Efficiency comes in many forms, both practical and intangible, and all hoteliers are seeking ways to effectively improve it in order to generate higher profit margins and deliver bottom-line results. Here are five tips to improve overall efficiency and make more money.
1. Encourage Guest Reviews
“Reviews from guests are vital parts to your business success,” says business writer John Donnell of UK Writings and State of writing. If you can understand what your guests need and want, then you can make effective and efficient changes to improve their overall satisfaction. Reviews can be a tricky thing and it’s important to keep some level of distance to avoid taking anything said personally. However, if you get several customers suggesting the same change or improvement, then it’s definitely a worthwhile experience. Have signs for Tripadvisor and your rating available as well as any other review systems you prefer to use. Have a link to these sites on your webpage and send them alongside digital receipts.
2. Implement Automation Software
You can reduce wait times and improve the guest experience by providing automated services. From having systems to allow for quick check in and check out, to having the ability to make room orders from a phone, you can reduce the workload on your staff and ensure that the right person is appropriately notified improving the overall workflow.
3. Ask for Staff Feedback
“Guest reviews give you an idea of how things look to an outsider, but for the best view of how the system works, you should also get as much feedback as you can from your staff,” recommends Joseph Rodriguez, a project manager for Paper Fellows and Boom Essays. Your staff are working for your hotel every day, they know the ins and outs, they know what is janky and what runs smoothly and they are your greatest source when it comes to finding out where you can improve efficiency. They can tell you where things are being wasteful and suggest areas that you might need to put more funding into. This includes potential improvements to staff facilities, improvements to equipment used to do the job and even just better communication amongst the departments.
4. Improve Recycling and Reuse
Climate change has gone from being a theoretical thing to being something we are actively seeing the effects of in our everyday lives. As such, it’s important to do our bit to try and improve our practices for recycling and reuse. Have a “scrap paper” tray available for people to reuse paper to avoid people wasting large amounts of paper when working. Change out waste bin bags to clear bags to highlight where recycling practices are not being followed. This can be harder to deal with when it comes to guests in their rooms but when it comes to staff you can show where there is room for improvement. This also can make things more efficient as you have less wasted bags you need to use and less time required to change bins if you can encourage your staff to recycle.
5. Monitor Heating and Cooling
Energy bills are skyrocketing with several places, such as the UK, suffering a cost of living crisis with the soaring prices. Have a timed heating and cooling system where possible and review it every month to make sure they are appropriate for the temperature and time of year. For empty rooms, have heating turned off in the summer and have it reduced to low in the winter. Just enough to prevent any damage to pipes but not a waste of heat either. If you can, invest in temperature-controlled heating and cooling systems that trigger depending on the ambient temperature and review these regularly.
Overall, improving a hotel’s efficiency is mostly a matter of automating systems. Use guest reviews and staff feedback in order to improve the outward efficiency of the hotel, while also making sure that everything behind the scenes is running smoothly.
When she’s not taking part in tech and marketing conferences or consulting with businesses, writer and marketing strategist Rebecca Leigh, Do my assignment and Write my essay, spends her time contributing to online sites and blogs like OX Essays.
About HotStats
HotStats provides monthly P&L benchmarking and market insight for the global hotel industry, collecting monthly detailed financial data from more than 8,500 hotels worldwide and over 100 different brands and independent hotels. HotStats provides more than 550 different KPIs covering all operating revenues, payroll, expenses, cost of sales and departmental and total hotel profitability.