<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by LH738:
g_leyser, thanks for this great threat and your detailled answers.
1.) What will be cleaned/exchanged after a guest leaves (e.g. one person staying in a two bed room):
a) all towels (also the - maybe - unused ones?)
b) all beds (also the second - maybe unused - bed?)
c) what happends to unused soaps (most times the wrapped soaps become wet, too).
2.) How did you do the overselling?
Did you manually look at any night and make adjustments? Did your system do the overselling and the staff only made several checks, e.g. "critical nights". Who is responsible for the overselling rate (e.g. 5%)?
Did you have established a procedure how to cope with guests that got no room anymore because the over-selling was too high (e.g. verbal excuses, money/vouchers)?</font>
Hi LH-
I had a feeling somebody would ask a hygiene related question. High cleanliness standards are a sign of a good hotel.
1) Technically EVERYTHING should be changed when a guest checks out. Certainly all of the towels will be changed, and the soaps go into the trash and are replaced. Even if only one bed is used both beds should be changed. There are some crazy people out there who like to hide things in their rooms before they leave. People will slide pornographic pictures into the bible or the phone book, for example. So even if the bed is still made, a good hotel will not take chances.
2) Overselling is a practice of every hotel. Hotels have room revenue managers, often times this person is the head of the reservations department. These people make the final decision on how much to oversell. The percentages are based on patterns generated by previous years' data, and on what "type" of guests have reservations. For example, in a block of 50 rooms reserved for a wedding party, you can bet that most if not all of these people will show up. But in a block of 150 rooms for a corporate convention where people are flying in from all over the country, there is a much higher probability of no-shows. A good, experienced room revenue manager should be able to predict this very well.
If they don't, and they do have to walk people there is a relatively cut and dry procedure. You should be entitled to a free room (for the first night) at another hotel, a free cab ride to the hotel, and often times they will comp one long distance phone call. You will probably also get an apology letter which will most likely offer an incentive to come back (free night, 2 for 1, etc.)
Thanks for the good questions.