Room service and maintenance are key components of smart hotel management. Not only are they critical to keeping a venue running smoothly, but depending on their quality, can make or break a guest's experience. When done right, guests may barely even notice that housekeeping or maintenance is taking place - everything works. Issues are resolved before the guest realizes there is a problem, or if the guest notices, the request is handled promptly and seamlessly.
If done poorly, things can go downhill very quickly - guests may complain, demand recourse or leave negative reviews, and the hotel may lose any chance of returning customers.
Coming up with a housekeeping and maintenance model that balances guest needs and hotel management is difficult. If you spend too little on housekeeping and maintenance, quality and thoroughness can suffer, and guest satisfaction can suffer. Spend too much on housekeeping and maintenance, and while guests appreciate the care and detail, you may wonder if you're spending more than you really need. So how do you strike the right balance for your smart hotel?
The current system of core hotel functions hinders the efficiency of many organizations
The first step in finding this balance is to understand the current state of operations. To do this, you need to ask questions about housekeeping, such as: "How many rooms do we clean per day and per week? How much time does it take to clean each room? How many rooms are assigned to each staff member and how?"
In terms of maintenance, you might want to ask the following questions: "How often do we get maintenance requests? What do we repair the most and usually cost? How often do we perform preventive maintenance, and how often does it prevent bigger problems from happening?"
While these questions are important, the answers may not be easy to come by because without systems or processes in place, it can be difficult to arrive at the answers. Many organizations find that their current systems are:
manual and inconsistent
As housekeeping and maintenance are hands-on and physical work, record keeping can also be manual labor. Room assignments, time spent checking each room, or service requests may be logged manually and are prone to inconsistencies or omissions entirely.
Fragmented
If software systems do exist, there are often separate systems for each function, making it difficult to figure out who is doing what or what is happening when. The housekeeping system may differ from the maintenance system, or the maintenance request system may vary by service type or provider.
Reaction formula
Most maintenance systems are based on submitting service orders to fix or fix problems that have broken. This results in a system that is forced to react to problems as they arise, rather than a system that is actively working to stay ahead of them.
Despite their limitations, these disparate manual systems have persisted over time, and many companies now offer software to digitize and aggregate housekeeping and maintenance functions. However, these solutions still rely on some degree of human intervention. Whether it's recording how long it takes to complete a certain task, or determining if something needs repairing, this means that as long as you're not a smart hotel, the uncertainty and level of variability in the data will always be a problem.
Monitor smart hotel functions in real time and gain operational insights through IoT
Fortunately, the Internet of Things (IoT) presents an opportunity for hospitality professionals to view the current state of critical services such as housekeeping and maintenance in a new dimension, analyze historical data in a centralized form, and use the data to take meaningful action to improve their service. Business. The benefits of housekeeping and maintenance solutions using IoT include:
Configurable alerts for proactive maintenance
Leak sensors in plumbing and bathroom fixtures, vibration sensors on HVAC equipment, and airflow sensors in ducts can be installed on a utility area or individual room basis to not only alert you when equipment is broken, but also to catch problems before they become bigger problem. By setting thresholds for expected humidity, vibration, or airflow—and even what constitutes low, medium, and high-severity issues—you can get alerts to perform preventative maintenance or proactively address issues accordingly. With enough data, some IoT solutions can use artificial intelligence or machine learning to implement more sophisticated predictive maintenance models.
Optimize staffing and resource planning
Adding proximity sensors and indoor locator beacons to housekeeping uniforms or housekeeping carts can provide data on which rooms are being cleaned at any given moment. It can also record when an employee cleans a room without manual reporting as the employee moves from room to room. By providing data at the zone and room level, hotel managers can understand the current status of rooms that have been, are being, and will be cleaned. Occupancy sensors in rooms can give employees real-time indication of which rooms to skip without repeated manual follow-ups. Aggregating and analyzing historical housekeeping data can be used to pinpoint operational bottlenecks to inform headcount and reduce housekeeping costs. UART-модуль
Improve guest experience
Interactive tablets can be added to each room for guests to order room service, request extra towels or mark their room as "Do Not Disturb." When integrated with housekeeping and maintenance data in a central system, front desk staff are empowered with a real-time dashboard of the current “health” of each room, giving them the information at hand to respond to requests and dispatch the appropriate personnel. The result is an improved service experience that appears quick and seamless to guests.
Analytics and Performance Monitoring
Data from housekeeping, maintenance, and guest service requests can be used to generate reports and metrics such as average cleaning time per room, number of maintenance requests per week, or average request completion time. Sensors on HVAC equipment can be used to monitor energy usage and optimize it. As a result, organizations learn metrics that can be used to make measurable operational improvements. GPRS-модуль
A wide range of sensors, networks and software to meet your needs
The sensors used in an IoT solution will vary depending on the specific needs of a smart hotel use case. When it comes to tracking housekeeping activities through indoor positioning, current hardware technologies include BLE beacons, WiFi tracking tags, or RFID tags. In terms of leak sensor maintenance, consider looking at ultrasonic and mechanical impeller based leak sensors. Vibration sensor technologies include piezoelectric and MEMS-based accelerometers.
For smart hotel network connectivity, these sensors can communicate with the cloud through a variety of wireless and wired protocols, including:
Wi-Fi/Ethernet
LoRa and other LPWAN protocols
Cellular (NB-IoT, LTE-M)
Finally, you need an IoT software platform to ingest, transform and visualize data. This may also include the ability to link/unlink sensors to various assets and equipment, set alarms and build custom reports.