The advantage of having high productivity in every aspect of a hotel business while obtaining good monetary profits cannot be overemphasized. However, in the midst of having to handle so much, it is not usually easy. There are buildings to oversee, people to manage, and systems to control. Nonetheless, with time and commitment, productivity can be achieved.
Managing a hotel corresponds to marketing the stock exchange. You're continually transacting in new policies, new colleagues, and innovation to check whether they will provide revenue as time goes on. Probably the most challenging step to estimate an optimum income of investment is from productivity. When the right strategies are in place, it's hard to tell if what you're not doing right and what changes could help improve income.
If you are looking to improve your hotel business productivity, here are seven ways you can boost productivity and simplify your daily activities.
A Reliable Medium Of Communication
Effective communication between the management and the staff will speed up the hotel's activities and improve customer experience. As communication is paramount, knowing the best channel to use is crucial. Therefore, hotel managers and owners are expected to weigh their options, pick the best communication channel for their team, and utilize it.
Besides picking a suitable channel, the staff needs to feel like they can converse with their manager, both casually and professionally. Keeping an open and friendly relationship with them will help increase the probability of issues within the hotel being handled openly rather than secretly. There will be room for corrections. Be a listener, allow your staff to communicate with you, and it will eventually help improve the efficiency of the profitability of the hotel.
Additionally, ensure you have a stable means of communication with your guests as well. Various software will help in-house messaging and even take care of your hotel's online presence on social media. Some of them, like Hootsuite, can be used to schedule social media posts ahead of time. This way, you are consistent with your content on social media.
Provide a high-speed internet connection to avert slow loading times when staff is working online, processing bookings, or organizing bookings. Use the best tech tools to ensure that your website is always up, available, and running. Your customers will love that!
Move Property Management to the Cloud
At any time, opt for a cloud-based property management system. This will help you to manage things more with plenty of time on your hands. Various present-day board programming and PMS can be operated from laptops, cell phones, and tablets. Adopt them, utilize them and use them to improve your hotel's systems. With a cloud system, access becomes easy, activities are centralized, and issues are fixed much quicker.
Even when you are not in or around the hotel, you can always control things and keep an eye on things with a cloud-based management system. You can access records, determine what goes on, and influence decisions.
Better still, cloud management systems come with supports that make analysis for decision-making easier. They can use them to draw charts and give reports at the end of the year. They can keep records for years without any alterations.
With a cloud hotel management system, You can employ more than one off-site management to see the hotel's welfare and give advice.
Know your business
Knowing and understanding your business, goals, values, and aims will help you utilize the latest technologies to your maximum advantage. Instead of attempting a firehose approach of tossing your business about, you'll pursue a deliberate method that will help achieve your goals exceptionally.
Knowing your business will help you discern your values and how best to deliver them. It gives a focus that aligns with your goal at all times. This way, you're concentrated only on bringing out the best in your business rather than focusing on the competition. With the right orientation and technological advancement, you can keep your business flourishing by satisfying your guests and running your hospitality business smoothly all year round. In your advertisement, you'll know whom to target, in bookings and reservation, you'll know your prominent visitors and how to best please them, in management you'll understand the style of staff you need and how best to get them and even be able to position yourself in the best ways. Knowing your business does planning for the future and attacking distraction easier.
Cut out the junk
Rather than have many activities going on at once, pick out the beneficial ones and stick them. Improve the services your guests like, remove the sides everyone has been leaving untouched, get rid of that gym equipment taking up space and make all the necessary changes.
When you declutter, you leave many empty spaces that allow you to explore new things and get creative.
Cutting out the junk is another way to save money. Is your hotel subscribed to services that have not been used for a long while? Consider canceling them or discussing flexible plans that are favorable. Please get rid of old things in stores and open up mini bars where they work.
Be Flexible
Being in the hospitality business requires that one follows certain principles and policies to treat guests and handle staff. However, this shouldn't affect your productivity, be open to ideas from other staff members, try new suggestions from customers, be innovative in your approach to management and system delivery, and schedule activities that will help the team grow.
Draw plans and utilize them while leaving out space for little changes when necessary—delegate tasks to the essential departments and monitor outcomes. Employ experts to handle each department of the hotel- the financial records, the customer relations, the communication, cleaning and housekeeping, the human relationships, and tech maintenance. This way, you stand a chance of improving the workflow and enhancing teamwork.
Train your staff
Perhaps the most ideal approach to improve profitability is to invest in your workers. Displacing staff to hire new ones takes a great deal of time and assets and even messes up your hotel's everyday tasks. It's smarter to work somewhat more challenging to guarantee that your staff is competent than the need to manage the once-in-a-while unfortunate result from a disappointing team.
Staff training and empowerment can not be under-emphasized. It's been proved that troubled staff accomplishes half-baked work. Invest in your worker's skill and their happiness, help them organize webinars, and give out tips to them in their various departments.
Not sure how you can invest in your staff? There are a few different ways to invest in your team that will support your staff's sense of commitment at work, prompting more effective days and optimum profit from labor investment.
Some of them include preparing your staff on new strategies and techniques, significant hotel management system trends, business, and management speculations. There is also timely salary payment, bonuses, benefits, paid holidays, leaves, and good commendation. These will show that you care for their growth and welfare as much as you care about the hotel.
Encourage customers' review.
Customer reviews can go a long way in boosting the productivity of your hotel business. Reviews help you to understand where you're lagging, what needs changes, and if your policy is long due for an update.
Of course, there are various ways to ask customers for reviews when you need to. You can talk to them directly to ask if they are enjoying the services you are offering them. You can use the advantage of social media to ask for feedback from customers, and you can also get reviews through room services and check-ins.
As to be expected, you'll get lousy feedback as well, but when a customer complains about your services, do not despair. It's merely another form of review. Customers' complaints go a long way in giving you hints about your hotel management business. It helps you to decide what to improve on and what to include in the next budget.
For the customer questions and complaints, you may choose to have an in-room sheet that answers every question your customer (especially guests/travelers) will like to ask before they walk up to the counter and ask. Your in-room sheet should be able to answer basic questions about the hotel environment, food, refreshment, recreation, and room services.
Hotel management has never come easy. Though there is always one manager, the hotel's entire staff contributes to the smooth running of the hotel. It is when the manager and the team are working collectively that the hotel's productivity will increase.
Read more: How hotel management works
More so, for a hotel management system to be efficient, it needs a brilliant manager to maneuver the system into one that yields optimum outcomes year in year out. Not only does it need a manager, but it needs a manager who is ready to make communication the topmost priority, clear out junk and encourage customers to give feedback both online and physical, educate the staff and help them improve.
Booking Ninjas provides a unique platform and template to automate and simplify guest onboarding into your facilities. We give our clients a unique, one-stop platform to handle everything property management from a cloud-based, globally accessible platform. Be sure to visit our Pilot page to see the Booking Ninjas system for yourself.