Transcript
Introduction
Everyone, welcome back to another Matt Talk. Today I wanted to talk about queues at reception desks. It's the inevitable thing that is going to happen if you run a large hotel, you're going to get queuing. But how do you avoid queuing or how do you dissolve some of the worst of the worst of the worst that happens in hotels?
The other day, I was doing some cross exposure with one of our customers. And at some point, I asked the front office supervisor and I said, I see that it's really busy at three o'clock on a Friday. What happens at three o'clock? And she looked at me like, how do you know?
Like, how can you know that we're busy on three? I was like, there's this great report in ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ that's called the activity report. And in that report, we map out every day of the week against every hour, twenty four hours in the day, and we can show you where the spikes are. And she was surprised because she'd never seen this report that was directly on the dashboard.
Chapter
Identifying check-in spikes
And I said, let me show you. Let me show you what I did in preparation of coming to the reception so that I can ask you these questions about when the queues happen. And I printed some. I've got really beautifully printed props, but work with me on this one.
So this is the reports, which is the check-in reports. And what you see is basically the days of the week and the hours in the day. And you get, this is the check-in report. So when our guests physically check in into the system and you see that this massive spike here and I'll quickly highlight those spikes and it's probably happening here.
Mostly they see some spikes on Monday. So you've got a Monday check-in. So that means that they've got corporate travelers probably arriving at that hotel. And then you've got a big spike here on Fridays and on Saturdays.
Again, around three o'clock. There's something that happens at three. And if you've checked into hotels before, you know that often three o'clock is when check-in starts. But it means most likely that guests are waiting for three o'clock.
They may have arrived earlier, but they haven't been able to get access to the room. So at three o'clock on a Friday is when real massive queues happen at this particular hotel. I printed another view of this report because it's also interesting to see when check-outs happen because you've got these big spikes at check-in and check-in is usually the hardest process because you've got to collect a lot of information. But if you look at the same reports and you look at the checkouts, so same story Monday to Friday, twenty four hours in the day, there is less spikes.
But you see a massive spike happening here and that spike happens here. And if you look down that so you've got a big spike happening here on a Sunday, which is between ten and twelve big checkout day for a leisure kind of destination hotel. And you see most of your checkouts are departing at around midday, people have breakfast and then right before noon they check out. But there are people leaving earlier, so you see people starting to leave already around eight o'clock in the mornings.
Rooms are becoming available and that's important for something that I'll talk about later. And then I did the same report and I looked at housekeeping because housekeeping is a critical piece to the success of the front desk. And if you take the housekeeping status, so what you see here is that actually rooms do get inspected throughout the morning. So in this hotel it looks like housekeeping starts at eleven o'clock only and they finish at around four o'clock.
But you've got a real spike that happens between two and three. So if I were to circle that, what you see is that around two three o'clock suddenly a huge amount of rooms come back inspected. And what that means is that housekeeping probably has a piece of paper with room numbers on it and they go home at four o'clock. So at four o'clock they go to reception, they hand over their rooms and they go home.
But these rooms have probably been inspected way before. It's just they haven't been given back to operations. And this is a really important piece. So now we kind of have a view of what happens in this particular hotel.
You've got big spikes for check-in at Monday afternoon, and then you've got a Friday and Saturday spike. And then in terms of departures, the Sunday seems to be a really busy time between ten and noon. And I asked in this hotel and they're like, yes, there are massive queues happening and lobbies mayhem, there's luggage everywhere, they want to store luggage. So there's a lot going on in this hotel and often when queues happen unhappy customers happen as well.
So how do you prepare for that scenario? Because with modern technology there is a huge amount of work that you can do before the guest actually gets to the hotel to diffuse some of these queues. And that's what I'll talk about in this Matt talk. So if we're talking about managing reception times and queuing at the reception, the place you probably didn't think I was gonna start is with housekeeping.
But housekeeping is
Chapter
How housekeeping influences queues
a real critical component, and it's often the department that is the least tech enabled, and it's actually having a huge amount of impact on the queues at reception desk. This day, I went to the housekeeper and I said, are your cleaners equipped with mobile phones? And she said, yes, some of them, but not all of them because some of them don't want it. And I said, but that shouldn't be a choice.
