In the hospitality industry, excellent service should always be the rule. One dissatisfied guest or bad review can easily discourage future guests from even considering your business. A health and safety violation can close down your hotel for good — whether it’s from a government notice or a completely tainted reputation.
The most common causes of dissatisfaction among hotel guests, according to TravelPulse, are:
- Uncomfortable Room Temperature — TravelPulse analyzed data from a hospitality ticketing app called ALICE. It found that almost a quarter of guests complain about having a room that’s either too hot or too cold.
- Connection Issues —In the digital age, every hotel is expected to provide WiFi. However, this is also a source of many customer complaints. Over 14 percent of guests stated that they had problems connecting to the WiFi or that the connection is too slow.
- Noisy Neighbors — One of the reasons people go to hotels is to rest in private. Some accommodations, however, are not doing a great job at providing this privacy. Over 11 percent of guests reported that they could hear too much noise from their room.
- Dirty Rooms — The worst sin your hotel could commit is to provide dirty accommodations to guests. However, a lot of businesses seem to be repeat offenders. The survey found that over 10 percent of guests felt like their rooms weren’t clean enough.
If you want to keep your guests satisfied, you need to keep your hotel well-maintained. Here are effective ways to up your maintenance practices.
Utilize Hotel Management Software
The days of physical logbooks to keep track of maintenance activities are gone. They’re prone to human error. And if they get lost or get destroyed, your hard work goes down the drain.
If you want to have a modern and effective maintenance program, you need hotel management software. These applications have real-time task tracking, provide alerts on which piece of equipment is due for maintenance, offer inventory tracking, and more.
Get Your Employees Certified
Apart from providing hotel management software training for employees, you also need to keep them up to date with the latest maintenance practices. One way to do this is to have them take certifications and training courses like the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute’s (AHLEI) Certified Maintenance Employee program. This course covers everything from fixing holes in your hotel wall and replacing bathroom fixtures to general preventive maintenance practices.
There’s also the National Association of Hotel and Lodging Engineers’ (NAHLE) Certified Chief Engineer Program. This is for existing hotel engineers and your other maintenance experts. They’ll learn how to maintain essential systems like plumbing, HVAC, electrical, lighting, fire safety, Hanson Tank hot water storage tanks, vertical transport systems, and more.
A variety of issues can happen in a hotel. However, just like any problem, prevention is always better than the cure.
That’s exactly what maintenance does: take away possible issues before they start to bug your customers. You’ll be able to track all the reported maintenance problems and appliances that are due for a check up with hotel maintenance software. And with the necessary certifications, your workers will be able to respond to these issues quickly and efficiently. With a well-maintained hotel, you’ll get those five-star ratings in no time.
