Hotel SOPs: How Going Digital Helps Boost Profit Margins

With Kristin K. Ingram. Kristin is a senior executive in the hospitality industry, with extensive experience managing hotel operations over 20+ years. She shares her thoughts on the importance of hotel SOPs and why hotels should digitize them.

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For any hospitality business, delivering consistently high standards is crucial to meeting guest expectations and cementing the brand reputation. Hotel Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are an essential tool to define standards and bring them to life in every area of your hotel’s operations. 

However, implementing these procedures across different properties, departments, or shifts can present challenges, especially when facing high staff turnover. How to ensure that all your team members understand and follow the SOPs correctly?

Read on for tips and best practices to effectively bring SOPs into action. We’ll discuss how using an inspection app can take your SOPs one step further, helping boost profit margins, guest satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

What is SOP in a Hotel and Why is It Important?

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are a collection of business procedures and instructions that provide a roadmap for all facets of your hospitality business. Defining the rules of the road, they help set clear expectations and achieve consistent standards across all departments and locations.

They cover many areas – front desk operations, housekeeping, dining areas and kitchen, health and safety protocols, fitness & spa, facility maintenance and security, etc. 

Standardize Operations to Stay Ahead of Your Competition

SOPs are one of the tools leading hospitality brands use to build and maintain a stellar reputation, irrespective of a property’s location or management team. Even for smaller operations, delivering a consistent guest experience is vital. 

When followed properly, hotel management Standard Operating Procedures can help you:

• Increase profit margins by streamlining operations. Clear procedures minimize wasted time and errors, resulting in lower labor costs and fewer refund requests.
• Increase guest satisfaction by offering a positive and frustration-free experience. For example, a properly stocked mini-bar upon arrival eliminates the need for multiple requests or disappointments.
• Ensure compliance with laws and avoid penalties. Many SOPs cover food safety checks, fire safety drills, workplace health and safety audits, and other essential areas critical to your staff and guest’s health and well-being.
• Stay ahead of the competition by offering consistent hotel service quality to your guests. This will help you win their trust, retain them, and bring your hotel organic growth through word-of-mouth referrals.

Having designed and implemented SOPs at LaTour Hotels, hospitality expert Kristin Ingram highlights how SOPs are crucial in any kind of hospitality setting, from luxury properties to simpler accommodations:

I think that if you set and document the standards properly, if you manage expectations, and really “inspect what you expect”; you can be a five-star operation – even if it’s not the newest type of accommodation or property.

Kristin Ingram, Regional Director of Resort Operations, LaTour Hotels & Resorts

What are Hotel Chains Using to Prepare Standard Operating Procedures?

Many hotel chains rely on Excel spreadsheets to create and implement their standard operating procedures (SOPs). However, as the size of the hotel chain and the complexity of operations increase, monitoring the implementation across all locations becomes challenging.

To address this, more and more businesses are switching to digital solutions that facilitate SOP implementation with features such as digital checklists, mobile applications, dashboards, and tools for assigning and tracking corrective actions.

For instance, the team at LaTour Hotels previously used complex spreadsheets and cellphone cameras to monitor operations but eventually transitioned to a digital SOP software for better efficiency.

SOPs in Hotel Management: Where to Start?

Start by identifying areas that need clear procedures, like housekeeping or guest check-in. Involve managers and experienced staff to understand current practices and potential improvements.

Draft a clear outline. Include the purpose and steps in concise language with numbered actions and details – in a doc, spreadsheet, or digital checklist. For that, you can leverage templates for hotel standards designed by industry experts. It only takes a few minutes to modify these templates to mirror your standard operating procedures. 

Before finalizing the SOP for your hotel, gather feedback from your staff and run a pilot in a test area. Finally, ensure SOPs are available in an accessible format (preferably digital) to your staff.

Best Practices to Effectively Implement SOPs for Hotel Management

Standard Operating Procedures in hotels can quickly become bulky, rule-book documents that are difficult to access and enforce. Ensuring that all staff understand and follow them consistently can be a challenge, especially when facing high staff turnover or operating under pressure during peak season.

