eeping a hotel in perfect condition and ready do deliver great guest experience is a lot more than just "having a crew" there are so many details involved.
Some striking points are how many tasks need to get solved before guests can occupy a room. Did you know that there's a new task created for every 2.12 rooms cleaned? That's a lot. Consider that many of those tasks are blocking - meaning the room can be released to guests until the task is fixed!
We've installed RoomChecking in hundreds of hotels by now and have a ton of data that our clients use to optimize their hotel, so we pulled some of it to help illustrate what really goes on behind the scenes in a hotel.
We found the data quite revealing, especially for non-housekeeping staff who might not be totally aware of how much work it takes to get a room ready for the guests. We like to compare it with putting on a show, every day thousands of invisible tasks and actions need to be done, and the show must go on!
Arrivals, Stayovers, Departures and Refusals
Between 36% and 61% of the hotel's guests leave every day. Meaning a lot more work for the housekeeping team. On average it takes 31.5 minutes to fully clean a room that is being released that day, that's more than 30% more time than it takes to clean a stayover room.
The good news is that on average there are more stayovers than departures in a hotel. Between 39% and 60% of the guests stay another night and the time it takes to clean those rooms is 20.5 minutes.
And in addition to that almost 7% of the hotel's room are not to be cleaned either because of refusal or Do Not Disturb.
Housekeeping and Maintenance Tasks
Some larger hotels generate an average of 60 tasks a day. That's a huge amount of additional work orders that need to be managed, especially that many of these can block a hotel room and leave guests waiting.
On average there is one task generated for every 2.12 rooms. So you can do the math yourself to figure out how many tasks are happening in your hotel. And then try not to think about how many of those tasks never made it to the recipient if you don't have a proper housekeeping and maintenance system in place.
From those tasks, 38.6% are for the hotel's maintenance team.
The Front Desk team are the ones who have to face the guests every day, they've got to keep the smile on and reassure the guests that everything will be taken care of and so they also issue tasks for Housekeeping and Maintenance, of all the tasks issued, they issue 26.8% of them.
What's maybe a little scary is that some 30% of the tasks never get completed, even when there is an advanced system in place to track them. What does that say for hotels who still use post-it notes to track these tasks?
But the show must go on, and the fact that 28.9% of tasks were completed within an hour explains why some hotels just excel at guest experience.
Lost and Found
We wrote about Lost and Found in hotels recently and shared a bunch of numbers and some tips on how hotels could fix that.
From our tracking we noticed that on average 2.16% of hotel rooms had lost items in them, it makes one wonder how hotels keep and track all those many lost and found items. Considering that some of these items are valuable items. But there are some days where almost 12% of rooms have lost items in them.
We published all this in an infographic that we're sharing here.
In summary
Hotels manage thousands if not millions of details to make guest experience great. The front-of-house does incredible work to keep guests happy, while the back-of-house, the Housekeeping staff and hotel Maintenance, staff work really hard to ensure no details are left out.
As guest expectations keep increasing - it is more and more important for hotels to use advanced systems to ensure all those details are happening in a coordinated manner to ultimately raise the level of guest experience in your hotel.
