It is undisputed that Housekeeping teams at hotels work very hard — from room cleaning to fulfilling room service requests. They are also, often, underpaid and overworked.

Housekeeping is a deeply scrutinised function at hotels. The rooms must be cleaned to the highest standards, on time, every time.

Many housekeeping teams have rigorous training and standards in place, but few can measure its outcome. To make things worse, inadequate activity logs and sluggish team communication often lead to poor guest experience.

If you zoom out from hotels and housekeeping and take a look at SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) functions in IT teams — there’s a gold standard for service quality and performance.

This gold standard has 3 pillars:

  1. SLA (Service Level Agreement) – a legally binding agreement that specifies the level of service that the customer can expect, usually uptime, responsiveness, etc.
  2. SLO (Service Level Objectives) – internal goals the service provider defines to ensure the SLA is fulfilled.
  3. SLI (Service Level Indicator) – serves as a measurable metric, such as latency or error rate, that acts as a yardstick for assessing the quality of service.

So how can this idea help housekeeping teams?

Much like IT, Housekeeping is the “Site reliability” team for hotels.

Setting SLAs internally doesn’t make much sense — you can’t expect legal repercussions for an internal breach.

SLOs on the other hand could be used to benchmark and define what the objectives of the housekeeping team are. Three primary areas for housekeeping to think about this framework are:

  1. Specifying turn-around time for room cleanup after checkout.
  2. Specifying turn-around time to assign and fulfil room requests.
  3. Specifying turn-around time to respond to a support ticket raised by a guest.

Let me elaborate on how to set up the above 3 SLOs to understand better.

SLO 1: Room Readiness Time

Room readiness time is time taken from when a room becomes vacant to when it is ready for a new guest. This includes cleaning, restocking amenities, and any required maintenance.

What to measure:

Begin by setting an expected time or window for each of the following tasks –

  1. How long should it take for the front desk to inform housekeeping that the guest has checked out?
  2. How long should it take for housekeeping to clean up the room?
  3. In case there were maintenance issues, how long should it take for housekeeping to involve the right team (say, engineering)?
  4. How long does it take the housekeeping to inform the front desk that the room is ready?

How to Measure:

  • At a high level - Use a digital tracking system to log the time when housekeeping starts and completes the preparation of each room.
  • Maintain a digital checklist of each step that needs to be measured.
  • Analyze the average time taken for room readiness across various types of rooms and compare against set benchmarks.

Stakeholders:

  • Housekeeping staff: They are directly responsible for preparing the rooms.
  • Front desk staff: They need to know when rooms are ready to assign them to guests.
  • Hotel management: They oversee operational efficiency and guest satisfaction.
  • Guests: Their experience is impacted by the wait time for their rooms.

Ideally, each of the stakeholders should be notified at appropriate steps, with appropriate messaging to ease any form of anxiety and to provide a real-time update on what happening.

SLO 2: Response Time to Guest Requests

This SLO could be used to set objectives for the time taken from when a guest makes a request (e.g., for extra towels, toiletries, room service) to when the request is fulfilled.

What to measure:

  1. How long should it take for someone to review the guest request and take it or assign the task to another team member?
  2. How long should it take for a standard request to be fulfilled?
  3. How long should an out-of-the-ordinary request take to be fulfilled?

How to Measure:

  • Implement a tracking system (potentially integrated with the hotel's management software) that logs the time a request is received and the time it is fulfilled.
  • Analyze the data to calculate the average response time and assess performance against set targets.
  • Monitor patterns to identify peak times or types of requests that may require a faster response.

Stakeholders:

  • Guests: They are directly affected by the timeliness of service delivery. If the guest used the guest app to
  • Housekeeping and service staff: They are responsible for responding to and fulfilling the requests.
  • Front desk and customer service teams: They often receive and coordinate these requests.
  • Hotel management: They oversee operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

SLO 3: Response Time to Guest Requests

This SLO is a measure of the time taken to fully resolve a guest's issue or complaint, from the moment it's reported to when the guest is satisfied with the resolution.

A prior requisite is a tech-enabled process to gather real-time feedback from guests during their stay.

What to measure:

  1. How long should it take to assign a ticket raised by the guest?
  2. How long should it take for the assignee to provide grievance-related support to the guest?

How to Measure:

  • Use a customer service management system to log when an issue is reported, actions taken, and when it is resolved to the guest's satisfaction.
  • Track the type and complexity of issues to understand the time taken for different categories of problems.
  • Regularly review and analyze this data to identify areas for improvement and ensure targets are being met.

Stakeholders:

  • Guests: Their experience and satisfaction are directly impacted by the efficiency and effectiveness of issue resolution.
  • Customer service team: They are typically the first point of contact and play a key role in resolving issues.
  • Housekeeping, maintenance, and other relevant departments: They may be involved in resolving specific types of complaints or issues.
  • Hotel management: They are responsible for overall guest satisfaction and operational efficiency, using this data to make strategic improvements.

Other Housekeeping SLOs

Setting the above 3 SLOs is critical for upfront guest satisfaction. There are more SLOs you could consider setting, to improve your internal housekeeping practice and make it resilient –

  1. Inspection Pass Rate: Set a goal for the percentage of rooms that pass a quality inspection on the first try. This SLO ensures that the rooms meet the hotel’s cleanliness and preparation standards.
  2. Reduction in Repeated Requests: Aim to reduce the number of repeated guest requests, indicating that the guest's needs were not adequately met the first time. This SLO focuses on getting things right the first time.
  3. Training and Development: Set objectives for regular training and development sessions for housekeeping staff, ensuring they are up-to-date with the best practices and efficiency techniques.
  4. Inventory Management: Establish targets for efficient management of housekeeping inventory, like linens and cleaning supplies, to ensure availability and reduce wastage.
  5. Employee Satisfaction and Turnover: Set goals for improving employee satisfaction scores and reducing staff turnover rates, which can impact the consistency and quality of housekeeping services.
  6. Health and Safety Compliance: Ensure a high compliance rate with health and safety standards, which is crucial in maintaining a safe environment for both guests and staff.
  7. Sustainability Goals: Implement objectives for environmentally friendly practices, like reducing water usage and using eco-friendly cleaning products.
  8. Guest Satisfaction Scores: Aim for a specific target in guest satisfaction scores related to room cleanliness and housekeeping service. This could be measured through guest feedback forms or online reviews.

Finally, I’d like to sign off by mentioning that SLOs not only strengthen housekeeping, the most critical function of your hotel business — it motivates them by removing vagueness on what's expected and uncovering inefficacies with data.

At Haven, we are driven by the idea of improving guest experience at hotels and building empowering tech that helps hotel teams make it remarkable. Haven helps housekeeping teams set up critical SLOs and track the real-time performance of the team. If you are passionate about this topic, write to animesh@havenapp [dot] co and I’d love to engage in a conversation.

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