It’s that time of year - families are planning vacations, road trips are picking up, and guests are eager to relax and enjoy their time away from home. Yes, summer is the busiest season for hotels, and you want to see your guest satisfaction scores rise with the temperature, so let’s make sure you are prepared for the traffic. From staying ahead of maintenance issues, to seamless guest communication, here are a few ways you can prepare for the summer and make the season as stress-free as possible. 

Preventative maintenance

Summer is the time where families are ready to relax and make memories through travel. Don’t let major breakdowns at your hotel happen on their summer break. While business is slow and steady, take this time to do your maintenance checks and make small repairs before the reservations come rolling in. 

Check smoke alarms, clean AC filters and make sure they are running properly, test outlets, etc. All of these and more are great ways to save your guests and staff stress in the summer. Kipsu Exceed’s team communication does a great job helping hotels stay up to date on their preventative maintenance. From collaboration, maintenance tickets, and checklists, your engineering team will appreciate the resource!

Streamline housekeeping

The efficiency of your housekeeping team will play a crucial role in the success of your summer. The faster the rooms get turned over, the faster they can be ready for the next guests. That’s why you should set up a strong SOP for your housekeeping team now.

Team communication is important, both within housekeeping and inter-department communication. Using team communication software with language translation features helps teams interact with each other easily and make sure appropriate information is delivered. To make the room turnover process easier, use our housekeeping checklist to make sure nothing gets missed.

Guest communication (texting!)

As your hotel traffic gets busier, efficient and effective guest communication becomes more imperative. Implement hotel texting to help your staff attend to more guests in a smaller amount of time. There are simple interactions you can do via guest messaging, such as providing recommendations. Share your favorite activities in the area, or suggest local restaurants they should check out. You can even keep a list of those recommendations in a pdf, and send guests a link to that file anytime they ask for ideas.

Another way to leverage hotel texting is to keep guests informed of weather updates, ongoing maintenance, etc. Sometimes there are things that are out of your control that could disrupt the guest experience. To mitigate that disruption, send guests a text that notifies them of safety precautions or a heads up so they can prepare for the day. If there is severe weather, you can send an outreach text that provides all guests the proper protocol in the emergency, and they will be thankful for your due diligence.

Lastly, leverage guest messaging to uncover service recovery opportunities. Even at the best-run hotels, there will inevitably be mishaps or problems that will go unnoticed. If you are proactive, you can find these moments and quickly recover them before they turn into low guest satisfaction scores. Send a mid-stay status check via text and you’ll be able to find those opportunities.

These are just a few tips that can make your teams less overwhelmed for the season. Kipsu wants to help your summer soar with success - so let’s get started! Schedule a conversation with our team and we can get you ready before the season begins.