10 Steps for Hotel Preventative Maintenance [+ Checklist]

In this post we’ll cover what preventative maintenance is, the benefits of conducting regular preventative maintenance at your hotel, some key steps for hotel preventative maintenance. Utilizing preventive maintenance software is crucial for streamlining these processes and ensuring efficiency. We’ll provide a free checklist template to get you started managing  your preventative maintenance goals.

Recommended Resources:

• Finding The Best Preventive Maintenance Software In 2024
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• What’s The Best Maintenance Solution for Hotels + 5 Free Maintenance Software for Hotels In 2024
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To continue your learning, check out our comprehensive Hotel Maintenance Management Guide

What is Hotel Preventative Maintenance?

Hotel preventative or preventive maintenance is regularly scheduled maintenance activities that aim to keep hotel assets and areas safe and functional for optimal guest satisfaction.

Some examples of preventative maintenance could include: 

• Regularly checking hotel lighting to ensure they’re in working order
• HVAC checks and regularly scheduled tune-ups 
• Checking pool readings on a consistent basis 
• Monitoring the function of electrical systems
• Servicing the plumbing facilities on a scheduled cadence  

Whereas reactive maintenance is a sudden response to an asset breaking down or experiencing issues, preventative maintenance aims to—as the name suggests—prevent maintenance problems before they can arise. If your hotel maintenance technician responds to a broken HVAC unit, that’s reactive maintenance. But if your hotel maintenance technician is giving an HVAC unit a regularly scheduled tune-up, that’s preventative maintenance.

What are the Benefits of Hotel Preventive Maintenance?

Having a hotel preventative maintenance program keeps your hotel prepared by creating a log of asset wellness and ultimately aims to extend the longevity of assets. Because it helps your maintenance team stay on top of your assets’ lifecycle, preventative maintenance often results in cost savings and easier budget preparation. By utilizing a preventative maintenance plan, you can keep a log of asset health and better anticipate when something needs replacing so it’s in your financial plans from the beginning and there aren’t any surprise costs. 

Preventative maintenance also helps with overall customer experience at your property and lends to reputation management.

Integrating housekeeping apps can further enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your property's cleanliness and maintenance operations.

It helps save guests from struggling with items while they’re at your hotel, maintaining your property’s reputation and aiding in avoiding the dreaded negative review. When your team is on top of maintenance, your guests can simply focus on their stay. 

How a Well-Designed Preventive Maintenance Checklist Can Boost Guest Satisfaction

One study showcased in a recent issue of orgeronline.com showed a strong correlation between customer experience ratings and employee engagement scores.

According to the study, companies with above-average customer experience ratings also have employees who are 1.5 times as engaged as those working at companies with less favorable ratings. This statistic truly shows just how important employee satisfaction is in the service industry!

A well-organized checklist for preventive maintenance is crucial for enhancing the hospitality industry's guest satisfaction. It is the primary guideline for maintenance professionals, every hotel has some kind of checklist to lay down routine jobs for different employees. It makes sure that all the hotel facilities run smoothly so that the customers are happy and kept in a consistent and enjoyable environment.

Meeting guest expectations demands consistency. With a structured preventive maintenance checklist, assignments are carried out with continuity.

This reduces the likelihood of visitors facing unexpected hitches when they are at the hotel. check of essential systems i.e. HVAC and plumbing and many other maintenance procedures creates a sense of reliability and trust among guests.

A well-developed checklist can also help identify and resolve potential problems before they cause guest inconvenience. Hotel personnel who are trained to proactively look for maintenance items can spot and resolve problems before they become headaches for guests.

If maintenance items are spotted, they can be repaired. A proactive approach to maintenance not only drives high-level guest satisfaction, but it also strongly reflects the smooth, problem-free hotel experience that guests are looking for.

Moreover, routine maintenance efforts assist in retaining the general condition of hotel facilities.

Every aspect of the hotel, ranging from the tidiness of the public spaces and the working conditions of recreation facilities, molds the experience and in turn, the satisfaction, of the guest. Keeping facilities in the best condition possible guarantees a positive and agreeable hotel visit for the guest. Whether it is properly running elevators or the perfect temperature in guestrooms, the level of detail in maintenance operations correlates with guest satisfaction.

In addition, the productivity of staff can also be increased if a structured preventive maintenance checklist is used.

By clearly outlining tasks that need to be done and an order of priority, the checklist can enable maintenance staff to become more efficient and effective within their role. This allows for no critical maintenance needs to be overlooked which can be valuable as you do not want to have to deal with something when it gets out of hand.

This means that staff can deal with any problems promptly allowing staff to have additional hours and time on their hands to deliver exceptional service which will enhance the experience of guests in the long run.