Instead, SOPs in the hotel industry should be treated as living documents that should be practiced and updated regularly. In the right format, SOPs can become a useful tool for training, quality assurance, and daily task completion. 

1. Use Digital Checklists to Make SOPs Accessible

There are countless departments and areas in your hotel that can massively benefit from standardized procedures. However, you may need help to create easy-to-rollout and well-written SOPs for all of them simultaneously.

An inspection app like GoAudits takes your SOPs one step further, helping you bring them into action effectively.  Design user-friendly Standard Operating Procedures for hotels in the form of digital checklists. These are simple, concrete, and actionable tools accessible through any device, e.g. mobile phones. Such digital hotel checklists offer staff easy-to-follow task lists.

Hotel SOP Templates for Different Departments

Here are some examples of free digital hotel checklist templates for various departments:

• Hotel Front Office Standard Operating Procedures
• Bathroom Cleaning SOP Checklist
• Hotel Housekeeping Checklist Template
• Hotel Room Maintenance Checklist
• Bar Service SOP
• Hotel Arrival SOP Checklist
• Hotel Operations Manager Checks
• Hotel Safety Checklist
• OSHA Hotel Safety Checklist
• Kitchen Cleaning Checklist
• Opening and Closing Checklist for Restaurants

2. SOPs in Action: Measure & Seek Out Improvement Areas

You can neither measure the efficiency of pen-paper-based SOPs nor know how well your staff is adhering to them. And what you cannot measure cannot be improved.

You can schedule regular SOP checks for your team with a hotel inspection app like GoAudits. Get a complete view of your hotel operations and any improvement opportunities. Here are a few examples in action:

• Track scores: to measure efficiency, you can assign a numeric value to each SOP item and get scores after every audit. This enables you to track performance over time and across different departments, prioritizing areas of high impact.
• Eliminate issues faster: using internal audit reports and dashboards alongside customer feedback, you can see in real-time any issues spotted by staff, assign corrective actions, and track resolution on dashboards. 
• Drive improvements: By spotting recurrent problems on dashboards, you can make wider changes, e.g. provide extra training or update your hotel’s standard operating procedures where necessary.
• To increase accountability, you can require staff to e-sign the hotel SOPs and assess how well they are following them.

It’s now much easier to hold staff accountable for our inspections by using the task list portion of the app! GoAudits is now a key part of our brand accountability.

Ruben Abeyta, Regional Director of Operations

3. Training Tool with Visuals and Multimedia

Visuals can clearly illustrate procedures, especially for tasks requiring specific steps or techniques. For instance, an SOP for setting up a bathroom might include a photo showing the correct presentation.

Photos and multimedia cater to diverse learning styles and reinforce written instructions, reducing errors and confusion.

Furthermore, short video clips can demonstrate complex procedures or showcase proper guest interaction techniques.

Integrate SOPs into Your Hotel Quality Assurance

SOP checklists can be used to replace paper checklists for everyday tasks. Also, SOP checklists can be used for self-inspections, quality assurance inspections, or even internal mystery audits, providing a great solution to establish consistency and enhance guest satisfaction.

Latour Hotels digitized the Headquarters Quality Assurance process and replaced paper checklists with digital SOP checklists for all facets of the hotel portfolio’s daily operations. As a direct result, the organization saw savings upwards of $8,000/year. 

Latour Hotels witnessed efficiencies by providing a digital resource to their employees: routines were strengthened, reducing employee stress and fatigue, and allowing employees to focus more on providing personal customer service. With each resort performing frequent self-inspections and digital SOP checklists, the team quickly saw improvements in operational standards.

We are seeing an upward trend (in scores) during our QA audits, primarily because the general managers are performing self-inspections, practicing the standard operating procedures daily.

Kristin Ingram, Regional Director of Resort Operations, LaTour Hotels & Resorts

Asked about the reaction from the staff on the ground, Kristin says: “There may have been some initial resistance to change. But once the GMs saw how much money they were saving in supplies and payroll, it caught on like wildfire!”

Many hospitality organizations have improved their operational consistency, increased customer satisfaction, and boosted profit margins by leveraging GoAudits. Talk to our experts to see GoAudits in action and discover how it can help your business.

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