TidyHotel is Launched.
A coupe of weeks ago, my latest software effort reached it’s first milestone. We (www.roomsdone.com) launched our first product, TidyHotel. TidyHotel is a mobile application that helps optimize the efforts of hotel housekeepers.
I started researching this effort 3 years ago when I took a friend to play golf. My friend runs housekeeping operations for hotels and had mentioned how difficult it was to find housekeepers, to line up their efforts, to keep up with their efforts and to put rooms back into inventory. We had these discussions for almost a year when I decided to hear if others in the industry had the same problems. I met with general managers, owners, ownership groups, management companies and of course, housekeepers. From Fairfield Inns to Shangri-La resorts, the problems were the same. Here is more detail on the issues I found.
It’s an everyday affair in most hotels. Housekeepers go down their list or are on the lookout for rooms to clean. Guests arrive in early and leave late. And then there’s the morning knock on the guest’s door. The hotel guest feels irritated (and rushed), and the housekeeper may or may not achieve a clean room this time. Once they find a room, should this be the one to clean? Would cleaning another open up inventory for a higher value guest? It’s all clipboards, printed reports, and manual updates. No synchronization with the hotel’s inventory, no real-time room status.
That’s why I established RoomsDone (www.roomsdone.com) and the founding team. With ubiquitous ownership of smartphones, the automation of hotel housekeepging staff no longer requires PCs, difficult spreadsheets or expensive computers. Just smartphones or tablets. The faster rooms are put back into inventory, the quicker they can be sold. And the more hotel management can see who does what best, the better they can hire and assign housekeeping duties.
TidyHotel will also enable hotels to better predict their needed staffing levels, eliminating unwieldy spreadsheets or expensive revenue management solutions. And later this year, TidyHotel will launch enable a hotel to turn that hiring recommendation into a staffing request into the housekeeping world.
TidyHotel is a departure from expensive, on-premise software bringing the savings, power and speed of the cloud to hospitality.