You give them the technology that they have to work with and then you train them and make them really comfortable with it and enforce it because it is really critical because a housekeeper usually starts at eight o'clock in the morning. That's a normal shift for a housekeeper. So from eight o'clock until four o'clock, they clean rooms gradually throughout the day. If you think a typical housekeeper does a cleaning of a room about twenty they should focus on departure rooms first and they should happen as soon as in the morning.
So they should have an app which tells them which rooms have already departed. Because one of the most frustrating things in a hotel is this constant knocking on doors at early mornings asking whether guests want their rooms inspected and cleaned. And actually the technology can tell you whether the guest is physically in the room or not. And that allows them to prioritize those rooms that have an arrival time coming up in the morning.
But your room should gradually come throughout the day. You should not have any spikes because you should have basically these bubbles be exactly the same throughout the day, and that means that rooms on arrival come back earlier into operation.
And there's cleaners who have to be enabled and then there's the people that do the inspections of the rooms who also have to be enabled on technology. And yes, this is a shift because it does require training. This is often a team member who's not used to technology, who's used to doing everything on paper, But on paper you always have a massive lag time. And if you don't give the rooms back until three o'clock, that creates a bottleneck at the reception desk.
Chapter
Ways to speed up check-out
So the most important thing that I would say is make sure that housekeeping is incentivized, is trained and is enabled on technology so that they can return these rooms as fast as possible into operation. Right. So housekeeping is now enabled. They're starting to clean the rooms as soon as it happens in the morning and they're starting to return rooms back to operation.
The next thing that happens in a day of a hotel is the check-out period. Right? So we're in the morning of the hotel operation and check-out is about to hit and you know that right after breakfast it's going to hit. But before like before that ten o'clock time, you've got the reception staff, but they might not be super busy because they're still waiting for the big flow to come out of the breakfast room.
So potentially one of the things you could do is put the news kiosk in staff mode, and give it to a tablet to someone in the restaurant. So you can have a receptionist going through the restaurant welcoming guests and just saying, hey, would you like me to help you a check-out? We can do a pre-checkout now where we can settle the bill so that you can just depart whenever you want to. And it's it's a really smart way to diffuse some of the stuff that will happen at the reception at like between ten and twelve.
You do this now between eight and ten when they're in the breakfast room. It's a really nice way to connect with customers when they're having breakfast or when they're just about to depart from the breakfast restaurants. You capture them, you get the bill settled and they can leave whenever they want to leave. And that allows you to also capture the departure time, which you can then feedback to housekeeping so that they know when the guests are leaving from the breakfast room.
So that is one way to very quickly diffuse the checkouts. Another way is enable the online check-out. I do still see that many hotels have not properly configured online check-outs. What this means is that the evening before departure, I think around five or six o'clock, we will send an email to the guest saying you're ready to pre-checkout, which allows you to settle the bill.
And during the online check-out we ask for any items that were taken from the minibar and then the billing address, and that allows them to pay for that. And then the bill is settled so that they actually don't have a process the next morning. So if you can diffuse twenty to thirty percent of your guests through the online checkout, then that means that you've got already a much smaller hub of busy time happening at the reception. So online check-out enablement
Chapter
Why SMS is better than emailing in guest comms
and we can also activate a SMS package that you can buy in the marketplace that allows not only to email the guests that message because email doesn't always get read the night before departure.
However, SMSs have a very high likelihood of getting activated, so you can do that through buying the SMS package directly in the marketplace to drive up those online checkout kind of numbers. So now you've tackled the online check-out, then the regular check-out that happens then on the tablets, for example, in the lobby at the breakfast room. And then whatever is remaining will probably come to the reception desk. You can always set up some kiosks in a corner because the check-out is actually one of the easier processes if you compare to the check-in with checkouts.
You often have to ask whether they had anything from the minibar. They want to do a bill check and they want to take payments. And that's about what happens at check-outs. Most of those processes we can just do seamlessly directly on the kiosk.
So if you install a kiosk in the lobby, it allows a lot of guests to just self-serve. It's like really quickly putting in the number, seeing that the bill is settled and then the bill will automatically be emailed to the guests. So the kiosk is one really great way to very quickly diffuse kind of what happens. And as always, like the way that you use the tablet in staff mode at the restaurant, you can do the same in the lobby when it gets quieter in the restaurant.
