Pain points brought on by the pandemic continue to linger for hotel operators as they welcome guests back, and management companies are learning not everything will have an immediate solution.

Hotel News Now reached out to CEOs at four management companies in the U.S. to detail the challenges they are facing across the board — such as delayed maintenance projects, exhausted middle management staff and unruly guests — and how they are coping.

Sloan Dean, CEO and president of Remington Hotels, said there's been longer lead times for various products coming from overseas, particularly on items for renovations and construction.

With disruption to the supply chain causing on average a 30- to 60-day delay, Remington Hotels has had to defer several capital expenditure projects, with only some just now restarting.

"I've got a huge HVAC project that we wanted to start. We probably won't start until mid-July because some of the parts are not in," he said. "It definitely is having a backlog effect on CapEx projects."

Mike Marshall, president and CEO of Marshall Hotels & Resorts, said the supply chain issue has come to the point where if a hotel brand requires a certain type of sheets on the bed and they can't find a wholesaler to supply it, "in some cases we're almost going to Walmart."

He anticipates soap and shampoo bottles and wall dispensers will soon be hard to obtain because so much of that is sourced from China. To remain ahead of that concern, Marshall said his company is purchasing all that it can.

"We are in a situation right now where you buy whatever is available, knowing that it might not be available in three weeks or a month. If you see something that's out there, you buy it," he said.

Chris Green, president and CEO of Chesapeake Hospitality, said he has a property in downtown Pittsburgh that remains empty with no guests but has a 1,300-room hotel in Atlantic City that's having a record year.

"Since the hotel in downtown Pittsburgh doesn't need any shampoo, there's plenty to go around in Atlantic City," he said.

Hotel restaurants are feeling pressure, too. Marshall said protein costs are through the roof. For some hotels, they are better off not doing banquets unless they're able to rent enough rooms to offset the costs.

Sheenal Patel, CEO, Arbor Lodging Management, said getting food supplies hasn't been as much of a problem for his company; instead, the issue is getting electronics in on time.

"In the portfolio, we have quite a few down rooms because we can't get TVs," he said, noting his company is moving swiftly to approve CapEx requests as they come in and get them in the queue with vendors.

By July, a lot of hotels in the U.S. will be running at almost 2019 occupancy levels, Dean said. But the mix of business is different this year, with the bulk of bookings coming from leisure travel.

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Typically for corporate travel, it's one person per room and they're eating elsewhere, meaning cleaning the room is easier. But now with more families traveling for leisure, there's more people per occupied room.

"In our leisure resorts, we've had to add more trash cans to the rooms because more people are eating in the rooms, they're bringing more with them and leaving more in the rooms," he said, which takes longer to clean after.

Dean said some of his hotels in certain markets have also had to increase security.

"We have a lot more leisure; in some cases I call it the staycation partier," he said.

More guests per occupied room also leads to heavier pressure on laundry as more guests in the room means more towels and linens are being used.

Green added the average time it took to clean a guestroom pre-pandemic was about 28.5 minutes, and about 15 to 16 rooms would be cleaned per day. That average room time is now up to 39 minutes.

"When you take 39 minutes, that's amplifying the labor issue ... you're basically taking two rooms a day out of the mix that you can't do. Not only do we not have enough staff, we can only clean 13 to 14 rooms," he said.

Typically, a business traveler pays $189 for a room, sleeps in one side of the bed, uses one towel and leaves, Green said. A room booked for leisure travel might cost $129 and will have all the beds and towels and the coffee maker used during the stay.

As a result, rooms booked for leisure take longer to clean and cut into the profitability of a hotel.

"That creates huge downward pressure on the financials. That's why big hotels need that mix of business to drive rate and to drive performance," he said.

Patel said the entire industry has been talking about labor and the lack of hourly employees as a pain point.

"From where I sit in the conversations that we're having is that the pain point isn't the fact that it's happening. Everybody is dealing with it. The pain point is really how do we support our managers and our senior leaders in dealing with the stress of having to figure out how to keep our hotels clean during this time," he said.

Many companies are asking a lot out of managers and supervisors, which is leading to exhaustion and burnout. The most important thing is understanding that some things just won't get done, he said.

Companies can post all the job listings they want, offer all the incentives, but until some federal benefits change, attracting hourly folks to work is going to be difficult, he said.

He said in states where the unemployment benefits have already ended, the labor forces have completely stabilized.

Green said the most significant pain point he's experiencing and working on is employee retention and maintaining positive staff morale.

"We're spending a lot of time investing in how do we get more people vacation time now ... what a lot of people don't realize is we all worked harder doing less business over the last 16 months than we were working before in 2019," he said. "The teams are exhausted. They're emotionally drained."

Chesapeake is taking a holistic approach to caring for employees, which includes adding different benefits to get them access to professional coaching and counseling.

"Frankly, I can't lose anybody," he said.

As leisure demand is returning quicker than expected, Green said he's figuring out how sales and revenue teams can help operations teams strategically plan.

As a third-party manager, his company has the constituency of the ownership group.

"If you have a client [and] they're seeing the market come back, and you're not capturing that demand because operationally you can't ... I hate to say it, but in the true management-client relationship, they don't care. My job is to deliver and at least hit my fair share of the marketplace," he said. "It's a lot of pressure on people."

Owners "have their debt service to cover, and they say, 'If you would have sold 200 more rooms that month, I might have been able to cover my debt service,'" he added.

Conversations between the sales and operations teams include room-turn planning, where they look at high demand days and figuring out when those rooms can be cleaned next and ready to sell again.

"Believe it or not, our chief commercial officer is talking about limiting group [business.] Even though the demand is not coming back so strong, limiting it because of the way that it takes up our inventory," Green said. "It's things that I never thought we would do—ever."