Cleanliness and sanitary conditions remain the top priority for people booking a hotel room. While price is important, people understand cheaper isn’t always better. You can bring in new travelers and keep your guests happy by focusing on these five vital hotel housekeeping duties.
Keeping track of the cleaning staff’s methods to clean hotel rooms may seem like an afterthought to busy hotel owners, but offering subpar housekeeping is terrible for the hospitality business. Guests notice cleanliness above fancy amenities and luxuries – especially now when sanitation is crucial to our health and safety. Pristine guest rooms in a clean, well-run hotel mean happy guests, good reviews, and repeat customers. Making hotel housekeeping duties a top priority saves you time, stress, and bad reviews in the long run.
As you already know, hotels rely heavily on customer satisfaction to ensure continued success. When guests book with you, they expect a clean, comfortable environment with all the essentials. Your housekeeping staff often works on the frontline, cleaning and tidying both guest rooms and public areas on a daily basis. In addition, ensuring staff keeps up with a housekeeping duties checklist helps keep guests feeling pleased with their accommodations.
Housekeeping responsibilities include cleaning rooms and organizing supplies to stock suites with necessary items. Interfacing with guests is critical to improving customer service, especially over multi-day stays. In a busy hotel, you may serve hundreds of customers at a time. The only way to keep track of it all is to properly train and manage your staff to have high standards of cleanliness and provide exceptional service to meet the demands of your guests.
Do you want to WOW your visitors the moment they see their rooms? Check out these five vital hotel housekeeping duties that your staff should focus on. These tasks will increase customer satisfaction and improve day-to-day operations at your hotel.
The 5 Hotel Housekeeping Duties Vital to Customer Satisfaction
1. Don’t Neglect Hidden Areas
Cleaning a hotel room is challenging, especially when the turnaround time is tight. It’s tempting for staff to sweep in, clean the surface areas and move to the next suite. But in a rush to check out, guests may leave essential items (and yes, even garbage) behind. Staff should take time to check the nooks and crannies of the room as part of their hotel housekeeping duties so the next guest doesn’t find a dirty sock (or worse) under the bed.
Checking all closets and drawers helps the front desk and concierge provide better customer service. For example, if a guest realizes they lost or forgot an item, they’ll likely call customer service at the front desk and be favorably impressed when the staff has the found item on hand.
The areas under the bed, behind furniture, and corners often collect dust and even garbage like dry cleaning bags or tissues that didn’t quite make it to the proper receptacle. While most trash is relatively benign, imagine the horror of a guest who finds a used tissue in the room they thought was clean. Even if the rest of the room is sparkling clean, the guest will immediately feel that the room doesn’t meet expectations.
Another hidden area that amasses a collection of trash is the space under the sofa or armchair. Wrappers, pocket change, and other small bits naturally fall out of pockets and get brushed away while your guest is busy entertaining or relaxing. Housekeeping staff should inspect seat cushions for stains, tears, and other damage that needs to be repaired and check under cushions for spots in need of a deep clean or vacuum attention. Keep in mind your team should remove the cushions for safety reasons. Reaching into spaces blind could cause injury from broken glass or used medical syringes.
Adding a task to check guestrooms’ hidden nooks and crannies to hotel housekeeping duties will help cleaning staff conduct efficient inspections for the highest quality room possible. When the room is clean, returning guests are always guaranteed!
2. Assess the Readiness of Small Electronics
Hotel rooms are full of small electronic devices that make your guests’ lives easier. Hotel housekeeping duties should include quickly assessing the state of the electronic devices. Address the quality of the essential items in your hotel’s rooms to make sure they’re up and running for the next visitor. The alarm clock, the coffeemaker, and the TV are all expected to work correctly when a guest checks in.
The housekeeping team should make sure all necessary devices are plugged in while checking a room. They should also do a quick power on/off to check everything works and is functioning correctly. For example, make sure the coffee maker is clean, the hairdryer is in good repair, and the iron is in its place.
Housekeepers should check the bedside alarm clock to ensure the alarm function is off when a guest checks out. Not only can the alarm lead to a rude awakening for guests, but unnecessary alarms going off at strange hours is a hassle for staff, as they run around, searching for the noise. Avoid the guessing game by adding “check alarm clocks” to your hotel housekeeping duties.
Additionally, many small electronics run on batteries rather than plugged into the wall. Items like the TV remote should be sanitized and checked for functionality each day. Housekeeping staff should check that the television is set at a moderate volume and on the default channel.