10 Steps to Hotel Preventative Maintenance 

Step 1: Identify areas where preventative maintenance can help 

The first step in creating a preventative maintenance plan is identifying areas where preventative maintenance can save you and your team time and money in the long run. Some common areas hotels generally perform preventative maintenance around are: 

• Heating systems
• Flooring and carpeting
• Refrigeration systems 
• Wall paints, wallpapers, and wall decor
• HVAC systems
• Lighting fixtures
• Guest room TV units and services 
• Room furnishings
• WiFi connections
• Faucets and plumbing 
• Staff and guest computers
• Phone lines

Step 2: Create standard operating procedures (SOPs) 

Once you’ve identified areas for preventive maintenance at your hotel, then you can start to look at creating standard operating procedures, or SOPs, around maintenance needs. 

Having a SOP provides a regulated method for completing preventative maintenance to ensure that hotel compliance standards are met and everyone is on the same page. It also helps you to set standards of cadence for regular maintenance needs so preventative maintenance is consistently completed according to protocol. 

Step 3: Create a hotel preventative maintenance checklist 

Once you’ve identified your standard operating procedure, you can create a checklist to help track and log preventative maintenance. Leveraging maintenance checklists ensures thoroughness and accountability in your maintenance operations.

Checklists provide a clear way for your team to work through preventative maintenance and allow you to easily keep track of which assets regularly pass or fail inspections so that you can anticipate and plan for further maintenance needs over time. It also helps hold your team accountable for maintenance responsibilities. 

The elements of a good checklist include clear, accessible language and the necessary steps for preventative maintenance completion.

This allows your team to work more autonomously too, so you can provide less guidance and instruction and save yourself and your maintenance techs valuable time. 

Step 4: Create a hotel preventative maintenance calendar

By now you should have a list of assets that require preventive maintenance, standard operating procedures to conduct the preventive maintenance and a checklist to track progress. The final piece that you need to deploy an impactful preventive maintenance plan, is a maintenance calendar. Using a preventive maintenance calendar allows managers to organize the tasks necessary to minimize equipment downtime and safety risk. Calendars allow managers to confidently schedule contractors and manage equipment outage related guest experiences.

Step 5: Keep your logs updated

Fortunately, it seems that manufacturers are ahead of the game in terms of maintenance. According to a 2017 maintenance research, 59% of facilities utilize a computerized maintenance management system, while 78% of facilities use a preventive maintenance plan.

To avoid last-minute mayhem, make sure your maintenance records are updated regularly. Utilizing maintenance software can significantly aid in keeping these records accurate and easily accessible, building a comprehensive history of all maintenance tasks. By maintaining these logs up to date, you build an exhaustive history of all maintenance tasks, offering insightful information and promoting more efficient operations.

Maintaining accurate logs helps you keep track of the maintenance history of your buildings, systems, and equipment. They also serve as a historical reference.

For troubleshooting, recognizing reoccurring problems, and scheduling upcoming maintenance chores, this information can be quite helpful.

Step 6: Keep preventive maintenance on top of your priority list

While both proactive and reactive maintenance are essential to total asset management, it is best to place a little more focus on preventive maintenance.

The recommendation is based on the possible financial consequences of unplanned breakdowns or malfunctions. Such unplanned events can have a detrimental effect on a hotel's reservations in addition to resulting in urgent repair costs.

Inadequate preventative maintenance can result in unforeseen failures that not only cost the hotel money in repair expenses but also cause revenue losses. Furthermore, the fallout from these mistakes may harm the hotel's image and reduce reservations.

Taking these factors into account, it makes sense to regularly give the upkeep and care of each hotel asset top priority. By reducing the risks and expenses connected with both reactive and preventative maintenance, this strategy enhances the establishment's overall operational effectiveness and financial stability.

Step 7: Do your documentation diligently

One easy way to shorten the duration of any outage situation is to update any documentation on your equipment.

Current machine histories, equipment drawings, and procedure manuals should be readily available for quick review in case of a mistake. By doing this, operators are guaranteed to have the necessary knowledge to handle problems promptly rather than attempting to resolve them in a vacuum.  

Creating a culture where people are concerned about this is the difficult part. The secret? Demonstrate to individuals how documentation affects plant performance overall and their time.  

Step 8: Train and empower your employees

Who has the most impact on downtime, you ask? Are they your line operators, managers of production, or maintenance technicians? Employees with the greatest capacity to extend downtime incidents are often also in the best position to stop them from happening again.

After hardware failure, operator error is the second most frequent reason for downtime. A competent operator will be able to avoid future downtime incidents with maintenance plans and correct paperwork in addition to being able to diagnose and repair their equipment.

Invest in specialized automation training, and stress the need to maintain current documentation.

Give operators the tools they need to identify and fix issues with their equipment and constantly remind them of how their actions may minimize downtime. Combining the jobs of maintenance technician and operator is a growing trend in hotels that works well since the workers is familiar with the equipment and can troubleshoot it on their own.

Step 9: Utilize your data and reporting systems

The use of insufficient software or manual data-gathering techniques in many hotels has led to the development of specialist maintenance software and integration solutions.

