By Larry Mogelonsky|August 2nd,
2016
Traveling for work puts me up close
and personal with a wide variety of hotels, but even though I love dabbling in
the luxury segment, the wallet just isn’t fat enough to make that a year-round
thing. Instead, I opt for business-oriented properties, often downtown or near
a convention center, and shrewdly designed for the harried guest. As you all
know, this is a humungous category of hotels worldwide, and any new features
that help optimize revenue for this market are often rapidly gormandized across
all major brands.
I could address the omnipresent issue
here of whether such widespread adoptions are homogenizing product to the point
of making every brand look and feel the same way. But that’s too much for a
terse morning read. Instead, let’s focus on the recent trend of giving guests
the option of trading in daily housekeeping service for a paltry amount of
loyalty points or some other perks.
A recent trip to a major southern
city landed me at a major brand’s property near their convention center. Apart
from the lacklustre, undifferentiated product, what immediately drew my
attention was a door hanger card, strategically placed almost out of view in
the bathroom towel stack. Printed herein was an interesting offer: hang the tag
before you retire and we’ll skip housekeeping. Your reward? 500 loyalty bonus
points.
It’s an intriguing offer, and
thinking short-term it makes perfect sense. First, though, let’s do the math
using the opt-out bonus of 500 points as an example. Perusing various branded
websites for rates in this category, such guestrooms average around 12,000
points in loyalty redemption. Using these two numbers and with a typical ADR of
$200 to $225, 500 points translates to a value of roughly ten bucks.
Unless you count yourself among the
most die-hard of point-hounds who can see the long-term benefit from repeated
usage of this trade-off, the consumer value is fairly negligible. For the road
warrior who might only spend two to three nights tops at any given property,
such a compromise makes total sense – who needs his or her single-occupancy
room cleaned every day? You make enough towels to last you for multiple showers
and the bedsheets are still relatively fresh after a single use.
And for the hotel operator, assuming
a housekeeping wage rate (including benefits) of about $15 per hour with the
corresponding amenity replenishments and laundry costs, the trade-off
technically yields a modest return to the hotel operator.
But this numerical reduction in
expenses does not factor in the psychological elements of a guest’s stay.
Hospitality means providing a product that makes customers feel not only good
but great about their experience. Hotels aren’t meant to be ‘just like home’
but better than any regular person’s house. An a clean, tidy room with fresh
towels and linens every day is a critical component towards making that a
reality.
Managers love this sort of opt-out
short-circuiting because of how it looks on a P&L, but they are clearing
missing the point of our business. Whoever thought this up in the corporate
headquarters should be given a pat on the shoulder for a good attempt at
solving our industry’s current woes…and then promptly taken out back to the
whipping shed.
Think about it in terms of
TripAdvisor reviews where housekeeping is a perennial issue and thus a key
criterion for guest satisfaction. If housekeeping is eliminated or bartered off
like some commodity, does that also mean that such issues evaporate from users’
online critiques? I highly doubt that!
As well, there is an important
employer-employee component here. When a room is bypassed, most of the cost
savings come in the form of labor reduction with fewer shifts given to your
cleaning staff. This is very demotivating for someone who witnesses the gradual
decline firsthand. Such employees who lack the inertia of frequent shifts will
ultimately take less pride in their work and are more prone to errors or
calling in sick. I’ll let you complete the circle as to how this impacts your
TripAdvisor ratings.
A final holistic look on the
hospitality industry, let’s weigh this concession in terms of how it relates to
our fight against alternate lodging providers such as Airbnb. Stripping
housekeeping from the customer purchase further narrows the gap between what’s
offered by us and by them. Gone are the days of morning newspaper delivery,
free bottled water or gourmet complimentary breakfasts. Without cleaning
services, there isn’t much left to distinguish a hotel at the mid-tier level.
On paper, this trade-off will make
any pennywise manager smile, but so much of our business can’t be surmised by a
balance sheet. We must account for the many intangibles of human behavior and
deliver to these emotional drivers. By opting out of housekeeping, you are in
essence opting out of your own long-term success.
Right now, we are all still talking about the rapid growth of
China and to a lesser extend India, Russia and Brazil under the collective
banner of BRIC. Their evolution into capitalistic territories has presented
countless lucrative prospects for hospitality organizations both big and small.
But there should be a fifth name in this acronym which is often overshadowed
despite what's happening on the ground and despite it being the fourth most
populous country in the world.