A clean break

Servest's housekeeping services at the Hilton Garden Inn Birmingham include bedroom and public area cleaning, laundry management, porterage and specialist floor cleaning. Since mobilising the contract in March 2015, Servest has introduced cutting-edge equipment and products to make the job easier, as well as improving health and safety standards, which in turn has had a positive impact on staff morale.

Streamlined floor care

The wet weather at this time of year presents a tough challenge for hoteliers. Guests with wet feet and wet umbrellas are constantly coming and going, leaving trails of water and dirt behind them. Keeping floors clean and tidy can be a constant battle.

Using standard mops on busy areas can only do so much, and often an external party needs to be brought in several times a year to do maintenance repairs.  Using just two machines, Servest has streamlined hard floor care, making the job easier and safer. 

First, a cylindrical scrubber dryer is used to ensure that all those hard-to-get surfaces are cleaned thoroughly; this is battery operated and so has no trailing cables for guests to trip over. Then a machine with floor pads that contain billions of microscopic diamonds further cleans and polishes. No chemicals are used so the process is environmentally friendly, both machines are quiet so they don’t disturb guests and quarterly maintenance repairs are no longer necessary because the second machine does them as it’s going along. 

Simpler stain removal

Hotel carpets and upholstery can take a beating; they often have red wine, or worse, spilt on them by guests. Historically, stain cleaning has been beyond the capability of the hotel’s basic vacuum cleaners. Instead, a specialist carpet cleaning company would have to be called in to blitz the stain using an industrial carpet machine, and to periodically clean carpets in the public areas, corridors and bedrooms.

Now, the housekeeping team is able to do emergency stain removal, thanks to access to a specialist machine. The machine can be rolled up and down corridors, easily and quietly, and has a range of handheld tool options to clean hard-to-reach upholstery and curtains. And since spills can be tended to immediately, rooms and areas only have to be closed for a short while.

Healthy & happy environment

Being a housekeeper in a hotel has its challenges. Getting through rooms in that unforgiving window between check out and check in can be physically tough and things don’t always go to plan. Guests don’t always check out on time, and rooms can be left in a real mess – but by making a few small changes you can make the task easier for your staff and give them a fresh enthusiasm for their work. 

Traditional heavy and bulky metal housekeeping trolleys that are hard to manoeuvre can be replaced with wheeled trollies that look like modern suitcases and contain everything from marketing literature for guests to cleaning materials. The cases are lightweight and so are easy to manoeuvre into the rooms. There are also peripheral benefits: Corridors don’t need to be redecorated frequently to remove trolley marks and dents, nor are they any longer filled with trolleys. This looks better and guests no longer have to get out of the way of trolleys, which improves health and safety.

Equipping attendants with an enzyme cleaning spray can improve safety for users and for the environment because it does not contain chemicals. It also makes much lighter work of cleaning. An attendant might begin their work on a room by spraying down the whole bathroom. The enzymes then get to work, eating away at the dirt, before evaporating. While the enzymes are working, the attendant can go about making the bed, hovering and tidying, before returning to the bathroom to wipe it down.

Servest have implemented all these and more at the Hilton Garden Inn Birmingham. Staff are also being trained in multiple skill-sets, which enhances their development prospects. In doing this, staff feel valued and appreciated, which has had a positive impact on motivation, productivity and job satisfaction.