The hospitality service industry is more competitive than ever: you can no longer rely on low prices or luxurious amenities to attract your target guests. To compete in today’s environment, you need to provide an experience that makes your hotel stand out from the crowd.
Cleanliness is one of the most important factors that guests look at when trying to determine if a hotel has quality service or not. You can offer a great product in terms of amenities and facilities, but if your hospitality cleaning services are subpar, then guests will remember this above all else when it comes time to make recommendations to friends and family members planning their future travel.
One way to level-up your hospitality cleaning is to have staff members focus on visibly making every aspect of the guest experience cleaner and more inviting. This approach will not only boost your loyalty ratings and guest satisfaction rates, but it will also differentiate your hotel from its competitors.
Here are some practical strategies on how to elevate hospitality cleanliness and service.
1. Appeal to Your Guests’ Senses of Sight and Smell
The perception of cleanliness involves multiple senses–from the way the air smells throughout the hotel to what guests see as they enter the lobby, walk the halls, and enter their rooms. Unusual odors are immediately off-putting, but so are the small details that guests pick up on visually: a layer of dust on the lobby side table, remnants of pet hair clinging to hallway carpets, smudges or streaks on windows and mirrors, etc.
It’s the sum of these parts that creates a guest’s impression of how clean (or not clean) their accommodations are. Their impression is further developed by what they don’t see. For example, do your guests have the opportunity to see cleaning in action as they go about their day?
To leave an impression of cleanliness with your guests, all of these details matter. However, keeping up with all of these small, detailed tasks is incredibly time-consuming, and most hotels simply don’t have the budget or staff to execute them. That’s why it’s important to leverage cleaning automation technologies.
For example, vacuuming is one of the most time-consuming housekeeping activities, taking up approximately 30% of your cleaning team’s time. Offloading this task to a robot vacuum gives housekeeping more time to focus on the details, while ensuring carpets are cleaned thoroughly.
Since carpets are the #1 air filter in any indoor space, automating vacuuming keeps carpeted areas visually clean while playing a critical role in purifying the air and keeping your hotel odor-free. Furthermore, robot vacuums can run continuously–day and night–serving as a powerful visual reinforcement of your cleaning policies, and showing a confirmation of clean.
Get the Guide: How to Improve Indoor Air Quality
2. Leverage Cleaning Technology to Drive Efficiency
Leveraging the right cleaning technologies is one of the most effective strategies to help you deliver the cleanliness your guests expect without blowing your budget or overburdening your staff. Smart cleaning robots are quickly proving their value by successfully streamlining cleaning operations, improving visibility into your cleaning performance (showing a confirmation of clean), and providing data-driven insights that help further improve performance and increase efficiency.
That’s because smart cleaning robots like Whiz, the autonomous commercial vacuum from SoftBank Robotics, are constantly capturing data. For example, with a quick glance at the performance dashboard in the Whiz Connect application, you can see exactly when each space was last cleaned, how it was cleaned, which robot cleaned it, and how long each route took. You can also see where and when any bottlenecks occurred during the route, and if any of your robots require maintenance soon.
All of this actionable data is viewable in near real-time, so you always know what’s happening and what to do about it. In addition, monitoring the routes, location, and productivity of each robot over time allows you to improve cleaning performance, optimize routes, plan ahead for maintenance requirements, and make other data-informed decisions.
3. Create a Culture of Clean
It’s not enough to simply clean your hotel and your common areas; you also need to create a culture of clean in order to really set yourself apart and create long-lasting relationships with your guests. A culture of clean is a culture where every member of the team understands the importance of their role of delivering clean spaces for guests and how that pertains to the hotel’s profitability. In this type of culture, staff members not only embrace that reality, but they have the training, the tools, and the time to execute their objectives.
For example, regular training ensures housekeeping staff are well-informed on how to implement safe, hygienic cleaning practices and are up-to-date on the latest standards. However, having training and confidence in their roles is only half the battle; cleaning staff also need enough time to do their jobs as thoroughly and effectively as possible. That is why it’s so important to implement cleaning automation that can free up your team’s time to do their jobs to the highest standards.
Conclusion
Ultimately, your housekeeping staff directly shape guest satisfaction, so the value of ensuring they know how to do their jobs well–and that they have the training, tools, and time to do so–cannot be underestimated.
Competing in the hospitality industry means refocusing on the basics: delivering the highest standards of hospitality cleaning. Contact us today to learn how SoftBank Robotics can help.
