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7 Hotel Maintenance Changes You Want toMake

Alittle over a year ago, we posted the Top 10 Hotel Preventive Maintenance Tips that re-commended hotels adopt a maintenance stra-

tegy target of 80% proactive maintenance. In this

post we go a little further and take a look at whygood hotel maintenance can signicantly changethe bottom line of hotel operating costs.

How Hotel Maintenance AectsProftability

It would be nice if all hotels under a brand namewere newly constructed, had state-of-the-art predic-tive technologies to pinpoint exactly when an assetwas going to need repair or maintenance and of course was fully staffed with experience engineerscapable of handling all issues.

Hotel maintenance generally comes in 4 areas whichare:

1. Emergency: Includes unexpected asset orequipment failures that require immediateattention.

2. Routine: Includes rounds, monitoring equip-ment, start-up and shut down of chillers andpumps and so on.

3. Preventive: Includes scheduled hotel work

management such as inspections, preven-tive maintenance, and other activities de-signed to prevent unplanned maintenancerepairs as well as extend an asset’s usefullifecycle.

4. Corrective: Corrective maintenance fallsinto a grey area but will include mainte-nance activities designed to restore assets tooptimal or normal working order. This typeof maintenance can be planned or unplan-ned.

It should be noted that the amount of correctivemaintenance can be decreased by being more proac-tive. On the other hand, if the amount of correctivemaintenance gets out of hand, hotel maintenancefalls into a trap of ghting res on a continual basiswhich decreases the amount of preventive mainte-nance that can be performed. The key to managingmaintenance activity is knowing the condition of all hotel assets at any given point in time.

Unfortunately, the reality is too many hotels (newerand older) do not have an adequate maintenanceplan that addresses how maintenance managementwill minimize operating costs by achieving a proac-tive maintenance goal of 80%.

“In hotels, the amount of energy use is affectedby weather conditions, number of guestroomsand occupancy rate, number of food coversserved and the operating eciency of plantsand equipment (Lee et al., 2000)….Without adecent control, the energy consumption of fuel

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7 Hotel Maintenance Changes You Want to Make

oil, gas and electricity, even in a well-managedhotel, will be as much as 457 kWh/yr.m2-oor-area (Lee et al., 2000). It is worth noting theresults of industrial energy audits and casestudies, which indicate that reduction in energyconsumption from improved operation andmaintenance activities can average between8 and 12.5 per cent (Thumann, 1999).”

Source: Kenny Chan

When utility bills alone can cost over $1 million peryear a 10% savings on maintenance expenses owsdirectly to the bottom line of a hotel P&L statement.In addition, when factoring in that the age of a ho-tel plays a signicant role in determining ongoingmaintenance costs it becomes clear that managinghotel maintenance costs must be a priority for seniormanagement.

Suggested Hotel MaintenanceChanges

To remain competitive and survive in a global mar-ketplace, hotels should embrace the idea that assetand maintenance management visibility must beincreased. This means that more senior level atten-tion needs to be given to controlling maintenanceexpenses.

The keys to getting a better handle on maintenancecosts are knowing your assets, organizing and sche-duling work management, automating work pro-cesses such as work requests and work orders andtracking results. With this in mind the following are7 suggested maintenance changes hotels can maketo increase protability.

Top 7 Hotel Maintenance Changes

1. Know where all hotel assets are along withtheir asset detail such as description, dateinstalled, costs, vendor, serial number, ex-

pected useful life, associated contracts etc.2. Inspect all hotel assets using a hotel inspec-

tion checklist to benchmark the condition of assets. This can be done using mobile de-vices for increased speed.

3. Schedule maintenance on each asset basedupon age, condition, value, impact on guestsetc. to ensure they are in proper workingorder.

4. Schedule rounds and preventive mainte-nance on assets to minimize surprises andunplanned emergency repairs.

5. Empower maintenance staff with mo-bile devices capable of transmitting workrequests and work orders directly to hotelmaintenance management.

6. Track asset work management history andevaluate monthly to identify hotel main-tenance trends, assets that had too manywork orders, bottlenecks, energy drains and

potential capital expenditure issues.7. Set a target of a 10% increase in proactivemaintenance on a monthly basis until theultimate goal of 80% of total hotel mainte-nance being proactive is achieved. Concen-trate initial efforts on the 20% of assets thatrequire 80% of the work.

The hotel maintenance changes above are commonsense applied to an operational environment. Thefoundation for a successful hotel maintenance ope-ration is maintenance planning and execution usingthe right tools that can accomplish the desired goals.Without the right tools maintaining aging hotel as-sets can become a nightmare.

Avoiding the Hotel MaintenanceNightmare

Achieving hotel maintenance success means over-coming the logistics of tracking the condition andmaintenance of thousands of assets. Archaic manualsystems and spreadsheets just don’t cut it in today’s

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7 Hotel Maintenance Changes You Want to Make

competitive environment because they are timeconsuming, cumbersome to manage and ineffective.

The tool of choice for hotels is a Computerized Main-tenance Management Software (CMMS) system.Implementing a hotel CMMS gives senior mana-gement, hotel management and maintenance ma-nagement the ability to make all of the suggestedchanges above.

Selecting the right CMMS is as crucial as making amaintenance plan. Hotel senior management shouldavoid off-the-shelf CMMS products that can’t be cus-tomized to meet management goals. On the otherhand, the CMMS should be easy to use so that withproper training adoption rates are high.

What hotel maintenance changes would you like tosee at your hotel? If you enjoyed reading this articleyou may also like reading:

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