Global hotel brands value uniformity of standards across all their locations. To accomplish this, they use standard operating procedures (SOPs). A hotel SOP is a set of clearly defined instructions that act as a guideline for performing routine activities, such as cleaning, food handling and storage, or safety checks.
This article explains why you need to incorporate SOPs into the operational workflow of your hotel and how you can easily do this with an inspection app.
Hotel SOPs: What Are They?
Guest satisfaction is the priority for most hoteliers. However, ensuring that every aspect of your hotel’s service, from the front desk to the room service and dining area, meets the expected standards at all times can be challenging. With Hotel SOPs, you can eliminate this bottleneck and guarantee your visitors a five-star experience for the duration of their stay.
Hotel SOPs provide a straightforward guide for performing everyday activities. These instructions are usually detailed in paper or digital format and act as a quality control measure to ensure compliance with brand standards across all your hotel locations.
Hotel standard operating procedures cover many areas, including onboarding new employees, food safety protocols, fire door inspections, or room housekeeping checks.
Why You Need to Incorporate Hotel SOPs
There are over 17.5 million guestrooms worldwide, and businesses in the hospitality industry are constantly exploring strategies that will help them take a significant portion of this $4.7 trillion market.
Hotel SOPs are one of the tools leading global brands use to build and maintain a stellar reputation, irrespective of their location or management team. Here are some reasons you need to incorporate SOPs into your operational workflow to improve your hotel standards.
Easy Integration of New Staff
Hoteliers spend much time and money getting new hires up to speed with the company’s culture and brand ethics. With clearly formulated SOPs, you can cut short this time and reduce the possibility of rookie mistakes that can hamper your overall customer experience.
Instead of relying on the learning speed of employees, you can provide them with a strict set of instructions to follow and guarantee that your guests receive the best service regardless of the specific staff on duty.
Guarantee Compliance With Legal Requirements
Most countries have strict regulations for hotels and other businesses in the hospitality industry, especially when it comes to food or fire safety. You can use Hotel SOPs to ensure compliance with these laws and avoid any penalties.
Many SOPs cover food safety, fire safety drills, workplace health and safety and other essential areas critical to your staff and customer’s health and well-being. Incorporating these SOPs into your daily operations is essential to ensure compliance and avoid fines or legal risks.
Stay Ahead of the Competition
Consistency is vital if you wish to retain customers and experience organic growth through word-of-mouth referrals. Fortunately, with hotel SOP templates, it becomes easy to deliver quality service at all times.
Hotel brands that desire high customer satisfaction ratings can use SOPs to ensure that they stay ahead of the competition and win their guest’s trust and confidence by offering consistent service.
How to Create SOPs For Your Hotel
Hotel SOPs have already been established as a must-have for brands that aspire to achieve the highest ratings from guests. However, creating standard operating procedures for your hotel from scratch can be daunting. Fortunately, we’ve broken down the process of drafting bespoke SOPs into three simple steps.
1. Seek Out Potential Areas for Improvement
There are countless departments and areas in your hotel that can massively benefit from the incorporation of standardized procedures. However, you might not be able to create SOPs for all of them simultaneously.
Instead, you can identify the high-impact areas – aspects of service that will have the most significant effect on customer satisfaction – and prioritize them when building your hotel SOP template.
2. Discuss With Staff
Your employees are one of the most reliable sources of information when creating hotel SOPs. It would be best if you reached out to them to understand their unique challenges and daily work routines to build a thorough SOP checklist.
For example, before writing hotel front office standard operating procedures, speak with your front desk team to learn the areas of service that are below par.
3. Document Your SOPs
Once you have gathered the necessary information, you can begin documenting your standard operating procedures. You can opt for a hard copy SOP or utilize an inspection app and create digitized guidelines that your staff can use more easily.
4. Use a Hotel Checklist
Although building your own SOPs from scratch is a great idea, it may be much more effective to take advantage of pre-written hotel SOP templates. Rather than endure the strain of navigating this process from scratch, you can get started with our top free hotel checklists to save time.
How to Effectively Implement Hotel SOPs
There are two things to consider when seeking to include an SOP in hotel management. The first is that your SOP is well-written and adequately addresses the needs of your establishment. The second consideration is that you must roll out these operating procedures in the most efficient format possible.
While there are many ways to achieve this, the most reliable solution is to use hotel checklists that translate the SOPs into simple, concrete steps. They simplify the process of working with SOPs by providing staff with an easy-to-understand list that lets them know what to prioritize.
Such hotel checklists can be used as a tool for daily self-inspections, as well as quality assurance by management, providing a great solution to the problem of establishing service consistency.
GoAudits Inspection App SOP format
Streamline Your Hotel SOPs With an Inspection App
Adopting a manual approach to brand compliance can be a cumbersome process. It usually involves countless wasted person-hours and a lot of unnecessary paperwork and data entry responsibilities. However, you can incorporate an inspection app to hasten this exercise.
Our customer Latour Hotels saved $8,000/year in paperwork using an inspection app. Witnessing the efficiencies brought by the app for the yearly quality assurance audits, the group decided to roll out the app for daily standard operating procedure checks.
Many other top businesses in this sector have improved their staff performance and increased customer satisfaction by adopting inspection apps. To maximize your guest retention while saving costs, download the GoAudits Inspection App today!
