3 Ways Hotel Operations Software Helps During COVID-19

Keeping guests safe is now the ultimate act of hospitality. Your hotel’s safety measures for staff and guests will determine whether your guests will feel safe and comfortable enough to return to your property. Taking significant precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19, with the help of hotel software, will be one of the best ways to keep hotel guests and employees healthy. 

Having a piece of software to help manage hotel operations will be critical in making sure your hotel runs smoothly. It can guide your team as they do more with less during a time of uncertainty. Despite these challenging times, it is still crucial for your guests to continue to have a positive and personalized stay while following safe protocols. 

Hotel operations software is critical to making sure your hotel’s operations are effective, streamlined and safe.

Create Seamless Communication Between Hotel Departments

Communication and transparency are absolutely key. The use of technology can ensure your teams are accountable and empowered. Platforms, such as ALICE, can give hotel managers and owners complete visibility of the hotel operations at any given time. 

Hotel software removes the “middleman” in what can be a lengthy game of telephone. Instead of having all guest requests go through the front desk, and then giving your front desk agents or your concierge the task of forwarding that request to another department, ALICE eliminates the potential for confusion. It quiets ringing phones and noisy radios, and it allows for quicker and more direct communication. 

Guest requests are put straight into the system and every department has access to it. Each department can then check off the task when it is completed ensuring the request is not forgotten. This supports a high-level of accountability for individual contributors and teams. 

The pandemic is not only affecting the guests. Hotel managers also want hotel staff to make an effort to socially distance ensuring their safety as well. Mobile communication allows for each department to receive any message, wherever they are, while still being socially distanced. 

Hotel management software enables your team to work efficiently. With a management solution, each team member, throughout your hotel, from housekeeping teams to front desk agents, are able to see their individual tasks. Built-in checklists make tasks easy to track and complete.

Here are some benefits of leveraging hotel software with checklists: 

• Staff have opportunities to take on more responsibilities
• Staff are able to visually see what tasks need to be completed
• Checklists are flexible with shift changes, allowing team members to pick up where someone else has left off, and have access to any notes that they’ve made

Allow for Safe Interactions with Your Guests 

The pandemic has completely changed hotel operations – even the way we communicate with our guests. With less face-to-face contact, guests are becoming more and more receptive to providing their cell phone numbers for SMS communication, limiting physical touchpoints.

This opens up the opportunity for guest messaging. With guest messaging software, hotels are able to reach out safely to guests asking for their requests, or welcoming them to the hotel. This direct communication allows for a more personalized stay, building the trust between the hotel and its guests. Starting with an online booking engine and reservation management system, the beginning of the guest journey has already been digitized. With hotel operations software, everything from booking to check-out can be digital, including communication before, during, and after a guest’s stay.   

With hospitality technology, concierges are able to enhance the guest experience by sending guests scheduled pre-arrival messages. This limits face-to-face interactions to ensure a safe interaction with the guest. This can also help capture no-show reservations and optimize up-sell opportunities. Additionally, on the day of arrival, guests can receive a message in real time that can direct them to a link detailing your hotel’s latest guidelines and COVID-19 procedures – making the check-in process a bit smoother, and certainly safer. 

Having a platform for this communication also allows guests to personally access all information, digitally, on their own device. This could be information on the hotel’s latest COVID guidelines, information on how breakfast service will look a bit different in a pandemic or even how to put in a maintenance request. Having access to this information puts guests at ease with the reassurance that their hotel is looking out for their safety, and making it a priority through these challenging times. Building this trust with your guests is essential!

Lastly, hotels are able to use this digital communication to receive feedback at the end of the stay. With guests already familiar with communicating via text with the hotel, there is a higher chance of capturing any feedback before the opportunity closes, by sending a request or link to guests via text.

Housekeeping is able to do more with less

Housekeeping has arguably become the most important hotel department in this pandemic. Housekeeping has had to work twice as hard, ensuring every corner of the hotel is clean and sanitized, with a lot less staff. These high expectations leave no room for miscommunication in this department. Guest satisfaction is directly impacted by the housekeeping department, but more importantly, housekeeping departments have a large impact on guest and staff safety. 

Housekeeping hotel software is crucial for any hotel during a global pandemic. With a new level of cleanliness needed, housekeeping can easily track when each room has been cleaned, inspected and certain that the level of cleanliness is superb. This hotel department can also provide digital timestamps for curious guests to maintain trust and also put them at ease knowing that your hotel tracks and manages each action. 

With housekeeping constantly providing updates for which room has been cleaned, this makes the job of managing the front desk easier. Rather than giving guests false hope as to when their room will be ready, a front desk agent is able to view the platform in real time and see exactly what room housekeeping is on, how much time each room will take, and see when the guest’s room will be ready. When housekeeping software is connected to a hotel’s PMS, the high-level of transparency has a direct impact on staff and guests. COVID-19 has brought a fair amount of uncertainty, but knowing when a hotel room is cleaned, or almost ready, is insight that can be quickly gained with the help of hotel housekeeping software. 

From a hotel manager’s perspective, hotel housekeeping software organizes the chaos when delegating room assignments to each housekeeping team member, whether they are a room attendant or supervisor. Auto-assignment, based on preset logic limits confusion and saves time ensuring no rooms will be double checked twice. 

In a year of uncertainty, one thing is certain: hotel operations software saves teams time and money throughout a hotel, during a time full of uncertainty.  

Schedule a demo today to learn more about how ALICE can help your hotel during COVID-19.