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.
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.
Classification and rating schemes such as the Hotelstars Union criteria and the Michelin Keys define what good looks like; SOPs are how staff deliver it consistently enough to earn the rating. 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 hotel 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 guests’ 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.
Hotel SOPs by Department
- Front office. Check-in and check-out, reservations handling, guest complaints, key control, cash handling, and night audit. Front desk SOPs matter disproportionately because they shape the first and last impression, and because the desk is where most escalations land.
- Housekeeping. Room turnaround for occupied and departure rooms, deep cleaning cycles, linen handling, lost property, trolley setup, and public area cleaning. The highest-volume SOPs in any hotel and the ones most affected by turnover.
- Food and beverage. Service sequence, bar operations, allergen handling, opening and closing, cash and till procedures, and in-room dining. These overlap with food safety requirements, so the SOP and the HACCP plan need to agree.
- Kitchen. Food preparation, temperature control, storage and stock rotation, cleaning schedules, and equipment handling. Kitchen SOPs carry regulatory weight that others do not.
- Maintenance and engineering. Preventive maintenance schedules, fault reporting and response times, plant room checks, and contractor management.
- Health, safety and security. Fire procedures, incident reporting, emergency evacuation, key and access control, and lone working. UK properties should note Martyn’s Law (the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025), which is expected to come into force in 2027 and will require premises expecting 200 or more people to have documented public protection procedures and trained staff. Properties at 800+ capacity face additional duties. The procedures it asks for are SOPs, so the groundwork is the same work.
- HR and training. Onboarding, induction, SOP sign-off, and refresher training schedules.
Start with the departments where inconsistency costs most, but be more specific than that. Three questions find the priority quickly: where do mistakes happen most often, what do new starters struggle with, and where do guest complaints cluster? Those three answers usually point to the same two or three procedures. Write those, prove they work, then widen.
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.
What Does a Hotel SOP Look Like?
Every hotel SOP follows the same structure regardless of department. What changes is the detail inside it.
Header
- SOP title and reference number
- Department and area it applies to
- Version, effective date, and next review date
- Author and approver
1. Purpose. What this procedure achieves and why it exists.
2. Scope. Which roles, shifts, and areas it covers.
3. Responsibilities. Who performs the task and who verifies it.
4. Equipment and materials. Everything needed before starting.
5. Procedure. Numbered steps in the order they happen, written as instructions.
6. Standards. What “done correctly” looks like, with a photo where the standard is visual.
7. Escalation. What to do when something is outside the procedure, and who to tell.
8. Revision history. Version, date, what changed, who approved it.
Hotel SOP Example: Guest Room Turnaround
SOP: Daily guest room servicing (occupied)
Reference: HK-ROOM-002 | Department: Housekeeping | Version: 1.0
Purpose: To ensure every occupied room is serviced to brand standard within the allocated time.
Procedure:
- Knock, announce “Housekeeping”, wait five seconds, and repeat twice before entering.
- Open curtains and windows where fitted; check for maintenance issues and log them before cleaning.
- Strip and remove used linen and towels; do not place on the floor.
- Clear rubbish and service the minibar against the stock list.
- Clean bathroom: toilet, shower, basin, mirror, floor, in that order.
- Replace linen and towels to the standard shown in the room presentation photo.
- Dust and vacuum, working from the furthest point toward the door.
- Final check against the room standard photo before leaving.
Standards: Room presentation matches the reference photo. Bathroom shows no watermarks. Amenities replenished to full set.
Escalation: Maintenance issues logged in the app before the room is released. Guest belongings are never moved more than necessary. Anything suspicious reported to the duty manager immediately, not at shift end.
Free Hotel SOP Template PDF
Prefer a document you can print or fill in by hand? Download our free hotel SOP template (PDF), which includes the blank eight-part structure plus a worked in-room dining example you can adapt.
How to Implement SOPs for Hotel Management Effectively: Best Practices
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.
A hospitality SOP management platform solves a problem paper cannot: knowing whether the procedure was actually followed. A written SOP tells staff what to do. A digital SOP checklist records that they did it, when, and with photo evidence where the standard is visual. Digitizing hotel operations this way turns a document nobody opens into a daily task list, and turns compliance from an assumption into data you can see across properties.
A hotel 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.
Free Hotel Checklist Templates by Department
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
- Hotel Maintenance Checklist
- Bar Service SOP
- Hotel Arrival SOP Checklist
- Hotel Room Safety 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-and-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 audit 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 staff 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
Read the full story: How Hotel Management Company TMS (Hilton, Marriott) streamlines hotel standards and compliance.
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!”
Read the full story: How LaTour Hotels conducts daily self-inspections in 30+ resorts to enhance operational standards.
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.
FAQs
Fewer than most hotels assume, and more than most have written. A mid-sized property typically runs 30 to 60 SOPs covering the repeatable tasks in each department. The test is whether a task is performed often enough and matters enough that inconsistency would show. One-off tasks do not need an SOP; the guest-facing daily ones do.
At least annually, and immediately after any change to brand standards, equipment, layout, or regulation. The practical trigger people miss is turnover: if the person who wrote the procedure has left and nobody has read it since, it needs reviewing regardless of the date.
Usually a department head or operations manager, working with the staff who actually perform the task. SOPs written entirely by management tend to describe how work is supposed to happen rather than how it does, and the gap between those two is where standards slip.
Make them accessible at the point of work rather than in a binder in the office, keep them short enough to be read during a shift, and verify rather than assume. The strongest predictor of adherence is whether anyone checks: procedures that are audited get followed, and procedures that are filed do not.
An SOP covers one task. An operations manual is the compiled set, usually organised by department, that a new manager reads to understand how the property runs. Write the SOPs first and compile them into the manual, not the other way round, because a manual written top-down tends to describe the organisation rather than the work.
