The housekeeping team is one of the most crucial departments of the hotel industry. Cleanliness is attributed to one of the top most reasons in affecting a guest’s choice to stay at a particular hotel. There is nothing worse than staying in a room which isn’t clean or maintained well.
Apart from maintaining the cleanliness of the room, the housekeeping staff need to ensure that the room is stocked with in-room amenities – for example, ensuring whether the mini bar is refilled, the linens, and toiletries are maintained, the cleanliness of the common areas is ensured and so much more. During the peak seasons, it gets even crucial because hotels need to ensure that the rooms are ready between the minimal time frame of check-ins and check-outs.
All these can be overwhelming for even the bigger hotels which have large housekeeping teams with a manager to lead them. So, imagine how crazy it can be for the mid-sized/independent hotels that need to manage their housekeeping requirements with a minimal workforce?
An efficient property management system (PMS) with a tightly-integrated housekeeping module can effortlessly manage the housekeeping requirements of the hotel. A PMS like Hotelogix is in complete sync with the hotel’s front desk, it can provide a single-screen snapshot with the most-current room information, organized neatly in a tabular format that can be tracked, amended and updated with a click of a button.
Here is how a housekeeping module can simplify operations of a mid-size hotel:
Task assignment:
A good PMS enables a hotel to maintain a list of their housekeeping staff, and rooms can be assigned to them based on blocks/floors or the room status. This assists the hotel in managing the division of work amongst their staff.
Managing lists
The daily list of housekeeping tasks is easy to print and the work is easy to divide & distribute amongst the staff. The lists can be given to the staff so that they are clearly updated of their roles and responsibilities.
Managing the minibar
The minibar can be an excellent source of revenue for the hotel, but without the right system in place it can also be extremely time consuming to manage. With PMS, the staff can directly update details of the minibar in the room, and the same shall be updated as part of the guest’s transactions and billed during check out.
Managing inventory
The inventory for the housekeeping team can be endless, they require cleaning items, servicing items, in room amenities, F&B for the mini bar, bed linen, toiletries, etc. Also depending on occupancy forecasts, the hotels should ensure they have enough supplies without being excessive. The PMS allows the hotel to update their inventory and maintain the opening and closing stocks so that the staff knows what needs to be ordered and what is still available. The PMS can even keep track of items that have been ordered and which of those have been received or are pending.
Room updates:
Hotelogix PMS allows an easy-to-use task & messaging system for special requests, thereby keeping a clear line of communication and minimising any embarrassing errors. Rooms can also be marked as being under maintenance and Do Not Reserve (DNR) rooms for a certain period, so that the Housekeeping staff is updated that these rooms are not required to be serviced. The systems can be automatically instructed to change room to ‘Dirty’ on checkout, or a clean room to ‘Inspect’ on Night Audit.
Instead of over burdening the staff with time consuming paper work or on-the-floor coordination, a well-integrated housekeeping module can improve overall efficiency, saving hours manual work.