You might have a waiter come back to reception with one of those tablets and support the reception desk for the check-out period. And it's really utilizing staff smartly because you now have mobile technology that allows them to navigate back to the reception or back to the restaurants when the big peaks kind of diffuse between them. And it's really important that you use staff interchangeable between departments, enable them through technology so they can help each other out in the worst periods possible. So for lowering the kind of peak that happens at check-out, I would say get people into the restaurants, breakfast restaurant restaurants in the morning, enable online check-out, and enable the SMS package to drive real adoption, set up a kiosk or set of kiosks in the lobby, and potentially have someone from the restaurant staff with a kiosk in staff mode in the lobby at the peak time between ten and twelve.
And then the rest of those guests will still come to the reception desk, but you now have much less queues and they can enable the online check-out
Chapter
How to soothe the pains of check-in
much easier. So let's talk about the most painful experiences of all, which is check-in. Check-in is hard. We have to ask for passports.
We have to fill in profiles. We have to get credit cards. We hopefully do an upsell. We have to ask some facilities.
We want to give a plastic key card to the customer. So there is a lot of things that happen in a check-in and a check-in takes between four to five minutes to get a guest from welcome to the hotel to here's your key and that's where the elevators are. So it's a very long period. And if it gets really busy, the guests at the back of the queue are going to have a bad experience.
And those first experiences at hotel really do matter and they leave a lasting impression. And it's the only like you've now started on the bad foot and everything after that moment of the bad experience is going to add up to more friction points and the guest is more likely to complain. So really resolving for that check-in in the smoothest way possible to diffuse that big spike that happens between three and four is one of the most critical things that you can do as a hotelier. So how do we do that?
Because it sounds really easy when I say it, but what are we actually doing to drive some of that? So let's talk about pre-arrival. So we have an online check-in product, which is great, and every hotel that runs on ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ has this beautiful online check-in. And what it does is it fills in the registration card.
It asks for companions. It doesn't upsell for both the products and the room upsell. We take credit card payments and there's a messaging function. If they have any questions, they can message the hotel beforehand, which is just a really great way to communicate with guests.
So if they've completed online check-in before they get to the hotel, suddenly the check-in at the hotel, if you still have plastic keys, which most hotels do, goes from a five minute process to a one and a half minute process where it's still welcome to the hotel. Let me find your reservation. Oh, yes, you've checked in online. Let me just give you your key and you're on your way to the room.
And that is a really important factor. So one thing is enabling the online check-in. Another thing is getting it right. So making sure that the emails are optimized for conversion.
So the language you use in the online check-in email is really critical. We've given hotels a lot of flexibility to modify that email using integration partners like, for example, BookBoost or Runnr.ai that can now also communicate the link. If they're engaging with the guests, they can actually say, I see that you haven't checked in online. Here's a link to the online check-in.
We can set up an SMS package to drive more adoption of the online check-in because SMS just cuts through the noise of email sometimes. So the goal should really be for you to have thirty to forty percent checking in online. And I know that hotels have those numbers where they're really leaning to the online check-in experience. So that's a really, really critical factor.
Chapter
The role of kiosks
The other thing is the kiosk. So while most hotels may not want the primary experience to be the kiosk, when it gets busy, a guest would prefer to probably use a kiosk than to wait in a queue for fifteen minutes. So you can choose between having a kiosk first experience or a kiosk second experience. So if you have a reception first experience and a kiosk second experience, then you can put the kiosks in a corner of the lobby where they're not that visible.
However, when it gets busy in the lobby, you can have anyone from operation to go and help navigate some of the guests to the kiosk and it doesn't cost much. It's cost, it's the cost of one tablet, a payment terminal and a key encoder. That's really kind of the framework of what you need.
But it is really important to have a way to diffuse the queue and point them to the kiosk in the lobby, because that's one way to very quickly get more guests out of the lobby into their rooms. And an experience on a kiosk might not be preferred, but it's better than having to wait in a queue for fifteen to twenty minutes to get the rushed experience that you're going to get when it's really busy in the lobby. The other thing you can do is put the kiosk in staff mode. So it's just a tablet and you put it into staff mode so you can give it to a trainee, to someone from the restaurant who can jump in to help out.
And it doesn't require training. So anyone can be given this tablet for check-in and it does all of the steps. It fills in the registration card. It can take the payments and it can cut the key.
