Why Should Hotel Quality Assurance be a Priority

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 QA and why hotels should digitize QA processes.

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Unlike other industries where customer contact may be fleeting, like in a retail shop, a hotel’s interaction with guests is much more intimate and lasting.

Ensuring the highest level of service in every room, every day, by every staff member, in every aspect – that’s a daunting task with no end. This is especially true as competition and customer expectations pressure hoteliers for ever higher standards.

Therefore, implementing a well-designed hotel quality management program is essential. We will discuss the best practices of hotel quality assurance, and how a hotel audit tool like GoAudits can help take your QA processes to the next level.

What is Quality Assurance in the Hospitality Industry?

Quality assurance (QA) or quality control in the hotel industry is the systematic process of ensuring that all services and amenities meet established standards for excellence, consistency, and guest satisfaction.

Hotel QA entails an ongoing effort to scrutinize and fine-tune various aspects of operations — from room housekeeping and food & beverage to customer service and facility maintenance.

Depending on the hospitality organization, quality control programs can include formal QA audits from headquarters, mystery audits by external consultancies, brand compliance audits for franchisees, regular internal self-inspections by property managers, or even daily operational to-do lists within each department.

Who Manages Quality Assurance in Hotels?

Quality management in hotels is typically overseen by a dedicated Quality Assurance Manager or Director of Quality. This role involves:

• conducting hotel audits and inspections: inspect products & services in line with the brand standards
• analyzing inspection data and guest feedback
• recording quality issues
• collaborating on training programs
• evaluating outcomes & monitoring progress

In smaller hotels, these responsibilities may fall to the General Manager or a senior manager with multiple duties. No matter the size of the property, quality assurance is an essential component of hotel operations.

How to Implement Quality Assurance in the Hotel Industry?

Here’s what typical quality assurance schemes in hospitality consist of:

• Developing brand standards and clear procedures for housekeeping, front of the house, maintenance, food & beverage, etc.
• Training staff on these hotel brand standards
• Creating hotel SOPs and checklists to clarify expectations in each role or area, for example for cleaning, front desk services, or safety
• Conducting regular internal audits & inspections by qualified personnel
• Documenting issues with photos and descriptions for follow-up
• Implementing corrective actions to address problems and prevent them from recurring
• Gathering regular guest feedback to identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes

Why Should Hotel Quality Control be a Priority?

With an effective hotel quality system, you can avoid costly mistakes and inefficiencies, and build your brand by consistently offering high-quality services. A satisfied guest won’t just return, but also bring additional new customers. Apart from increasing business, this will help you save money on marketing campaigns.

According to TripAdvisor, 81% of users read reviews online before booking a place to stay. Quality assurance is the way for hotels to meet or exceed guest expectations and gain positive reviews. If the high hotel service quality is guaranteed, customers will likely be more willing to pay a premium price.

To sum up, quality control in hotels is all about consistency, brand reputation, guest satisfaction, and profitability.

Common Challenges in Hotel Quality Management

In the dynamic hotel industry, where guest expectations are constantly evolving, upholding consistent quality across all aspects presents a unique set of challenges.

1. Complexity of Internal Quality Audits

Many hospitality organizations rely on spreadsheets or paperwork to run their audit program, which can be time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to error. Conducting audits and then documenting findings requires collating data, such as date, location, findings, comments, photos, assignees, etc., into a file.

Generating such inspection reports is difficult for larger properties, but becomes even more challenging when it comes to upholding consistent standards across multiple locations. 

As an example, the team at LaTour Hotels used to perform quality assurance audits using spreadsheets, before switching to GoAudits. Whereas the admin overhead only allowed them to conduct 30 QA audits per year, by moving to this efficient digital tool the team was able to perform over 20,000 yearly audits and operational checks to improve quality.

We were performing over 30 major quality assurance audit inspections each year, in various parts of the U.S. and Caribbean. I utilized my cellphone camera to take images of deficiencies and/or good observations to reference, as well as a 12-page Excel spreadsheet to document and calculate quality assurance scores.

Kristin Ingram, Regional Director of Resort Operations, LaTour Properties

2. Coordination & Long Response Time

It can take many days for hospitality organizations to complete one audit cycle, which typically consists of inspection, reporting, corrections, and follow-up.

For example, The Independent Food Company was spending on average 4 days per audit cycle, which could be an issue when it came to food safety and quality. Having switched to a digital auditor tool, the team now achieves a much faster turnaround, with most issues fixed within the day.

Our main challenge was the time it took to put all the inspection information into a report. It used to take us 3-4 days to conduct the audit, submit the report, and get the appropriate actions to be taken.

