Surviving labor shortages and reducing costs are both front of mind for hospitality businesses today. Hotel owners and managers are now starting to embrace technology as a key tool to navigate this challenging environment. The implementation of technology in hospitality has historically only been in front-of-house operations, which means that many hotels are missing out on huge operational efficiencies and savings for back office departments such as housekeeping. This often-overlooked area can benefit hugely from an intelligent solution, which could significantly increase room-attendant productivity, reduce labor costs and deliver real ROI results.
Do you have a technology solution to help run your housekeeping operations? If not, then here are just a few of many reasons hotel owners and managers should explore implementing an intelligent housekeeping solution over time-consuming and costly manual systems:
1. Increase staff productivity and cut labor costs
By automating workflow schedules, showing cleaning progress in real-time and decreasing unnecessary paperwork and phone/radio calls, predictive technology can enable increased levels of productivity for both room attendants and supervisors, helping lean teams to run more efficiently.
In fact, Optii's intelligent housekeeping solution has proven that its software helps hotels achieve productivity increases of up to 20% for room attendants and 40% for supervisors, helping hotels cut labor costs by up to 15%, all within just months of implementing the technology.
2. Improve guest experience and reviews
Small mistakes in key departments such as housekeeping can lead to a negative experience and sometimes a negative review or rating for a hotel. Whether it is waiting for a room to be ready on arrival or minor slip ups with the room clean, you want to make sure your housekeeping is streamlined to reduce the chances of this happening.
This is where technology can help, by implementing a mobile, automated and predictive housekeeping solution to your housekeeping staff, means communications between the front desk is optimized so rooms can be ready faster and managers can be confident guest preferences have been met and tasks completed to the higher standard, leading to a better guest experience.
3. Optimize housekeeping resources by predicting use-patterns
Manual processes to understand different use-patterns of guests are traditionally difficult to predict, making it hard to know how to schedule your team so their time is used efficiently. You can have a lightly used room for a business traveler that only takes 20 minutes to clean, or you can have a room that has been used to its full capacity by a family of four that will take a full hour to clean.
Using technology such as Artificial Intelligence will provide predictive clean-time capability, so you can accurately estimate room-cleaning times and your team can schedule the right amount of people for tasks, so shifts are optimized and distributed fairly.
4. Be confident you can meet guest expectations
The operating world today has changed, and hotels need to be able to adapt quickly. Guest expectations have changed so we can no longer rely on the old processes. If a guest arrives earlier than traditional check-in hours, they won’t want to be waiting around communal or crowded areas and will expect their room to be ready – especially if they requested early check-in upon booking.
Intelligent housekeeping technology can help you optimize the complete cycle of 24-hour cleaning operations and be prepared for guests, no matter when they arrive.
5. Ditch the radios and make your communications more efficient!
Did you know by switching to an intelligent housekeeping solution you can streamline communication and eliminate up to 60% of phone/radio calls? Think of the time that could be saved so that your staff can spend time attending to guest’s needs and perform high-quality cleaning.
Communication is at the heart of any good hotel operations and so to help eliminate language barriers Optii offer multilingual versions of the platform, helping improve relations between front-desk staff and housekeeping.
Why now?
Never has it been so important for hoteliers to be able to do more with less and eliminate inefficiencies. We have seen the success of hotels using technology to improve operations in other departments and now is the time for your housekeeping department to transform.
If you want a real return on investment, now is the time to explore intelligent housekeeping solutions. Optii is an industry-leading intelligent hotel operations solution that can give you all the benefits listed above, and more. Sounds expensive? Optii normally pays for itself in the first month or two in savings and by the way, from day one of implementation, to being full up and running takes around 22 days. It’s an investment hoteliers can’t afford not to explore in this current operating environment.
Still not convinced? See first hand how intelligent housekeeping technology has helped hotels around the world today!