A bad first impression of a room can affect other aspects of a hotel guest’s stay, coloring their opinions about everything else they encounter.
“Poor housekeeping tends to magnify every other issue,” said Carrie Genzlinger, director of quality assurance for Select Registry, a curated portfolio of bed and breakfasts, inns and boutique hotels headquartered in Kansas City, Mo.
Housekeeping is so important that it accounts for 20 percent of a property’s score when the company runs a quality assurance evaluation, she said.
The first thing a guest checks out in a room is the bed, and the bathroom’s not far behind, said Seth McDaniels, general manager, Wyndham Grand Clearwater Beach, Fla. And if they find a problem there, there’s a snowball effect. “One small speck of something gives the perception that something’s not clean.”
Every room is checked at the Wyndham Grand and the property also uses employees from other departments to bring a fresh set of eyes and a different perspective to checking the room.
Focus On Tidiness
While cleanliness has become even more important in the past five years, it is absolutely vital that when a guest checks into a room, there’s no sign of previous occupants, said Beth Anne King, senior director of operations, Staypineapple, a 10-hotel chain headquartered in Seattle, Wash.
“It doesn’t matter how clean and sanitary everything is, if there’s a left-behind phone cord or a random sock, that reminds the guest there was someone else in that room and [that’s] evidence the room isn’t clean.” And, she adds, “if we miss one of those details, it takes away from that feeling of comfort.”
In addition, it’s important that every item is intentionally placed in a room, from the lamp to a pen and the TV remote control. This, said King, “gives guests a feeling of care,” which is especially important to repeat guests. “Consistency matters,” she added.
But at the same time, Staypineapple also tries to show it recognizes guest preferences, such as leaving more tea or shampoo for guests who use more of those. “There’s a fine line; we don’t want our room attendants being overly nosey, but you can just pay a bit of attention and make a difference,” King said.
The Wyndham Grand also tries to add a personal touch and room attendants don’t just clean around guests’ items but tidy them too, putting the toiletries in a symmetrical display for example. “That has such an impact on the guest; they see this person is paying attention to the details and organizing their stuff,” McDaniels said.
Room attendants are also trained to notice things, like a family going through more towels or amenities than usual and to leave extras. This also leads to a more efficient hotel operation, he said, so the front desk isn’t receiving calls for extra needs and someone isn’t having to run those items up to rooms. It also “gives the room attendants the well-deserved recognition of going above and beyond and hopefully they’ll be compensated,” McDaniels added.
“Attention to detail ultimately elevates cleanliness into quality,” said Hugo Reyes Duran, senior corporate director of guest experience, strategic operations. “Spotless mirrors, crisp bed presentation, fresh scents and properly-staged amenities signal care and professionalism. Together, these elements shape a guest’s first impression, sense of comfort and overall trust in the hotel, elevating perception of value, and with it, willingness-to-pay, and their willingness to positively share their stay with others and return.”
The Saratoga Arms Hotel, a Select Registry property, takes the condition of its rooms so seriously that the management team goes into a selection of rooms each year and acts as a guest—lying on the bed, standing in the shower—to make sure everything is as it should be, said Rachel Paley, general manager.
To ensure each room looks as it should, the property uses a digital program to describe each one—they’re all different—to ensure they’re staged correctly, meaning staff have something to rely on if memory fails, Paley said.
Cleaning Products
To get the most out of cleaning products, it’s important that they’re good quality but also that they’re used properly.
Staff should spray bathroom products on the surfaces and then leave them for full sanitation and cleaning to work, King noted. “If staff aren’t using them properly, the products are not doing their job.”
The Wyndham Grand trains heavily on how its cleaning products work. Several years ago, it moved away from bleach, which can be harmful to health and surfaces, so staff need to understand how to apply bathroom cleaner and leave it long enough to disinfect.
Training Housekeepers
Room attendants do their best work when they’ve been well trained. Staypineapple pairs new hires with its best trainers and these are not necessarily their best employees, King said. “Some people are good trainers and some people might be great room attendants but aren’t good trainers. So you figure out your best trainer and pair them.”
Training takes place over two or three days as the two people clean rooms side-by-side. And ideally a new hire works with more than one trainer “because it’s important that a new person see a couple of ways to do things,” she said, since everyone has slightly different ways of completing a room.
Davidson Hospitality prefers first-hand training, where the employee experiences the role in practice. This typically follows a short period of theory when they learn about standard operating procedures, processes, chemicals, equipment, expectations, said Duran.
Davidson also likes to use videos and other digital learning visual aids, which it uses for ongoing training, too, like introducing new concepts or offering quick how-to guides when launching new tools, processes or ideas. In the future, Duran expects more of this to do be done through AI.
At properties managed by Raines, Florence, S.C., new hires are paired with a trainer for a week or two and they clean together. Then, the person is given a half-load of rooms to clean for a few days, and those rooms are checked and added to over time.
Staypineapple checks all rooms cleaned by new hires. “The housekeeper manager or supervisor walks the room with them and gives guidance on what they’ve missed,” King said. “No room’s going to be perfect the first time.”
