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An Easy Change that Reduced Housekeeping Costs by 7.4%

Here’s a simple change that most hotels can benefit from:

Housekeeping is a huge cost for every hotel.  Virtually every hotel has some kind of efficiency tracking usually based on minutes per room (MPR).  Most hotels measure their housekeeping using one flat MPR target.  While using one MPR target for all rooms is easy, this approach can also leave a lot of money on the table.

We always recommend that every hotel should have multiple housekeeping targets.  At a bare minimum, each property should have separate targets for guests staying over and for guests checking out.

We recently put this recommendation to the test for tracking housekeeping productivity and saw a big change in performance.

Time for a Test

One of our clients has two hotels in the same market (very similar in both product and business mix).  Both hotels were running virtually identical housekeeping metrics at 28 MPR.

In Property A, we introduced a flexible minutes per room target at one of the properties.

In this case, we only used two MPR tiers:

  • 30 MPR for cleaning a checkout guest room
  • 20 MPR for cleaning a stay-over guest room

The goal was to provide realistic targets that would take into account how long it actually takes to clean these different rooms.  This provides the housekeepers more time to clean rooms when there are a larger number of check-outs and less time to clean rooms when there are more guests staying over.

For Property B, we maintained their existing flat MPR target of 28 minutes as a control.

Both hotels already used Hotel Effectiveness Labor Management, which includes automated reporting on the performance for each housekeeping attendant; because of this there was no additional management time for either property to track their efficiency.

And the Winner is

Property A (the test hotel) reduced their housekeeping MPR from 28.2 minutes to 26.1 minutes (7.4%) over the four month test period. 

Property B (the control hotel) was virtually unchanged MPR (28.3 minutes vs. 28.1 minutes) over the same period

Neither hotel saw any material change in their quality scores.

We’ve introduced similar flexible housekeeping targets in dozens of hotels over the past year and have always seen that more specific housekeeping targets lead to better efficiency.  Even so, we were still surprised by how big of a difference using flexible housekeeping targets made in this case.

Why This Works

The reason why this works is simple – when you provide specific and realistic goals, you focus your team on achieving those goals.  You eliminate the easy excuses of why they cannot meet the targets.

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