Maintenance is not the most glamorous aspect of hotel management, but it might be the most important. All that you invest to attract guests could be a wasted effort if your property proves to be untidy or defective upon arrival. Hotels must ensure that everything from turndown service to major repairs is conducted quickly and consistently—which is no small feat at even a small property. Instead of accepting anything less than perfection, we recommend relying on the right hybrid of effective technology and attentive staff to keep your hotel in pristine working order.
Get Your PMS Involved
Including maintenance and housekeeping as part of your property management system (PMS) is the single best way to make maintenance easier to track and oversee. Once regular repairs are integrated with the broader guest experience, hotels are able to coordinate their efforts so that maintenance is performed immediately, correctly and with minimal input from management. Maintenance can become fragmented if it’s disconnected from the rest of the operations. Using a PMS that includes expansive maintenance functionality ensures your staff is unified and on target.
Label Rooms as Out of Order
Maintenance issues are unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean they have to degrade the guest experience. When a room or guest space has a maintenance issue—a broken TV or a shower without hot water, for example—use your PMS to mark those rooms as “out of order” and unavailable. That way, guests don’t get booked into a defective room by your front desk staff or automated booking engine. When you rely on a property-wide platform to manage maintenance issues, you guarantee that guests only experience the best your hotel has to provide.
Prioritize Preventive Maintenance
Prevention is the best medicine in healthcare and in hotels both. The hard part is finding the time to conduct inspections and the resources to perform updates early instead of too late. Taking a systematic approach ensures that issues don’t go overlooked and budget crunches don’t compromise maintenance. Begin tracking the maintenance history of each room to know when updates are reaching the end of their life cycle. Your PMS can help you take a closer look at your revenue management and budget cycle, revealing where, when and how your property can find the money for necessary—and emergency—repairs.
Institute a Ticketing System
Every maintenance issue is important, but not all are equally urgent. When the HVAC system fails or the wifi goes down, it makes sense that they should take priority over burned out light bulbs. A ticketing system makes it easy to allocate the right resources to the right problem at the right time. It also makes maintenance proactive—instead of waiting for calls to come in, maintenance crews have an assembled, prioritized schedule of tasks to work through.
Adjust Your Staff Mix
Ideally, hotels should have enough maintenance staff in-house to repair all the major systems on the property 24 hours a day. Realistically, however, that level of staffing may only be possible for the biggest properties and brands. At the very least, hotels are responsible for maintaining productive relationships with contractors—from plumbers to electricians to IT experts—who are available on call. Put these contacts and any other relevant information into your PMS system so that staff are always equipped to respond to maintenance issues the second they arise.
Experts believe occupancy, ADR and RevPAR will all rise this year, and the hotels that live up to guest expectations are best positioned to take advantage of this business surge. Maintenance issues, even those that seem minor or ordinary, can sour a guest on an otherwise great stay and leave your property vulnerable to negative reviews. Keep your reputation and bottom line in shape by optimizing your hotel’s maintenance processes.
RoomKeyPMS integrates maintenance and housekeeping with every other aspect of your hotel. Gain oversight, create efficiency, control costs and keep your property looking and operating perfectly all from one portal. Contact us to tour our solutions.
Photo Credits: Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia
