Good housekeeping pays off

By Marni Andrews
Contributing editor

If there’s one thing that pays back in the hotel sector, it’s cleanliness. But don’t forget being green and looking after housekeeping staff.

One factor is fairly consistent across hotel guest surveys. Cleanliness counts when it comes to satisfaction. It is the number one priority when it comes to choosing accommodation. Additionally, hotels that have a plan for being ecologically proactive, for keeping housekeeping staff happy and for eliminating the threat of bed bugs will realize the benefits. Those are three of the most troublesome issues in the lodging industry today.
 
“Guests mostly look at two things when speaking of cleanliness. The first and most important thing is the bathroom, from the sink to the floor to the shower or bath. The second most important thing is sheets,” says Jason Trottier, general manager, The Courtyard by Marriott Quebec City, which has been recognized for the second consecutive year as having the cleanest rooms in Courtyard by Marriott’s North American chain of more than 700 hotels.

The green movement has now become so important that the Starwood Hotels & Resorts chain is building a new brand that will require all of its properties to pursue LEEDS Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The first Element hotel opens this summer in Massachusetts and will feature energy- and water-efficient appliances, faucets and fixtures; bins to recycle paper, plastic and glass; amenity dispensers to reduce waste; paints and carpets with up to 100 per cent recycled content; and priority parking rewards for guests driving hybrid cars.

The importance of good staff cannot be underestimated in a tight labour market.

“Housekeeping employees in particular can have a significant impact on the customer experience, which ultimately affects loyalty and revenue,” says John Ely, senior vice-president, Signature Worldwide, which provides training and business building solutions to the hospitality industry. If a guest comments that a member of housekeeping was great about greeting him by name in the hallway, pat your team on the back and reinforce this great behaviour with ongoing training, suggests Ely. He adds that properties should be proactive in training their teams to create outstanding customer experiences.

Bed bugs even in five-star properties

One of the worst public relations situations possible for a hotel involves the growing prevalence of bed bugs, even in five-star properties. Since many guests are now taking their complaints to the Internet, where they post them often with photos for all to see, it’s an issue whose importance cannot be overstated.

According to Johan Bosman, hospitality channel manager with Caber Distributors, a couple filed a $20 million lawsuit last year against a hotel in the Catskills after their experience with bed bugs at the property. The story made news internationally.

Eco talk that matters

According to Adam Weissenberg, vice-chairman and U.S. leader of the Tourism, Hospitality & Leisure sector of Deloitte & Touche USA, in a recent New York Times article, the hotel industry is under growing pressure from big corporate customers to show that it means business about “green” initiatives. He says that meeting planners are already asking hotels what they’re doing in regard to green policies, energy policies, waste water policies and recycling.

San Francisco-based Kimpton Hotels’ Earth Care program was started several years ago with the addition of recycle trash cans in rooms and improvement of water conservation. The chain also replaced standard hotel cleaning products with organic products over an 18-month period, which necessitated one main product supplier being replaced with six regional companies.
 
Housekeeping was slow to sign on with the new products. Because the products had different characteristics, such as a lack of foam, there was the perception that they weren’t working. Steve Pinetti, senior vice-president for marketing, finally had to demonstrate to staff himself that the products did work before they were accepted.
He says that Kimpton, which operates 43 luxury boutique properties in the U.S., signed on to the Earth Care program in response to the “pseudo-eco” policy in place at many hotels. In his words, “’We don’t change your sheets or wash your towels because we’re going to save the planet.’ Almost everybody was doing that to save money. It had absolutely nothing to do with the planet.”
 
Ecolab Canada marketing manager Mike Brown says that his company’s Formula 1 laundry detergent allows operators to control the cost of chemicals, water and energy with a properly installed dispensing system. He says that customers such as Motel 6 and the Extended Stay America Properties (approximately 800 across North America) have seen value in their water and energy savings.

“The new program reduced hot water usage by 25 per cent and cycle times by 12 to 18 minutes,” says Brown.

He adds that water savings per year are 946 cubic metres, energy savings per year are 56,655 kWh per location, and in 12 months customers avoided producing more than 26 tonnes of plastic waste.

“Properties are definitely thinking green,” says Carlo Martini, laundry equipment consultant with On Premise Laundry Systems. “From the moment hotels started switching to compact fluorescent lightbulbs and saw the savings, green took off. Operators are looking at ways to conserve water and gas in the laundry as well.”
Martini says that simple equipment upgrades and features such as variable water levels on washer-extractors or high-efficiency drying tumblers can have huge positive impacts on laundry expenses.

Many people do not consider carpet cleaning as an opportunity for energy and water savings but facilities that use wet cleaning methods may be surprised at the amount of water that is used during one cleaning, says Geoffrey Greeley, director of marketing and training for Racine Industries, Inc., which manufactures the HOST Dry Extraction Carpet Cleaning System and Aridex Dry Upholstery Cleaning System.
 
Greeley notes that carpet cleaning with a dry method such as the HOST System requires no water usage from the property, so savings can be considerable. Electricity, too, is conserved since water does not have to be heated with a dry method. Finally, according to Greeley, dry carpet cleaning removes spots permanently.
 
Rob Carter, technical sales rep for Harco Co. Ltd., recommends either high efficiency laundry equipment or an ozone system to extract better savings from a laundry operation. Harco offers laundry solutions for the hospitality industry.
 
Ozone laundry systems provide another level of cleaning power without damaging linen and allow laundry to be washed in cold water, which offers further cost savings compared to using warm or hot water. Less water is needed and washing and drying times are shortened by 10 to 20 per cent.
 
Jani-King Canada Hospitality Division provides outsourcing to the industry for housekeeping and laundry. General manager Robert McNamara’s green cleaning tips focus on the implementation and marketing of a Green Stewardship Program in which everyone on the property has a role. He advises involving customers in a green cleaning plan by advising them what products are being used and how they help protect their health. He also suggests working from a written cleaning plan that lists how often floors are swept, mopped, buffed, refinished, etc. and using technologically advanced janitorial equipment such as high quality filtration bags for vacuums.

McNamara adds that with more than 100,000 green products in the marketplace to choose from, the best choices are those with the Green Seal or Environmental Choice logos.
 
“We do rounds every evening to make sure that all function space that is unused is shut down,” says Trottier of The Courtyard by Marriott Quebec City.
 
He notes that employees need to be educated on environmental measures such as not leaving the faucet running as they do other things when cleaning a room and remembering to turn off all lights when leaving a room.

Treating staff well

Since availability of labour continues to be tight and labour costs are becoming a higher percentage of overall cleaning and facility maintenance costs, it makes sense to treat staff well in the interest of lower turnover.
 
Vicky Gulevich, manager of the Mount Robson Inn in Jasper, AB, a 19-time recipient of the Travel Alberta Housekeeping Award, says good staff policies include an encouraging atmosphere, compliments from guests being passed along to employees, in-house training, and listening to suggestions from staff.
 
She adds that since labour is extremely hard to find in Jasper, the property provides subsidized accommodation for most staff. They also use a foreign worker program that has brought in people from the Philippines, Barbados and Japan.

“The hardest thing is finding good people and keeping them,” agrees Dan Carlson, general manager of the 43-room Howard Johnson Express Inn in Winnipeg, which just received an award as the 2007 International Property of the Year from Howard Johnson International. It’s a Cinderella story that started with a lower than anticipated Quality Assurance Score in early 2007.
 
“Keep staff happy and motivate them. We try to find ways to encourage them. Go out of your way to tell them when they’re doing a good job; it doesn’t always involve raises. Especially when you’re talking minimum wage, those incentives work wonders.”

Carlson hired an experienced head housekeeper a year ago and says this has made all the difference. Her responsibility is to randomly check rooms at the end of the day before the housekeepers have left. Any flaws must be corrected before that housekeeper can leave. “Once a week, one of the assistant managers and I go with her and show her what we like and don’t like.
 
“It’s worked wonders. We realized our main flaws were housekeeping issues, rooms that appeared clean when you entered but weren’t actually clean. We’re now getting a lot more repeat visits so we’ve upgraded televisions and bedding. Occupancy has gone up by 10 per cent and RevPAR is following. Last year was phenomenal and this year we’re beating last year,” he says proudly.

Jack Barrett, COO and CFO of Pure Solutions LLC says that his company’s Pure Allergy Friendly Room program will assist housekeeping staff in providing a cleaner room to guests. He promises that the EPA-registered technology will inhibit the growth of a wide array of bacteria, mold, mildew, algae, fungi and yeast on bedding, towels and other textiles.

Diamonds Are Four Ever

General manager Nicholas Carson of The Prince George Hotel in Halifax knows first hand about the value of happy housekeeping staff. His CAA 4-diamond rated property is the only fully independent hotel in Nova Scotia to achieve that distinction. Consequently, management is continually looking to maintain and improve the product and services. One of their recent innovations was a cleaning incentive program for housekeeping.
 
Rooms manager Lynn Davis and her team initiated a program called “Diamonds Are Four Ever,” that involved the monthly hiding of 50 “diamonds” in remote places around the hotel. They noted where they were hidden and at the end of each month the room attendant who found the greatest number was given a gift certificate for groceries or the movies or a dinner for two. At the end of the year, on May 2, 2008, a 14-carat gold ring with four diamonds was awarded to Debbie Harvey, a room attendant with 18 years of service at the property, in recognition of her having found the most “diamonds” throughout the year.
 
Making sure the tops of mirrors and pictures were dusted, beds were vacuumed underneath or window frames were wiped clean was previously always a challenge, says Davis. With the implementation of the new program, she found that a lot more detailed attention was being given to places that had previously been overlooked.

Marilena Neacsu is executive housekeeper with the Sheraton Suites Calgary Eau Claire. For the last nine years, the property has had the leading housekeeping department in North America based on Starwood’s Guest Satisfaction Index survey. She says that all local properties in her area are unhappy with the laundry service they currently receive, especially in regard to bed linen and terry linen. Citing not fully clean linen and problems with hair, Neacsu says there is not enough competition and there is a big need for more laundry facilities in Calgary.
 
“All our suppliers play a very important role in providing high quality to our customers; therefore I believe that it is very important to continue raising our expectations from our suppliers,” she says.

Martini of On Premise Laundry Systems says that laundry is often viewed in the industry as a back-of-house service; laundry goes there dirty and returns clean. He says it’s up to general managers and laundry managers to identify processes and equipment upgrades that will help them deliver more efficiency and better quality.

Al Bennett, regional managing director with Karcher Cleaning Equipment, acknowledges the demand for more efficient, less labour intensive and more cost-effective cleaning methods.
 
“The biggest complaint from operators is the weight, mobility and performance of equipment. They want equipment that works, is easy to use, easy to carry/move and also easy to clean and maintain,” he says.
 
Murray Oxford, president of Jani-King of Canada, says that his company “can eliminate the challenges of hiring and managing housekeeping staff so hoteliers can focus on guests.”

Jani-King’s McNamara says that managers are finding that they need to concentrate more on core competencies and are outsourcing the rest to experts.

Don’t let bed bugs bite

A pilot project in Orkin Pest Control’s Edmonton office uses a Labrador cross dog to sniff out bed bugs in hotel rooms. The company is claiming an accuracy rate of 90 to 95 per cent with the dogs compared with a 40 to 45 per cent accuracy rate for visual inspections, which can miss infestations inside a couch or behind a wall, according to Orkin’s Edmonton branch manager Doug Wadlow.

Bosman of Caber Distributors claims that once his company’s distributed product, Protect-a-Bed’s Aller-Zip mattress encasement, is placed around a mattress, it is never removed and any bed bugs inside will die. He suggests that a room and mattress be steam cleaned by a pest control company to get rid of as many bugs as possible before encasing the mattress.
 
“When one hotel room has an infestation, eight additional rooms are affected and are out of commission while the steaming and cleaning are taking their course,” says Bosman. “This means two rooms above the infested room, two rooms below, two rooms to the left and two rooms to the right. That’s big money lost forever.”

For properties without a bed bug problem, Bosman says that Aller-Zip is also useful as a mattress protector, since it stops liquids, perspiration and bodily fluids from getting through.
 
Tony Canevaro, president and chief heating officer of Baked Bed Bugs, claims that his company’s product uses the patented chemical-free Thermapure Heat process to kill the bugs. He says that the major advantage is the short period of time required for a room to be out of commission using the heat process compared to a pesticide treatment.
 
“Bed bugs are a huge problem in the hospitality industry today,” says Canevaro. “They are here to stay. If you do not develop protocols to deal with them quickly and efficiently, your facility could be the next one targetted for a lawsuit.”