Best Practices for Managing Room Usage in the Hotel Industry

Your hotel rooms are the bread and butter of your business. Without them, you wouldn’t make money. But room management can end up taking much more time than it needs. Doing room checks can feel tedious because you’re doing the same work over and over. However, it’s necessary to ensure your customers get the best hotel experience possible.

Read on to learn about some practices that can improve your room management and give you more time to build your business.

Consider Implementing Smart Technology

Hotel room technology has come a long way in the last couple of decades. It’s no longer enough to have a nice TV in the room. However, this is to your advantage. Using smart technology allows you, and your customers, to connect their devices to the Internet of Things (IoT). Implementing this technology enables you to see which rooms are using how much electricity, water, and more at any given time.

Automated monitoring using IoT technology can also notify you when things break, or when they’ve reached an amount of usage that means the room needs maintenance. Consider implementing smart technology for temperature controls, booking room service, and improving utility usage. Using IoT technology can also help you track hotel asset usage. Doing so gives you the information you need to know when assets in specific rooms have surpassed their useful life-cycle.

Smart technology also does wonders to enhance the customer experience. Giving them access to connect to the TV, air conditioner, and more will help them feel more in control of their time with you. As a bonus, your hotel’s brand will be seen as cutting edge, and it’ll draw more patrons to your facilities.

Hire Motivated Managers for Managing Room Usage

Making sure you have the right manager supervising your hotel staff can mean the difference between a machine with well-oiled cogs and a total disaster. Your hotel manager is the one who brings it all together. They help you with marketing strategies by giving you insight into the day to day for patrons who visit. They’ll give you all the information you need about what your customers are requesting, ways you’re falling short, and how to address those issues.

When you’re in the market for supervisors, or anyone in a managerial position, make sure you hire someone with the right qualifications and characteristics. Successful hotel managers are motivated and adaptive enough that they can keep up with all the curve balls they’ll encounter. They have an excellent grasp of communication and can help team members understand issues that need addressing.

Managers also need to have natural empathy. If they can’t connect with your team members and hotel patrons, they won’t last long. Your managers should want to see the rest of your staff succeed in their roles, and want to offer them tools and resources that will make their jobs easier.

Delegate Appropriately

Part of being effectively organized is knowing how, and when, to delegate work for managing room usage. Each of your team members has specific skills. Some of them are good with people, while others shine when it comes to crunching numbers.

Learning to delegate workload is a great way to ensure everything gets handled promptly. It also helps spread job tasks, so no one person is in charge of all the work.

Sometimes as upper management, it can be hard to delegate. You know how you like things done, and allowing other people to take on more responsibilities means giving up control. But you can only do so much, and you need to focus your attention on the things that only you can handle.

Identify what can be handled by other team members and what you have to tackle on your own. Then, split up responsibilities accordingly.