In fact, Staypineapple checks every room twice. “Everyone misses something, even if you have 10 years’ experience. It’s not a lack of trust. The room inspection is just that safety net,” she added.
Technology Assistance
Used well, technology can improve communication, improve efficiency and effectiveness for housekeeping staff.
At Staypineapple properties, room attendants carry a Google Pixel device, where they can directly report maintenance issues or request something like additional towels. “It really helps streamline by connecting those dots faster,” King said.
Room attendants receive their room assignments via the Pixel and know when a guest checks out and which rooms are a priority for new guests checking in. “It’s a constant balancing act,” King noted, because it’s most efficient to clean all rooms on one floor consecutively, but sometimes a specific room that’s elsewhere, is needed.
The Wyndham Grand in Clearwater uses HotSOS from Amadeus Hospitality, which has a housekeeping module, assigning rooms, that staff can mark as completed when finished. If there’s a problem, they can also report it using the technology. And it tracks how long staff take to clean rooms so management staff can understand why one person takes more or less time.
According to Duran, Housekeeping at Davidson properties “is very mathematical and technical, and everything we do within this discipline is tracked and measured down to the second, allowing us to then quantify the cost of each of those seconds, and their contribution to overall profit, when managed properly.”
So Davidson uses several tools to manage housekeeping productivity and efficiency, improve scheduling, hour-allocation and overtime controls. “Digital checklists keep us sane and aligned with service standards, speed, guest expectations and timing,” he said, adding that the company also uses tools to keep track of guest requests and their personal preferences, “making our service delivery a personalized one.”
Davidson also was an early adopter of automated and robotic cleaning and some properties employ robots “assisting with the most physical and repetitive routines,” Duran said. It also uses linen- and towel-tracking via RFID sensors, and tracks everything from uniforms to soft goods and even operating supplies and equipment, “making inventory in large properties the result of pressing a button, rather than a multiple-day effort.”
The company also uses other technology such as systems that lift the beds for guestroom attendants to housekeeping systems that enhance the operational efficiency via real time analysis and AI. “We will soon see humanoid-robotics in our rooms and systems that expedite bed-making, and fully sanitize bathrooms using robots and UV-C systems,” Duran said. “In a not-too-distant future, these will be common housekeeping resources at many hotels.”
Outsourcing
All room attendants at Staypineapple are in-house employees. It would be hard to use outsourced labor, King said, because it would always be a tough training curve and there would be less consistency. “It adds an extra layer and more chance for things to go wrong and more cost—for the middle man,” she said.
Davidson has experimented with outsourcing housekeeping “but it is important to understand they are not a plug-and-play model that works for all hotels equally,” Duran said. But problems with this include a lack of consistency and the employees lacking a sense of identity because they’re not part of the company, and this can affect the quality of their work.
Raines has used contract labor at many hotels, “but there’s less control,” said Jason LaBarge, executive vice president. “It also adds costs and complexity. We encourage our hotels to continue to strive to employ 100 percent of their staff internally and to use external labor only when needed.”
Retention
If you’ve got good employees, you want to keep them, for consistency of operations, to keep costs down and reduce training hours. Staypineapple takes this really seriously.
“Housekeepers are considered the heart of the house and their job is very difficult and they break or make your hotel,” King said. “So we find a way to show appreciation for them.”
The company holds team parties and provides appreciation gifts but the heart and soul of this is an appreciation program called Pineapple Chunks. When a staff member goes above and beyond, a manager gives them a yellow poker chip, which they can turn in for $5 apiece. Some employees turn them in regularly; others save them and turn them all in together. This program, said King, “is saying I see you; your work is not going unnoticed.”
Staypineapple also passes on to its housekeeping staff if they are recognized by name by a guest, as well as any positive reviews.
Raines encourages properties to hold consistent meetings and huddles. “Ongoing praise and incentives are always important, as well as working with team members when they need flexible schedules,” LaBarge said.
The Wyndham Grand likes to celebrate housekeeping staff with events such as bringing in a taco truck for lunch. It also hands out awards every quarter and offers one-on-one talks with McDaniels every month so he can understand what’s going well and what’s not working.
“We spend a lot of time creating that connection,” he said.
Housekeeping Extras
The Wyndham Grand Clearwater Beach, Fla., has implemented a couple of new initiatives that have worked well for the housekeeping staff.
It’s introduced eTip, allowing for cashless tipping in rooms. “It makes it very easy to tip,” said Seth McDaniels, general manager, and it’s much more likely to lead to a tip, since few people carry cash. Tips have increased “exponentially” since this rolled out, he added.
And it’s been experimenting with mobile packs instead of carts for room cleaning, since the latter are hard to push and scuff the walls. The mobile packs are the size of a carry-on suitcase and can be wheeled down corridors and into rooms, then restocked.
The downside to these is they can’t accommodate bed linens, said McDaniels, so the property has linen runners. These employees strip beds and gather dirty linens and leave a new set of sheets on the bed, ready for the housekeeping staff. This makes housekeeping easier and more efficient.
This article was originally published in the February/March edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.