There are hundreds of thousands of hotels and unique stays around the world. Staying up-to-date with the top management practices for the industry is crucial for a positive guest experience.
While starting your hotel, creating the design, and getting guests to come is pretty intuitive, there’s a lot more to it behind the scenes. If you want your guests to have the best experience at your hotel, you need to have a few practices set in place.
If you are curious about hotel management top practices, you need to keep reading!
Provide Essential Items for Your Guests
As a hotel manager, one of the best practices that you can do is to provide essential items to your customers.
This can be something as simple as providing a coffee machine in the room. You should also provide hotel slippers and a bathrobe to give your customers the most comfortable experience during their stay. It could also mean providing bathroom essentials such as Q-tips, beauty supplies, and nice lotion that they can use during their stay.
Put Your Employees First
The hospitality of your hotel starts behind the scenes. You need to create a welcoming environment for your employees before you can do so for your guests.
That means that you need to treat your employees as one of the best assets you have.
Why is this so important? Just as in any industry, if employees are treated well it can lead to higher turnover rates. This affects the entire operation of your hotel and management system.
Here are a few things that you can do to ensure that you were putting your employees first:
- Provide benefits and a competitive salary
- Give employees PTO time as well as enough sick days
- Provide flexibility with their schedules
- Create incentives for your employees such as bonuses for their work ethic or customer service experience
By incorporating these things into your hotel management, your employees will enjoy working at the hotel more. If they enjoy working here more, they are more likely to treat the guests with respect.
This will ensure that you are creating a positive guest experience for everyone who comes into the hotel.
Know Your Mission
Knowing your mission as a hotel may not seem that important. However, your mission is what will drive your guest experience.
For instance, if you are a luxury hotel, your mission is going to have something to do with impressing guests. Because you know this mission, you will revolve part of your business around creating a luxurious experience.
On the other hand, if you are a budget-conscious hotel, you are going to create that experience for your guests. You may have cheaper restaurant options or packages that they can use to get a discount for the room.
The mission of your hotel will have an impact on the guest experience.
Automate Management Tasks
Although you may feel that you should be doing everything manually for your hotel management, automating tasks can make the world of difference in the behind-the-scenes of your business.
Instead of having to send follow-up emails to your guests, you can automate emails to go through to guests one day after checkout to send a survey. This will free up your time to spend on more innovative ideas for the guest experience.
Another way to automate management tasks is to think about all of the aspects that go into hotel management that a person doesn’t need to be doing. For instance, does a guest really need to go to the concierge to check out? Or, can there be a drop-off box for the keys to be placed?
Making these decisions to automate tasks can drastically improve your hotel management. Instead of focusing on small, mundane things, Your focus will be on the most important aspect of your hotel: the guest experience.
Personalize Everything
Personalizing materials enhances the customer experience.
Think about it. If you receive a letter with your name on it, You will feel more special than if you receive a letter without a greeting with your name.
The same thing applies to everything that you do in your hotel. If you have guests coming, you should do everything in your power to personalize the details. Here are a few ideas for personalization:
- Leave a survey addressed to your guests in the room on the first day of their stay to fill out their preferences such as the number of towels, washcloths, favorite breakfast items, type of tea they want in the room, etc.
- Go the extra mile to see who your guests are (for instance, if you have a family with a baby coming, put a crib in the room)
- Write a detailed personal message to leave in their room upon arrival
These are just a few ideas for how to personalize the customer experience at your hotel. There are many other practices that you can start doing as well if you think outside the box!
Be Authentic
One of the easiest things you can do to enhance your guest experience is to be authentic. If a guest is frustrated, show concern. Help the guest to figure out a solution.
When a guest is checking in, show excitement. Show them around the hotel with enthusiasm as if you were just arriving at the hotel for the first time.
You should also train your employees about how to treat the guests. This should also be a concern when hiring employees for the hotel. You want to ensure that their personalities are perfect for the hospitality industry.
Creating a Positive Guest Experience
Creating a positive guest experience at your hotel starts with management. If you follow these steps, your management will improve, and the guest experience will follow.
You can start with a few small changes. Add hotel slippers to the rooms and start personalizing the experience. Once you get that down, you can start training employees, automating tasks, and more.
If you enjoyed reading these tips, be sure to check out others like them on our blog!