A timesaving tip for hotel housekeeping staff is to note batteries needed for the devices in your rooms, such as clocks or small lights (typically AA and AAA). Every housekeeping cart should be stocked with the types of batteries for easy replacement.
As “smart” hotel rooms become the standard, digital and electronic features increase. Therefore, another checkbox on the housekeeping duties list should be a quick check and assessment of electronic devices. Hotel room technology that doesn’t work can turn a great room into a disappointing experience.
3. Pay Extra Attention to the Kitchenette Clean
The housekeeping job description is all about cleanliness, of course! Nowhere is that more important than the areas of the suite used for food. Most hotel rooms feature a minibar, a small fridge, and, at the very least, a coffee maker. These areas should get special priority on the list of hotel housekeeping duties.
Many travelers choose hotels with a kitchenette or small kitchen area to help them save money during their trip because the reality is eating out all the time is expensive. And with vacation home rentals (like Airbnb) increasing in popularity, your suites must feature the comforts of home. Therefore, keeping kitchen areas clean and consistent in every room is crucial.
Your rooms may have a full kitchen, a countertop with a microwave, or a mini-fridge with a few spirits inside. Your staff should take the time to make sure nothing gets left behind in these spaces and that food spills are thoroughly cleaned up. Food prep and cooking can leave behind telltale messes and attract unwanted guests (like roaches, ants, and other pests). Make sure drips, drops, and spills don’t cause pest issues down the road by urging hotel housekeeping staff to attend to these areas every day.
Even if your rooms don’t feature a kitchen space, guests will inevitably eat in the room (especially if you offer room service). Crumbs, spills, and wrappers come along with the territory. Your hotel staff should always watch for food waste, vacuum up crumbs, treat carpet stains, and remove garbage (especially takeout or pizza boxes).
Cleaning the messes up now means avoiding bigger problems later. Food is a significant source of hotel room dirt and debris, so be sure that staff is mindful of it as they clean.
4. Restock Your Consumables
Most hotel room cleaning checklists include keeping one vital paper product in stock: toilet paper. However, many hotels have other papers that need to be refreshed in the room after a guest clears out too. For example, if your hotel still offers stationery and pens, make sure those are refilled and returned to their proper place. Good housekeeping and close attention to detail make a good first impression.
Restocking brochures and other elements from your in-room informational packets is also essential. Keep the room service or hotel menu up to date and replace any torn, missing, or damaged pages. Many guests prefer to use their phones to find places to eat or things to do, but keeping up the guest book shows people you have a handle on the small details and, most importantly, that you care.
Hotel housekeeping duties should also include checking burnt-out light bulbs. Make sure to turn on desk lamps, reading lamps, and other small lights that may not always be used to confirm everything is working properly. Preventative maintenance can keep these lights on, but having a small spot check while housekeeping refreshes the room doesn’t hurt.
Check closets for guest items and errant hangers that don’t match the ones you provide. Keep couches and chairs free and clear of natural specks and debris that occur from use. Reset small electronics. Replace batteries as needed. Clean the kitchenette and remove all hidden trash. Replace used paper products. By keeping an eye on these commonly overlooked hotel housekeeping responsibilities, housekeepers will also be working smarter to make your hotel run smoothly.
5. Sanitation
Hotel management may allow the Housekeeping Department to create their own checklist for the cleaning and tidying of hotel rooms, but guests will demand the staff’s cleaning tasks include sanitation of the room items, surfaces, towels, and bed sheets. Cleaning products that contain bleach or antibacterial qualities are recommended. Eco-friendly cleaning products will appeal to a large group of potential lodgers.
In addition to cleaning the entire room and disinfecting the bathroom, sanitize and wipe down all the items the previous guest may have used, like light switches, door handles, remote controls, and other high-touch areas.
When it comes to laundry, hot water is a necessity for disinfecting bedding and towels. Most hotel washing machines use a mixture of detergent, bleach, and hot water at around 160 degrees. Create a redundant water heater system to avoid a hot water outage and guest outrage. Commercial water heaters can be rented to ensure a continual flow of hot water to hotel cleaning areas, kitchens, and guest bathrooms.
Whether you’re a quirky, unique hotel or a family-friendly establishment, add these responsibilities to your hotel housekeeping duties list today to improve your overall guest experience and hospitality service. These little areas may seem minor, but they make all the difference when it comes to happy guests.
