NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The realities of operating a hotel in a pandemic include dealing with unexpected scenarios, such as spending $10,000 at once on linens because they’re available now and may not be later due to shipping backlogs, or realizing the need to help general managers find purpose in their jobs because the purpose they had pre-pandemic — running their hotel business with success and profitability — disappeared overnight.

Speakers from third-party hotel management companies on the “Operational Changes: What Stays and What Goes?” panel at the 2021 Hotel Data Conference said they have adopted new practices to deal with the new realities of operating in an environment rife with uncertainty over labor levels and demand shifts.

Staffing changes were predicated by the reduction of stayover cleaning, which is "pretty pervasive in the industry,” said Eve Moore, vice president of operations, hotels, for third-party hotel and restaurant management company Legacy Ventures.

Legacy Ventures added more people to evening shifts at its hotels to deliver towels and amenities at peak times to guests who weren’t getting daily full housecleaning.

Speakers agreed housekeeping frequency long-term likely will depend on the hotel’s positioning or class. Daily housekeeping is back at most of Charlestowne Hotels’ largely independent lifestyle portfolio, said Vice President of Operations Matt Barba.

But for hotels at the midscale level, he anticipates opt-in stayover housekeeping to be the norm going forward.

“There are clever ways to encourage opting out,” he said. “Some hotels are offering a discount if your arrival time is after 6 p.m. so they have more time to turn the rooms. It depends on the segment of the market or price point, which will drive what guests expect.”

Mark Ricketts, president and chief operating officer of third-party management company McNeill Hotel Company, addressed the industry chatter around potentially charging extra for housekeeping services, saying it’s a tricky proposition that has been at least discussed by the brands for which his company manages hotels.

“Airlines charged for bags and when they did it, they did it together,” he said. “Does every (hotel company) need to opt in to do this? If one or two brands stay out, then the message is inconsistent.”

Reduced daily housekeeping often can lead to more wear and tear on hotel rooms, but Moore said the money and time saved outweigh that cost for Legacy Ventures’ portfolio.

Ricketts said his company weighed the balance between rate and occupancy, finding that “as you play that rate game, you can dip down too low and you get people in who really destroy rooms.”

He said staying on top of quarterly preventive maintenance has been “a big help” to stave off irreparable wear on guestrooms and hotel systems.

Barba said his hotels developed a plan that requires housekeeping at some point during a stay, even at properties where housekeeping is by request only, which has helped alleviate some issues with heavy wear on rooms and reduced the burden of time-consuming full housekeeping on check-out.

Managing around supply shortages has been another pain point, but speakers said advance planning and simple resourcefulness can go a long way.

“Brands may require you to triple-sheet a bed, but you can’t triple-sheet if you don’t have the sheets,” Ricketts said. “It’s been tough, but for the most part, brands are willing to understand. But at the end of the day, you may have to go to Walmart to get a bedsheet.”

Moore said hotels have had to act fast to get ahead of supply shortages.

“We started hearing supplies were on backorder, so we said we’ll spend now. We may authorize $10,000 of linen now, but we’ll have it later” and avoid a shortage, she said.

Barba talked about Charlestowne’s approach to training, given the realities of labor shortages.

“We notice two scenarios. One is that we’re hiring people who may not have historical knowledge of our industry so the investment has to be deeper to get them caught up to speed,” he said. “And second, we have to think about who we’re hiring today and how they’re consuming content.”

To address training, his company put together short video snippets, less than a minute long, to keep people engaged but moving quickly.

Moore said helping general managers rediscover a sense of value has been a big challenge.

“GMs generally take so much pride and ownership in their buildings. These folks are strategists running a huge business, who typically find value in their successes and those successes were gone” once the pandemic hit, she said. “They couldn’t encourage themselves the way they did before, so it was about finding new ways to find purpose.”

For Legacy Ventures, that meant engaging with an executive coach to produce a “resilience series” of coaching reminders and ways to share and vent with peers. Moore called it “that idea of putting on your own oxygen mask before you help other people.”

Communication has been key in keeping staff engaged, and speakers said the necessities of the pandemic — when everyone had to pitch in to complete jobs — has boosted empathy and given their teams a better understanding of what it takes to get the job done.

“We sent our vice president of marketing in to help clean rooms and he said, ‘I don’t understand why housekeepers don’t make $100 an hour,'” Barba said. “There does need to be a seismic shift in how we approach things, and some business models may not be able to sustain that.”

Getting back to basics has been a positive for Legacy Ventures, Moore said.

“We’ve demystified things we used to overcomplicate,” she said. “Everybody does everything now, so relationships are forming between department heads in different ways. People are supporting each other. It’s hard to find optimism sometimes, but I’m optimistic about the relationships that have been forged in battle.”