The Hidden Cost of Small Inefficiencies in Hotels
Five minutes to find a piece of information. A phone call to check whether a task has been completed. An urgent order because an item ran out sooner than expected. A request sent to the wrong department and then forwarded again.
These are common situations in the daily operations of a hotel and, taken individually, they rarely seem like a problem. Their impact becomes apparent when they start occurring every day, involving different people and departments.
This is where some of the hardest costs to identify arise: costs that do not necessarily appear as a specific expense, but result from how time is used and activities are organised.
When lost time becomes a cost
Imagine an employee spending ten minutes trying to understand who should handle a request. The cost of those ten minutes is minimal.
But if the same situation occurs several times during the day, involves different employees and continues to happen for months, the result changes.
The same applies to many other situations: information searched for in chats and Excel spreadsheets, tasks performed twice, manual checks, errors that need to be corrected, urgent purchases or tasks left pending because responsibility was unclear.
None of these situations alone will compromise the management of a hotel. Together, however, they can absorb a significant amount of time and resources.
Inefficiencies are not always where we look for them
When analysing hotel costs, it is natural to focus on the most visible items: staff, raw materials, energy, supplies and maintenance.
However, part of a hotel’s economic efficiency also depends on how the activities generating those costs are carried out.
Two hotels of similar size and with similar services may use their resources very differently. In one, a technical issue is reported, assigned and resolved through a clear process. In the other, the same issue passes through phone calls and messages before reaching the right person.
The final result may be identical: the problem is solved. What changes is the amount of resources required to get there.
And this is precisely the kind of difference that is difficult to identify by looking at financial data alone.
Before looking for major savings, observe what happens every day
Opportunities for improvement do not necessarily have to come from major changes.
Sometimes, it is more useful to observe a normal working day and identify where waiting times, manual steps, repeated checks and activities that take longer than necessary are concentrated.
Why does an employee need to ask for information that could already be available? Why does a task need to be confirmed by phone? Why do some orders become urgent? Why is the same information entered into multiple tools?
These may seem like operational questions, but they can have very real economic consequences.
Making visible what is normally not measured
One of the advantages of process digitalisation is the ability to make activities observable that would otherwise be difficult to reconstruct.
Times, assignments, deadlines, anomalies and the frequency of specific activities can provide a different perspective on how a hotel operates. Not only how much is spent, but also how the available resources are used.
This is the perspective adopted by ESC Agency: analysing hotel processes to identify critical issues, inefficient steps and opportunities for improvement, and then selecting the most appropriate tools to address them.
Because one small inefficiency may seem negligible. Hundreds of small inefficiencies repeated throughout the year are much harder to ignore.
Would you like to understand where operational inefficiencies are hidden within your hotel?
Contact us for an initial analysis of your hotel’s processes.