Sometimes it’s easy to assume that housekeeping only requires someone coming into the room to change the bedding and bring fresh towels.
People need to understand that the housekeeping department of a hotel plays a crucial role in maintaining the environment sanitized. In short, they are the frontline staff as far as fighting the COVID-19 goes.
ET Hospitality spoke to several housekeeping heads and industry veterans from various hospitality giants to know how their team is taking care of the current situation.
According to Ankur Bhatia, Executive Director, Bird Group, Roseate Hotels, and Resorts have been working on precautionary measures since January as the hotels were expecting Chinese guests during the Auto Expo.
“Vendors are asked to use masks and sanitize hands using sanitizers provided before entering and touching anything. Hand sanitizer is amply available in all the public spaces such as the lobby, ballroom, and restaurants as well as at every employee station and office space,” Bhatia told ET Hospitality.
Thorough cleanliness is a basic expectation of any hotel guest. The current situation has added more responsibility for the housekeeping staff.
“A few of our hotels have been identified by the government as Asymptomatic Quarantine Centers. We have carefully formulated exclusive SOPs to handle such guests as per the WHO Guidelines. These guests although are not Covid-19 positive, however, have been quarantined for 14 days as a precautionary measure since they have the travel history from the countries which are highly affected by this pandemic. Key challenges remain is to sanitize all the guest touch areas periodically to avoid the spread of infection by adhering to all the safety norms,” a very senior housekeeping professional told ET Hospitality anonymously.
According to her, another key challenge is to dispose of the soiled linen and garbage collected from these rooms in a very hygienic way, as this could have the potential to be high-risk.
Training housekeeping staff to use disinfectants safely and correctly is of utmost importance. For many hotels safety of their staff remains the prime concern as they are directly exposed to the guests.
“For this, we are well equipped with all the safety aids and PPE (personal protective equipment). All staff handling Covid-19 asymptomatic guests wear the protective bio-suits, which covers and protects their body completely. Also, high-quality masks, gloves, caps, and shoe covers are worn by such staff assigned in these areas,” a senior housekeeping professional told ET Hospitality.
With an unexpected decline in revenues, hotels are proactively going for cost reduction. Housekeeping departments are also currently spending their budget cautiously on all the priority essential services.
“To maintain a proper balance in operational costs, we have completely closed down two floors out of the four. To ensure the limited guests are served in the best way, we have also limited our staff on duty. In this crisis, we being responsible housekeepers took the initiative to control the costs on certain expenses. At this juncture we also ensure that no wastage and unnecessary expenditure takes place,” Vinita Choudhary, Director Housekeeping, The Park, said.
The Park Bangalore has installed portable sensor washbasins at all entry points of the hotel.
“This helped the guest at the main porch to sanitize and then enter the lobby. For the team members we kept one portable wash basin near the time office to ensure that before they use the biometric they sanitize their hands to avoid the virus to spread,” Choudhary added.
A spokesperson from IHCL informed ET Hospitality that the group has ensured that all the associates, including housekeeping, are trained to follow the standard operating procedures based on the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s guidelines for prevention and transmission of COVID-19.
Leave a Comment