The business case for a digitized standards management platform

13.07.2024 - 05:25 / traveldailynews.com

Using a digitized standards management platform, property’s brand integrity is maintained through centralized management of guidelines, which are easily followed, property wide.

One of the most important (and undervalued) aspects of offering top-notch hotel guest services is consistency. It’s only through consistent levels of service and consistent experiential deliverables that a hotel’s brand is established in guests’ minds. Once the brand image is set in potential guests’ minds, hoteliers have even more work to do as they must ensure that they maintain their brand image and reputation over the long-term; after all, a successful brand takes years to build and only one bad experience to tarnish it – and with the popularity of social media and online reviews, one bad review can be enough to have a negative effect on your bottom line.

So, how can hoteliers ensure that they are delivering a consistent guest experience, every day, to every single guest – especially across a large portfolio of properties?

The only way to do this is to create and implement a regimented set of brand standards and operational processes and procedures to ensure consistency and quality across every aspect of your operations. It sounds simple but, historically, this has been one of the biggest challenges for hoteliers because of the lack of tools available to efficiently support the implementation and standardization of these processes.

Until recently, hoteliers have used a pen and paper to try to keep their brand and service standards consistent across their portfolio. Employees would be required to follow procedures down to the letter, and religiously document their progress; unfortunately, when things got busy, employees would often forget to track and log their work against the brand standards and, slowly but surely, consistency and service standards would start to decrease.

But it doesn’t have to be that way… technology is here to save the day (again)!

In today’s highly competitive travel market, hotels can’t afford to be held back by outdated offline processes, as a hotelier’s ability to provide the best guest service (and pivot operationally as needed when service levels don’t live up to guests’ expectations) is key in standing out from the competition.

Today, digitizing your operational standards is an operational imperative, as it will streamline your property’s efficiency, making standards accessible to your entire team and providing better data capture and reporting, improving brand consistency, minimizing costs and enhancing the overall guest experience.

Before we dive deeper into the benefits, what does it mean to digitize your operational standards? Is it as simple as turning your pen and paper documents into