Eliane E., Quality and Hygiene Manager, The Independent Food Company

3. Training Staff on Brand Standards

The hospitality industry is particularly known for fast staff turnover. As a result, training new staff and rolling out updated hotel brand standards can be a challenge. Infrequent Quality Assurance audits from the Headquarters are not the right tool for this, as they are insufficient to ensure standards on a daily basis. For that, you need to rely on staff to conduct their own operational checks and self-inspections.

It can become even more of a challenge when your hotel quality assurance program covers several elements, such as internal standards, hotel flag brand standards, and also external ratings such as Forbes and LQA standards in luxury hospitality.

All of these standards represent an administrative burden that is seemingly impossible to break down and communicate to the staff on the ground.

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Designing a Hotel Quality Assurance Scheme: Best Practices

Customer feedback is a good indicator of service levels. However, they usually lack specific detail and actionable items and put you in a passive position: you can only react after the damage has taken place.

Therefore, you need a solid quality control program in place. Here are some of the best practices you must implement while designing quality control in the hospitality industry.

1. Implement and Monitor Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) serve as the blueprint for each department’s activities. They are often outlined in checklists that staff can follow to guarantee that each task is completed accurately and efficiently.

For example, housekeeping might have an SOP checklist that specifies the steps for cleaning a room, while the Hotel Front Desk Checklist an SOP for checking in guests.

According to Kristin, hotel SOPs are a way to manage expectations, inspect what you expect, and achieve five-star operations. She said, “I think that you can be a five-star operation if you set and document the standards properly, you’re managing expectations, and really “inspect what you expect.”

2. KPIs and Scores to Train & Motivate Staff

Most hotels manage their checklists and SOPs on paper, excel, or email. Hence, it can get complicated to keep track of everything. Additionally, you get a fragmented view across different departments with no easy way to check your team’s performance or how things have evolved.

Therefore, a slightly more scientific approach can be helpful: creating some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), inspection scores, etc that you can track on a smart dashboard.

A Regional Talent Manager at Rosewood Hotels highlighted the benefits of using audit scores as a performance management tool:

For us, GoAudits has been a phenomenal resource to develop a performance-based recognition program for associates and departments. Recognize your highest performing associates based on the audits results and follow up. Using the app enables you to initiate and create a fun and competitive environment within your property, for example by establishing inter-department competitions on audit results.

You can match hotel inspection scores with the customer’s positive or negative feedback to know the complete story. This way, you can also resolve personnel issues and understand who needs retraining.

3. Use Digital Audit Checklists

Managers require multiple checklists for inspections to audit their standards – housekeeping checklists, kitchen standards lists, maintenance checks, etc. 

Rather than dealing with stacks of forms and spreadsheets, you can require everyone to fill out the quality checks related to their department on their phone, tablet, or computer. This means all the information is in one place, easily accessible to anyone who needs it. 

Digital checklists facilitate affordable, quicker, consistent, and regular inspections. For instance, LaTour Hotels saved $8,000 in paperwork and conducted over 20,000 audits in a year across 30 properties within their portfolio.

Hotel Quality Assurance Checklists

We offer a library of hotel inspection checklists to support various hospitality quality control processes, here are some examples:

• The Hotel Operations Manager checks
• Hotel Arrival Checklist
• Room Inspection Checklist
• Hotel Manager on Duty Checklist
• Pool Deck Inspection Checklist
• Hotel Housekeeping Checklist
• Hotel Maintenance Checklist
• Hotel Reopening Checklist

4. Close the Loop with Hotel Quality Assurance Software

Good quality assurance software allows you to schedule audits frequently and equips you with ready-to-use customizable checklists, facilitating regular and consistent inspections.

Self-assessments are inevitable in hospitality. However, they may lack objectivity. According to Kristin, location tagging, e-signature, and photos can bring some accountability. In an interview she said, “I mentioned the GPS and signatures, which help hold everyone accountable. I also think that it’s important to have the ability to upload pictures for each line item, showing the before and after.”

Some audit apps like GoAudits, facilitate assigning corrective actions and increasing accountability.

It’s now much easier to hold maintenance staff accountable for our inspections by using the task list portion of the app. Our hotels have seen a dramatic increase in guest service scores since we started using GoAudits, which in turn brings an increase in business.

Our company prides itself on quality hotels and GoAudits has kept us competitive. We have noticed that our properties consistently score better than our competitive sets.

Ruben Abeyta, Regional Director of Operations, TMS (Hilton, Marriott, Choice Hotels)