Hotel management can be complex! There are many different elements to running a hotel successfully, from housekeeping, maintenance, guest services, catering through to marketing and finance. Even before a pandemic, all of these elements of hotel management needed to connect seamlessly to ensure guests have a good experience from the moment they book to the moment they check out.
Now more than ever, hotel operators and managers are assessing how their daily operations and hotel management can be optimized to help run more efficiently. Therefore, they are turning to technology to help optimize labor.
If you find yourself in this position, consider these top 5 ways technology can help optimize your labor and ultimately improve your hotel management and guest experience.
Improve efficiency and turnaround times
Housekeeping teams are a central part of hotel operations and with new cleaning protocols these teams are more stretched than ever before. By centralizing hotel operations and using a housekeeping technology, you can achieve full visibility of your team's performance and importantly for housekeeping, manage room attendants and room status’ with intelligent automation.
At Optii we understand the importance of data insights for hotel operations, which is why our data-driven platform, Optii Housekeeping, employs predictive, intelligent AI to optimize room attendant routes in real-time to deliver cleaning efficiency. It also means housekeeping managers can track and trace audit trails for cost-efficiency per occupied room.
Never miss a request or task
Guests expectations and hotel experience has changed in the past two years and operations teams need to be able to adapt easily to new demands. Does a guest not want a stayover clean? Are they looking for a contact free check-in? All of these requests and tasks need to be reliably captured and communicated across teams to ensure nothing is missed.
Hotel management software is the perfect solution for this as the tech enables teams to easily configure new jobs and make the necessary changes as guests and property needs evolve. With Optii Service, hotels can auto-assign and prioritize guest requests and internal jobs, including built-in escalation, to help teams to easily prioritize the requests and tasks on their list and make the best use of their time. It also provides a single view of job status and actions’ so that everyone on the team is updated in real-time.
This form of automation and information can be used beyond service and housekeeping, as maintenance teams also play a crucial role in helping to provide a good guest experience.
At Optii we’re excited to be working on a new product, Preventative Maintenance, which will enable teams to track not only assets by usage, repair frequency and labor costs, but also track the performance and productivity of your team members. It will help to increase engineer efficiency and productivity and balance scheduled vs ad-hoc jobs. Watch this space!
Harness data to analyze trends and report on your daily operations
Data is key and this is no exception in the hospitality industry. As hotels are faced with staffing shortages and increased workloads, it is more important than ever that managers have a full 360º view of their daily operations and hotel metrics. Doing so, they can identify areas that technology and automation may be able to help.
Utilizing time-based insights into each team member’s activity can help drive productivity, as operations managers have a detailed view of what tasks are taking longer than others and where team resources are best spent. It can even help to identify gaps in training, so managers can do team refreshes to keep housekeeping and service teams skills in line with new cleaning protocols and processes.
Communicate with confidence
Whether you are running a small property or hotel group, the need for efficient and reliable communication is equally as important. Traditional hotels who have not adopted technology still rely on pen and paper and loud walkie talkies to talk across teams and departments, which lends itself to human error and miscommunication. Technology can easily replace these old fashioned methods, providing teams the ability to access hotel management software on their mobile devices.
Optii Chat means teams can communicate with confidence, knowing that the whole team has been notified of tasks, requests and changes. The chat provides real-time department and one-to-one communication so you can finally say good to those clunky walkie talkies!
Help your teams to do more
Optimizing your labor creates many benefits including increasing productivity and helping to reduce costs. However it will also help to empower your teams to do their job well, they are not overworked or battling against using inefficient methods. With technology you can improve response times of teams, minimize downtime and ensure a balanced workload so that you can keep staff motivated and happy.
More has been asked of hotel operations teams in the past two years, with changing protocols and additional cleaning required, all while hotels have had to cut teams down and struggle to recruit. The ability to do more with less is a priority. By providing your team with the right software you can keep teams aware of schedules and changes, which they can access from any device to make the day to day job easier. Teams can view workload, job status and easily configure new jobs to stay on top of updates throughout the day in the most efficient way.
If there is a positive to come from this challenging period of time for hospitality, it has been the adoption and increased awareness in the role technology can play to help update outdated systems to help stretched teams do their jobs better.
