By David Kaupp, Xeros
Successfully managing a hotel has its challenges. Keeping guests happy and staff motivated is no easy feat. And even if you are effective at both of those tasks, you must be able to measure and monitor expenses and take action to reduce hotel operations costs where appropriate. But reducing costs can never be at the expense of quality and service. Guest comfort and experience is paramount to every decision regarding costs.
Marketing: Digital and social media are low cost ways to get your hotel’s name out to your target markets. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TripAdvisor can give you exposure to local, national, and global customers. These technologies can also be used to gather feedback from past guests on their experiences—both positive and negative—and engage with them to promote offers for future stays.
Labor: Hotel labor costs are estimated to be approximately 43.5% of total operating expenses, so it is imperative to ensure you hire top-notch staff and focus on boosting productivity. Determining the time it takes to perform tasks and how tasks relate to service volumes helps in planning and staff scheduling. One area to explore is cross training staff for areas that have peaks and valleys such as front desk duties and housekeeping.
Energy Efficiency: Turning your property into an energy-efficient environment can help you reduce costs and improve guest satisfaction.
Installing Thermostats that offer night and occupancy detection can help significantly reduce energy consumption. Although guests don’t spend all their time in the room, usually less than 50%, most leave heating or air-conditioning running throughout their stay.
Window films are another technology that helps reduce energy costs. This thin layer of polyester film not only controls energy spend but solves glare and fading problems on drapes, carpet, and upholstery, as well as improves guests’ comfort.
Interior lighting represents around 1/3 of electricity consumption in hotels. Energy-efficient lighting, such as light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs which use up to 75% less electricity and last up to 25% longer than traditional bulbs, are a good option to reduce electricity consumption and will help reap you savings.
Laundry: Saving water and energy in hotel’s on premise laundry (OPL) is an optimum way to reduce hotel laundry costs. The OPL is where all of the bedding, table linens, towels, and other hotel-owned laundry items get washed so that guests can have a steady supply of these items for their stay. A hotel’s OPL operation consumes vast amounts of water, chemical, and energy to keep the linens clean.
A new polymer bead cleaning system which employs reusable polymer beads to clean textiles rather than massive amounts of hot water as used in traditional laundry machines is being embraced by hotels across the globe. The environmentally-friendly machines decrease water and energy consumption resulting in significant expense reduction as well as superior clean towels and linens that delight guests.
Learn how Boston-based Midtown Hotel has reduced water and energy consumption while providing its customers exceptionally clean linens with the Xeros polymer bead laundry system.
