Guest Blog: How Berry Springs Lodge Cut Housekeeping Times by 15% and Put Maintenance Projects on Autopilot
In the early 1900s, Karl Pearson, the Chair of Applied Mathematics at University College, London, gifted us many incredible mathematical discoveries (which aren’t relevant to this story). But what is relevant to this story – and your hotel – is one of his famous quotes:
“That which is measured, improves.”
Karl understood that measuring things like how long it takes your hotel to do a check-out clean, was the key to improving it.
When my business partner, Justin, and I purchased Berry Springs Lodge, a 13-unit resort in Tennessee, it was a paper-heavy business. We’ve since discovered most small hotels still print out or write things down related to hotel operations. Things like:
- Housekeeping assignments and checklists (daily!)
- Maintenance to-do’s (daily!)
- Staff to-do’s and checklists (also daily!)
- Inventory counts (and audits)
- And more…
Which is ok, but it wasn’t going to work for us.
We didn’t want to have to be there 24/7 to know what was going on. And with our expenses ballooning over the last few years, we had to find a way to become more efficient – all while maintaining a great guest experience.
Easy, right?
How we cut our housekeeping time by 15% and saved $4,000 in a year.
“That which is measured, improves.”
We lived with that quote in our heads for months. We suspected there were inefficiencies in our housekeeping. But how could we prove it?
We printed out housekeeping sheets every day for our housekeepers.
Some sheets would get filled out. Some would get left in closets for guests or a manager to find. Yikes!
We tried to track how long it took to clean each room. Which became impossible unless we were there all the time. And how would we know which housekeepers were cleaning rooms quickly with the highest quality, or worse…slowly with poor quality?
Our housekeeping did improve, though, just by us trying to track it. There was an incremental improvement in efficiency and quality. A win, nevertheless. If you are going to stick with pen-and-paper for housekeeping, you can still improve by simply tracking it more closely.
If you don’t already do these things with the pen-and-paper process, here’s what we found to be the most helpful:
- Print out housekeeping sheets every day and set the expectation with staff to complete the whole sheet.
- Your housekeeping sheet should be your checklist for what needs to be done in every room. Remember, one sheet per room!
- Capture start time and end time on every sheet so you can have an idea of how long it takes each employee to clean each room. You might have to hang around and audit just how long it takes in case they forget to write the times down.
- In order to assess quality, remember to inspect rooms daily for each type of clean. Or at least do them consistently (e.g. 2x week, 3x week, etc.). Bring the housekeeping sheets with you during the inspections so you can mark off if something is missed or not up to your standards.
- At the end of every day (or at least once per week), review each sheet for each housekeeper and see if there are trends in efficiency and quality.
- Create reports for each housekeeper so you can give them kudos on their efficiency or tips on how and where to improve.
This equated to a 3-5% improvement for us. Not bad! But we were looking for more.
Our “supplies” expenses alone increased 15% over the last few years. We had to find a way to offset it.
As you know, a 15% reduction in expenses could make a huge difference in this business.
Luckily, I’m a software engineer by trade and I built a simple housekeeping app for our staff. We connected it to our favorite property management system (shoutout to rezStream!) so rooms needing to be cleaned on any given day would automatically populate in our app. We now call the app Comfort.ly and you can use it too.
That was almost a year ago and the app has grown into our secret weapon for housekeeping and more. Housekeepers open the app and see which rooms are priority and what needs to be done in each room. Our General Manager can assign rooms, conduct inspections, and view reports daily, weekly, or monthly all in one place. No more paper. We reduced the amount of time it took to clean rooms by 15%, which equated to about $4,000 savings in expenses over the course of the year. And we never printed a single housekeeping sheet again.
“That which is measured, improves.”
Thanks, Karl.
How we put our maintenance projects on autopilot.
As all of you know, there are a set of recurring and ongoing maintenance projects at every property. Ours, yours, and every other independent inn, B&B, resort, vacation rental, motel, and hotel across the country has a maintenance list.
Sometimes it’s on a whiteboard.
Sometimes it’s on Post-it Notes.
Sometimes it’s in a spreadsheet.
And sometimes it’s in one person’s head and then they quit.
We had the benefit of starting fresh by creating our own process for managing maintenance projects.
If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that you need to make sure there’s one single process for getting maintenance tasks to your maintenance person or team. And make sure it’s visible to everyone in case they go on vacation, get sick, or quit. This can be a shared whiteboard, email chain, calendar, or whatever works best for you. As long as it’s one thing that everyone agrees on.
Having a housekeeper leave a Post-it Note on the front desk for the maintenance lead to snake a toilet for a guest before they come back in the evening is a recipe for disaster! Ask us how we know. We didn’t make it clear that was not the process for getting information to our maintenance team, and we paid for it. Mistake made, lesson learned.
We’ve just about circumvented all maintenance miscommunications with our app, Comfortly. It’s one place for all recurring and ongoing maintenance projects to be managed. Our maintenance team can set tasks to pop up daily, weekly, monthly, etc. for things that need to be done on a specific schedule. And housekeepers can create maintenance tasks directly in the app when they’re cleaning a room. Plus, our whole team can see what maintenance projects are new and old so nothing falls through the cracks. We have comments on each task, photos, and more so everything is in-context and kept in one place.
Summary
A detailed audit of your housekeeping processes can be a revelation. By closely monitoring and measuring every aspect of housekeeping, from time spent per room to the quality of cleaning, you’ll identify areas for improvement that directly translate to cost savings. These audits don’t necessitate a sacrifice in guest experience. Instead, they’ll help improve it by fostering a more efficient, responsive housekeeping team.
Similarly, the standardization of maintenance processes ensures that every task, from the routine to the unexpected, is accounted for and addressed in a timely manner. This prevents the all-too-common scenario where minor issues escalate into major inconveniences for guests, potentially harming your reputation (and bottom line).
Investing in these areas not only reduces expenses, but also gives you more oversight into your day-to-day operations without having to be there all the time.
“That which is measured, improves.”
About Comfortly
By combining Comfortly for managing housekeeping and maintenance with rezStream’s property management and booking software, your staff will have the tools to cut cost, improve operations and personalize guest experiences in ways that big hotels and Airbnbs can't match. And you, as owners and managers, will have oversight of your business without all of the "paperwork".
Comfortly was created by Trae Robrock and Justin Gabriel, who are rezStream customers and owners of Berry Springs Lodge in Tennessee. Manage your small hotel’s housekeeping, maintenance, and more in one place with Comfortly.
Try Comfortly free for 30 days.