Setting up a hotel is hard (of course), but what they don’t tell you is running a hotel is harder. Hoteliers need to keep a keen eye on every single aspect to ensure seamless operations.

This is where hotel maintenance management comes into the picture.

Maintenance management has not been discussed at length before. But I would like to tell you all the maintenance is one of those aspects that can make or break a hotel.

Keeping hotel assets in top condition is essential if you want your guests to be happy enough and save your wallet from the extra expenses of replacing or repairing a broken asset.

So, without further ado, let’s jump right into the blog.

What is Hotel Maintenance?

Hotel maintenance is one of the crucial aspects of a hotel. It is the work undertaken in order to keep, restore, or improve every part of a hotel. Meaning, keeping the functioning of every asset as smooth as possible to reduce the risk of interruptions in running a hotel.

For example, it could be refrigerators, elevators, cable TV, phone lines, computers, furniture, lighting etc.

This might sound like a ‘not-so-tough’ job, but in reality, it’s the opposite. Hotel maintenance isn’t an easy task to pull. It requires a large breadth of expertise from hotel maintenance crews.

And this is where hotel maintenance management comes into the picture. There are certain practices involved when it comes to managing maintenance tasks at a hotel. We will discuss them in this blog going forward.

Types of Hotel Maintenance

Now, when I say hotel maintenance, it isn’t generic maintenance tasks. There are different types of duties and responsibilities of a maintenance department in a hotel. But for now, let’s look at two prominent maintenance activities.

Preventive Maintenance

Hotel preventive maintenance is nothing but regular and routine upkeep activities done to keep a hotel’s assets up and running and avoid unexpected equipment failures or breakages.

Reactive Maintenance

Hotel reactive maintenance on the other hand is about repair when a piece of equipment has already broken down. It is done to restore (or bring as close to normal as possible) a failed hotel asset.

What is the Importance of Hotel Maintenance?

Now that you know about hotel maintenance and its types, let’s try to understand the importance of maintenance in the hotel industry.

Hotel maintenance management is about ensuring that all the activities that go behind the scenes are in order and work seamlessly.

Sometimes hotels do have all the required resources and manpower to carry out all types of maintenance. However, they still experience outages. Sometimes, even tasks are all hay wired and not done on time.  

The reason behind all of it is the lack of proper management.

Hotel maintenance management ensures that there are no barriers in implementing and carrying out all the hotel maintenance duties. Not to mention, it also helps hotels lose out on revenue.

For example, you charge $90 per night. One day you see that there’s damage in one of your rooms and you can’t sell it. Meaning, there’s a loss of $90; that too, for all the nights it would take to repair that damage. Not to mention, if the same happens with multiple rooms, it would require more staff to fix them, costing you more bucks. Do you see how easily and quickly your loss would escalate?

Proper maintenance management ensures that these kinds of scenarios never come up and there are no hurdles in achieving maximum revenue.

The Best Hotel Maintenance Management Practices

Hotel maintenance management is no rocket science. However, for a hotel to make the most out of it without any discrepancy, it must follow a set of practices.

And this is exactly what we are going to see in this section. The following points are some of the best practices on how to improve hotel maintenance. All of them are proven to do wonders, so I would highly recommend you give each of them a try and see it for yourself.

1. Establish standard operating procedures (SOPs)

One of the hotel maintenance best practices is that you need to have a standard SOP in place when it comes to maintenance.

I know, most of you are aware of SOP, but for those who aren’t, it is basically step-by-step instructions to carry out a certain task.

Now talking about the topic at hand, a hotel maintenance SOP is going to guide your staff and reduce the chances of any missed steps or other discrepancies that would impact the quality of work.

2. Incorporate a hotel maintenance management software

A hotel maintenance management software is like a sidekick for a hotelier.

These kinds of systems help hoteliers in streamlining various tasks; be it assigning work, keeping track of the progress, managing workers, work schedule and everything in between.

With a hotel maintenance management system, the chances of discrepancies decrease by a great length.  Not to mention, they also save a lot of time and costs.

3. Use a daily hotel maintenance checklist

Next up on the hotel maintenance tips, use a daily checklist. Why? Because not every hotelier would have an automated system or would prefer one.

So, if you’re into management already, you would understand the prominence of penning down all the tasks for the day. And whenever a task is down, tick it.

This strategy also works for a hotel’s maintenance tasks. A checklist will not only help you complete tasks on time but also makes sure that you’re working on things that hold a priority.

Not to mention, ticking tasks on a checklist also helps, psychologically, in keeping motivated.

4. Have a proper schedule and calendar in place

When it’s about managing complicated tasks like maintenance, it is indeed imperative to have a schedule or calendar in place.

It will help you pre-assign all the tasks to the respected maintenance staff and make sure things are getting done on time. Not just that, it also ensures that there’s always a standby worker available.

Furthermore, having a calendar also allows you to work only on the required tasks. After all, what’s the point of wasting time on tasks that aren’t an immediate necessity?

5. Keep logs updated

I have been in this industry for quite some time now and I have seen how hoteliers run into barriers.

I remember this incident from a hotel in Kathmandu, Nepal. There was a lot of hustle-bustle going on when I arrived.

I didn’t think much over it because my room was ready to check-in. But then when I took the keys and reached my room, the smartcard wasn’t working. I reached out to the frontdesk and they again started arguing with the maintenance dept.

So, what actually happened is, they haven’t kept any record of their maintenance. They missed out on a few rooms and marked a few of them repaired while the case was otherwise.

If you want to do away with such last-minute chaos, it is really important to keep all the maintenance logs updated. Not just that, someone should also cross-check everything before wrapping up.

6. Improve housekeeping operations

I know housekeeping works to make things better at a hotel, but there are times when things go wrong.

For instance, the housekeeping staff is not trained on how to use the new digital door locks. And there are chances that a staff member might try to open it anyway and damage it.

This would not only cost the hotel, but also the housekeeping staff. Therefore, it is supremely important to keep clear communication regarding each and everything and with each and every department.

Not just that. When it comes to improving housekeeping, hotels should also upskill them with maintenance tasks. This would help in cross-department tasks.

7. Keep preventive maintenance on your priority list

Reactive maintenance is equally important as preventive, but personally, I recommend you to give a little weight to the latter one.

The reason is when there is an unexpected failure or breakage, it burns the hotelier’s wallet. The damage is already a loss, but then it would also impact your bookings.

Meaning, you have already spent enough on preventive maintenance (which wasn’t done right), and then you experience a failure and now you’re paying for the repair.

Therefore, it is best to always take good care of every asset of the hotel.

8. Hire best-in-class maintenance staff

This point is definitely one of the biggest elephants in the room.

Hotel maintenance duties aren’t a piece of cake. They require a good amount of experience and expertise.

And you’ll only get that when you hire the best-in-class professionals. So, make sure you have certain standards for this aspect of hiring. Organise a set of screening and testing sessions before welcoming someone aboard.

9. Consider outsourcing maintenance services (if required)

If hiring is not on the list, then there’s one more thing you can try out is outsourcing.

At present, anything and everything can be outsourced, and there are a gazillion agencies and firms that provide maintenance services. You can do your research or ask your acquaintances from the industry which one is the best.

Outsourcing in hospitality has proven to be a great idea for a lot of aspects. I am sure it would work well in hotel maintenance as well.

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