I was in a meeting yesterday and was telling the participants about some of my favorite hotel strategies. While we were specifically talking about sales strategies, I did throw in an operations strategy that seemed to generate a bit of interest. Since many of you don’t know I have an operations background, I thought I would share this little tidbit. “You can take a girl out of operations, but you can’t always keep her toes out of the operation’s pool!” LOL.
Many of our branded hotels are slated for (or are going through) renovations to “freshen up”. It may be a rooms refresh, it may be a lobby refresh – but whatever the case, there are tactics that managers can take so that we are “wearing out” our rooms evenly. Some of you may say – ‘who cares, I have to do mandatory renovations every 5-10 years anyway’. My philosophy about this is sales driven, and is based on the fact that wearing out rooms evenly prolongs the life of our FF&E and gives the customer a better product for a longer time. Our GSRs are in complete control! They often have “go to rooms” or guests have their “favorite rooms”, but for the most part no one has ever encouraged them to think about the “wearing out factor”. (You may even be able to program this strategy into your PMS system to “suggest” or “assign” rooms based on these scenarios!)
There are reports in your Property Management Systems that tell you which rooms are rented out most, and what rooms least. Try running this report and see how your hotel fares. To “wear” your hotel out evenly, and to maximize utilities, payroll, etc., enact a strategy that might following these (or similar) guidelines:
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday – Assign even number rooms first
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday – Assign odd number rooms first
OR
Every other day – Assign rooms on the first and third floors first
Every other, other day – Assign rooms on the second and fourth floors first
Catch my drift? So a hotel who runs a year round occupancy of around 50% – using this technique guarantees that you use your rooms evenly. Make sense?
Of course, this is best case scenario – but it is an operational strategy that could/should be a part of your overall Rooms plan.
Happy wearing out the rooms!
Linda