property & assets and streamline & integrate your work order management, inventory management, preventive maintenance & overall accountability.
The software and IT solutions help in developing ultimate productivity tool for hotel managers on the move. It allows them to track guest movements, view guest profiles, log and track guest complaints/ requests, and view guest histories. You can have ultimate control and consistency of all maintenance activities occurring at your hotel. Using digital checklists, equipment inspection software easily removes the guesswork and accountability concerns out of conducting inspections. Equipment inspection software increases your staff’s efficiency. It is consistency and excellence that make your hotel stand ahead of others.
Given below are some of the ways the hospitality industry has leveraged technology to overcome the challenges:
- Reduced operational and support cost by improving efficiencies through process and technology excellence
- Consistent brand experience to customers byensuring scalable infrastructure, repeatable processes and integrated systems
- Truly differentiated customer experience by creating enterprise frameworks and making use of smart technology to provide a seamless view of the customer across the value chain and at service-delivery touch points, including those managed by channel partners
The hospitality sector today is going through a phase of tremendous change in its operational strategy. Technology is becoming an integral part of it. One such area that has seen rapid improvements brought on by the growing use of technology is housekeeping. In a labour intensive activity like housekeeping, hospitality technology introduces enhanced efficiency and reduces operational costs. The largest cost in a hotel’s balance sheet is manpower. Forty percent of these manpower expenses is directly linked to housekeeping. Hotels are demanding technology-based solutions that can enable them to reduce these costs and optimize manpower through innovative means.
Some of the technology leveraged by the housekeeping department has been I Pads and smart phones with specific housekeeping applications, kiosk based stations and text message modules to address guests requests and grievances rapidly. Numerous housekeeping functions such as room cleaning, lost and found, supplies and inventory, accessing mini bar using telephones or kiosks and other mundane functions have been automated using smart housekeeping applications. Complaints from guests can be addressed faster through text messages, rather than through staff stationed at a desk. The constant endeavor is to provide guests with personalized service in the least possible time.
Some of the requests for housekeeping departments include applications for tracking a janitor’s cleaning time, floor- wise duty roster for cleaning schedules and comprehensive housekeeping console, which allows floor-wise and user-wise performance tracking. This tracking is useful for guest supplies, laundry, room cleaning and housekeeping inventory information.
Benefits of Technology in Housekeeping
- Instant communication between housekeeping staff and real time availability to streamline check-in / check-out at reception
- Saves time in room allocation process and management of housekeeping schedules
- Increases room attendant productivity by 20%, saves up to 40% time of floor supervisor and eliminates 80% of calls to front office
- Helps in optimizing laundry and housekeeping schedules throughout the day
- Allows fair spread of work among housekeeping staff
- Minimizes expenses of overstaffing and understaffing on daily, weekly and monthly basis
- Provides accurate forecasting of staffing needs
Reports can be derived which help in increasing the productivity and achieve service excellence.
Some examples of Top Reports
- Quality & productivity by department – daily/ weekly/monthly
- Top complaints – for all or one epartment
- Recovery & recurring glitches – stop the bad news from traveling faster!
- Escalated Jobs – narrow down by VIPs
- All Guests/VIP complaints in-house
- Pre- Arrival Guest Report – find out complaints for repeat guests
- Recurring Issues – for engineering & housekeeping
- Low GSR Scores – find out why guests are dissatisfied
- Task-sheet and task history report
- Rule-based room cleaning prioritization
- Rooms are auto prioritized based on real time updates from OPERA
- Cleaning codes are automatically updated based on pre-configured rules
- Guest preferences and traces are updated when the attendant starts cleaning a new room
- Real-time change of task-codes based on Reservation Status
- Paperless task-sheets & room-status auto-update in PMS
- Access to Preferences/Specials on Smart phones
- Auto handling of queue rooms (with or without PMS)
- Modules: lost & found + minibar posting – direct posting into guest profile + count & report
- Real time alerts to supervisors & managers
- DND report
- Message and alert log report
- Staff performance report
- Discrepancy report
- Staff Move around detailed report – know the time consumed in between cleaning the rooms
- Staff move around summary report Escalations – know when someone is running behind
- Task of the day screen – inform about the daily focus areas
- Count & report – keep a track of trolley items
- OOS/OOO buttons – for any pending engineering, other jobs
Vaneeta Arora
Director-Housekeeping,
The Park-New Delhi