Examine your present gathering systems for a minute. Are they providing the details that are required? Your statistics ought to show the main causes of outages.

The root source of the issue is not addressed by a straightforward spreadsheet or report that claims, "A maintenance issue in Room 31 caused two hours of service disruption." The key is having real-time access to extensive operational data.

How?

Integrating different IT and operational systems may provide a comprehensive perspective on hotel upkeep.

This enables hotel staff to pinpoint the exact instant a maintenance problem occurs and compare it to other hotel operations to find patterns.

The prompt identification of the root cause of service outages enables more accurate and timely responses in hotel maintenance, which in turn improves overall operational efficiency.

Step 10: Utilize a digital operations software to simplify preventative maintenance processes

You can use modern, digital hotel solutions to create and store SOP documentation, complete maintenance checklists in real-time, log asset information, and even examine maintenance and asset analytics over time.

The right solution streamlines and simplifies all of these processes, saving your organization even more time and money. 

How CMMS Helps?

Centralizing Your Data

A key benefit of CMMS software is the ability to consolidate all maintenance-related data into a centralized platform.

Equipment information, maintenance types, checklists, and planned schedules are consolidated into the data fields within the system.

From one screen, hotels can add, edit and manage their preventive maintenance checklists without preliminary paper-work.

This one view for all the required checklists will organize your preventive maintenance program and eliminate checklists being stored in numerous different places.

This efficient centralization removes the risk of data scattered through different systems and increases a hotel’s ability to control and report on the performance of its maintenance program.

Automated scheduling

 Avoid costly downtime by having the computer system automatically schedule routine maintenance procedures.

CMMS records the tasks and schedules them based on the frequency they have been defined. For example, you can have the program schedule monthly inspections, oil changes, or equipment services.

This way, you simply “set it and forget it.” Maintenance will be performed as scheduled and you are assured peace of mind, knowing that no maintenance has been inadvertently overlooked.

Customizable Checklists

CMMS offers great flexibility in creating customized checklists that meet the specific requirements and equipment profiles of each hotel.

With this flexibility, hotels can create checklists that can change as per the equipment, changes in regulatory guidelines, changes in operating procedures, etc.. Hotels can add new tasks or modify existing tasks to create detailed and relevant checklists.

Real-Time Updates

With CMMS, maintenance tasks can be updated immediately and in “real-time”. The quickness of this model allows for maintenance tasks to be updated without delay, without needing to wait for an individual to return to their desk, fill out a form, enter it into the computer, etc.

Maintenance staff can also check off tasks as soon as they are completed, while management can see updates from anywhere, in real time. This level of visibility greatly enhances accountability and transparency across the maintenance hierarchy.

Instead of having to rely on the property managers to turn over a bunch of fill sheets every month, maintenance management has real-time, 24/7 access to information to determine whether or not preventive maintenance activities are being done promptly.

Inventory Management

CMMS modules also seamlessly integrate inventory management so that all of the parts and supplies needed to perform the recommended PM tasks are in house, there by decrease down time from having to wait for parts to arrive, up time of equipment, and guest satisfaction.

Extensive Reporting and Analytics

CMMS software produces advanced reports and analytics to give you a better understanding into performance of maintenance.

This lets hotels know of trends that may be reoccurring, key performance indicators to track and most importantly, make decisions based on real performance data to optimize your preventative maintenance plan. With the large amount of information at your convenience, hotels can tweak your maintenance process for higher efficiency in operation which, will ultimately satisfy your guests.

• Hotel Maintenance Management Is Challenging at Times! Feel Free to Book a Demo Today to Get a Complete Walkthrough on How You Can Improve Your Hotel Operations.

Free Hotel Maintenance Template Library

Given the ongoing industry challenges, the increased focus on preventive maintenance strategy is paramount. Per Deloitte, over 53% of hoteliers are currently operating with a decreased workforce and less than 10% of hoteliers expect their workforce to be fully staffed by the end of 2023. This highlights the ever-increasing need for efficient, responsive processes and tools to drive operational efficiency, while maintaining and improving customer satisfaction.

To help you hit the ground running with your preventative maintenance initiatives, we’ve included a checklist that covers the general maintenance needs of many hotels. Simply download the template via the link below and edit the checklist to suit your team’s needs.

Happy Hoteliering!

FAQs

What is the purpose of hotel maintenance?

Maintaining a hotel's assets in good functioning order, protecting hoteliers from unforeseen costs, and providing excellent guest experiences are the three major goals of hotel maintenance.

How many types of maintenance are there in the hotel industry?

Hotel upkeep comes in a variety of forms. Preventive and reactive maintenance, however, are the two most notable types.

Should every size of hotel perform maintenance tasks?

For hotels of all sizes, maintenance is essential. There's no law saying that hotels in a given category can't do maintenance. Any hotel may implement maintenance if funding, available resources, and the intended outcome allow.