Yes, you may have to have a key encoder somewhere in the lobby, but it's very straightforward and it helps very quickly add more staff to the check-in experience to make sure that we diffuse the queues and then really leaning into what is remaining, right? So if you still have fifty percent of customers remaining, some of the guests have now checked in early because you had those rooms cleaned. Some of them have checked in online, so you get a fast check-in. Some of them will go to the kiosk, but the remaining number of guests that were still coming, you don't, with a traditional hotel check-in, they'd still have forty five minutes.
Chapter
How payment automation cuts queues
And what can we do to optimize that? One of the major things that we do is payment automation. So a lot of hotels have not properly configured the payment automation, but you know that guests arriving today, you're going to have to take a pre-authorization for the room rates and potentially the incidental charges, you can set up complete automation flows that says, you know, the night before arrival, take a pre-authorization against the card of the guest for this amount. And that is one of the most painful processes because this is where a guest has to whip out the credit card.
You have to process it on the terminal. You have to make sure the transaction is correct. You have to calculate how much transaction is. So payments is one of those big friction points, and actually you can optimize that very quickly by setting up your automation.
And that's probably one of the most painful parts that we've recognized and we've automated. So hotels that have automated payments suddenly go from a five minutes to a three minute check-in because all they have to do is still capture the passport information, maybe do an upsell and get the rooms, dig the key into the hand of the guests.
Right. I talked a lot about some of the innovation and I wanna make sure that I summarized this well. There's two great examples of hotels that I wanted to talk about. One was the hotel that I went for cross exposure who still experienced long queues. And even though they deployed ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ, I don't think that they had deployed it to the fullest efficiency. So they really still saw those big spikes happening at three o'clock at a reception desk on a Friday afternoon. There are people queuing outside the front door.
And it hurts me to see that because actually we have the technology that we can enable to drive some of those improvements. And then I had a great call with Paradise Resort in Australia the other day, and she said we used to have these queues. We used to have cars lining up down the streets basically on a Friday afternoon when it was big check-in time. And now that we've deployed ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ in the right way, we no longer see those queues.
And some of the things they did were some of the things I talked about. So first of all, make sure that housekeeping is tech-enabled and enforced. Everyone in housekeeping should be using a housekeeping app that gives them the latest status of information, but they also get to put rooms back into operation. Secondly, lean into online check-in and online check-out.
It works incredibly well. You can drive adoption through adding an SMS package because not everyone engages with emails, but with SMS, the conversion number shoots up and it's worth the price of one SMS to cut down that check-in time significantly because also the online check-in is doing the upsell. So actually you earn it back because the upsell is really consistent. Every single guest offered upsell products and upsell to rooms.
Chapter
Key takeaways
So that works really, really well. So lean into online check-in and online checkout and configure it right. Configure those emails. Thirdly, look at the kiosk.
So you need to make a choice whether you want the kiosk to be a primary experience or a secondary experience. And both options work really well. But if you make it a secondary experience, make sure that you built them into the lobby as an overflow for those spike times. Most of the week you won't use them, but when it gets busy, you want to make sure that you have them ready as an overflow.
Have some tablets ready in the back office that you can switch to staff mode so you can give that tablet to any staff member who is not trained on the PMS to just do some check-ins and check-outs during the really busy peak times. And then for the guests that remain that haven't been into online check-in, online check-out that haven't done the kiosk, those guests, you still need to make sure that that check-in is optimized as much as possible. So lean into payment automation. Payments is the largest chunk of work that goes into a check-in.
And if you can automate that one hundred percent for most of your guests, honestly, it makes such a difference because you can cut a check-in from five minutes to like a three minute experience. And this is how you diffuse those big spikes that happen at the reception desk. It also allows hotels to make sure they don't need huge amounts of staffing at the reception desk because suddenly you spread the workload out throughout the day. And that's a really powerful way to go about fixing the biggest spikes.
But it will always be hard. Spikes are going to happen. This is hospitality. It's unpredictable, but it's all about how you lean into what's going to happen.
You know that Friday is going to get busy. So then get ready with the technology that you've already purchased, leaning into switching on, reviewing the process, whether it's set up correctly and not allowing any manual work to happen if it can be automated so that you lean into driving the changes in your hotel. I know that I talk about it like it is the easiest thing possible, but I have seen it in real life and hotels where it didn't work and hotels that use the same technology where it does work and it can be done. But it does require someone to go and configure this entire end-to-end journey and make some of those decisions and train the staff and lean into the automation and the excitement of what technology can do for you.
I hope you enjoyed this. Thank you.
