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walkitoutI have been considering a bit more — after a ton of research and talking to two different people — the Boston Globe article in which the author scare quotes green, and calls hotels which incentivize declining daily housekeeping “greenwashing”. The author, the union, and various union members seem united in believing this is cost cutting (should I scare quote cost cutting?).
Well, sure. It is cost cutting. But the very best places to cut costs are places where the customer will like it _better_ with the cheaper solution. Here are some examples of _awesome_ cost cutting: Amazon’s Frustration Free Packaging, USPSTF deciding that you _don’t_ need to do that screening test that will lead to you having your dick roto rootered unnecessarily, resulting in incontinence and/or impotence and having no meaningful impact on your all causes mortality or even your five year survival rate if you still get cancer Down There. We’re slowly working on backing away from some other screening for women, but it is still a touchy subject so I won’t Go There. Anyway. Customers _really_ like not having daily housekeeping. So, not having daily housekeeping means a per night cost goes away (not true, of course — they want to make sure you haven’t set up a meth lab or whatever in there, so they are going to go in and clean the room every 3 days regardless) AND the customer is happier.
Here are some observations.
First, only about 30% of hotel stays generate a tip to housekeeping. It’s hard to completely nail this down, but this is more or less what I’m finding.
Second, the tips that people _do_ leave for housekeeping are surprisingly small. We’re talking $2-3.
Third, if you pay a hotel housekeeper federal minimum wage, and require them to do two rooms per hour or you will lay them off, then you are basically paying them roughly $4 per room. In practice, most hotels are paying more than this — but not a lot more. We are talking on the order of $10/room. (Again, assuming a 2 room / hour minimum quota, and that the housekeeper isn’t making more than $20/hour. So, if you are thinking, hey, just raise the federal minimum to $15! Well, that would be $7.50/room, not really that impressive, right?)
Now, when most of the rooms that a housekeeper is maintaining require trash removal, replacement of consumables (shampoo, soap, towels, TP, makeup wipes, tissue box) and bed making, maybe run the vac over crumbs around the table and a quick wipe of the sink, mirror and counter at the vanity, and make the bed, $4-$10 is not outrageous. It’s not great — if you had a choice that wasn’t picking strawberries or peaches or whatever, you would take it — but it isn’t life threatening. However, when most of the rooms that the housekeeper is maintaining require all of that, vac the whole room, scrub the combo and the toilet and _change_ the sheets on the bed, $4, $7.50, $10 / room no longer seems like a good deal. It is sounding kinda painful.
For reference purposes, I live in a 4 bedroom center hall colonial with more than 2K sq ft but less than 3K. While I haven’t had it cleaned by someone else for a while now, when it was being cleaned, it cost me $99 to the agency and I tipped $20. A typical hotel room in this country is more than 300 sq ft but well under 400 sq ft. A little math suggests that an equivalent fee based on square footage (for reference purposes, I said 2600 sq ft for my house and 325 sq ft for the hotel room and $119 for the amount I paid to have the house done weekly) is a little under $15. 2 rooms / hour implies $30 an hour.
Now, _to be fair_, a typical 325 sq ft hotel room does _not_ have a kitchen, and anyone who cleans houses knows perfectly well that that’s where the worst of the mess is, with the downstairs lav or bathroom (or only bathroom) being a close contender. OTOH, people do frequently have coffee, a pastry, pizza, takeout, etc. in that 325 square feet. So. Not sure which way you should adjust the pricing.
Let’s talk about time now.
My house was spec’ed at a 3 hour job. (Making the same assumptions: 2600 sq ft for my house and 325 for the hotel room.) That suggests 22.5 minutes per room. So I don’t think that requiring 2 rooms per hour is inherently wrong, altho that’s super tight in terms of allowing time to transition in and out of and to the next room.
My sister’s solution is, Tip Heavily! Personally, I think that daily housecleaning should go away entirely, the wage should increase to reflect the increased physical difficulty of the job, or, more time should be allowed because having to rush through housework is where almost all of the awfulness lies. And I think that the quota in general should have some adjustments made to it. Here are some possible adjustments.
(1) How many people are in that room? If you use my family of 4 in my house as a basis of comparison, anything more than a half a person (literally, a half a person) will be generating more work (on the theory that the more people are in a space, the more of a disaster it becomes. They’ve got data. They could have a reference team of cleaners go into a room with one person, a room with 2 people, a room with 1 person and a toddler, etc. They could then run the information they generate through something and come up with an adjustment. 1 person = 30 minutes to do the room. Add a toddler, and you get an hour. That type of thing.
(2) Age of people in the room (see toddler example in (1), but I’m sure you can think of other situations.)
(3) Amount of cooking facilities (a room with a mini fridge and a microwave, for example, should get extra minutes.)
The above discussion suggests that this is a horribly complex situation. And I honestly have not at any point asked why there isn’t a fleet of robot vacuum cleaners cleaning the floors. That, right there (no, not the robots — the complexity of the underlying reality) is why policy is terrible (if this were simple, management would have already done it) and the union response is kinda random and evil. Hey, Let’s Blame Environmentalism! Sure, if we pit Greens against SJW, that’ll turn out _spectacularly_ well as rhetoric.
Basically, the union is throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. I hope to hell this one doesn’t stick, because I do NOT want to live in a world in which my desire to treat the environment well and have it be nice for the kiddos and future generations in general must go toe to toe with my desire to treat other people well.
ETA:
Some scheduling formula / discussion from a management perspective:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-amount-of-time-housekeeping-spends-per-room-at-a-5-star-hotel-to-prepare-for-a-new-guest
This is from _pre_ incentivizing declining daily housekeeping. I’m currently searching for discussion of how to adjust the formula for post incentivizing declining housekeeping. Note that the discussion of the formula factors in pretty much everything I got into above, right down to number of people in the room. They did not get into age of people in the room / presence of toddlers. They may know something I don’t.
https://www.hotelmanagement.net/operate/housekeeping-best-practices-to-improve-productivity
This describes how to quantify the expected difference in cleaning time for a checkout vs. a stayover. AGAIN this is pre incentivizing declining daily housekeeping.
https://www.hotelmanagement.net/operate/housekeeping-best-practices-to-improve-productivity
I would _expect_ that as long as it takes to clean a checkout AFTER daily housekeeping through the stay, it would take even longer to clean a checkout with NO daily housekeeping through the stay (or only on the 3rd day or whatever). Someone’s got a formula, if only I could find it...
This is not about formulae — this one is about a specific app being used to assign rooms to clean. It has some issues. One hopes that they will be addressed in updates; certainly that is what Unite Here is working for:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/hotel-housekeepers-schedules-app-marriott-union-hotsos-20180702.html
Well, sure. It is cost cutting. But the very best places to cut costs are places where the customer will like it _better_ with the cheaper solution. Here are some examples of _awesome_ cost cutting: Amazon’s Frustration Free Packaging, USPSTF deciding that you _don’t_ need to do that screening test that will lead to you having your dick roto rootered unnecessarily, resulting in incontinence and/or impotence and having no meaningful impact on your all causes mortality or even your five year survival rate if you still get cancer Down There. We’re slowly working on backing away from some other screening for women, but it is still a touchy subject so I won’t Go There. Anyway. Customers _really_ like not having daily housekeeping. So, not having daily housekeeping means a per night cost goes away (not true, of course — they want to make sure you haven’t set up a meth lab or whatever in there, so they are going to go in and clean the room every 3 days regardless) AND the customer is happier.
Here are some observations.
First, only about 30% of hotel stays generate a tip to housekeeping. It’s hard to completely nail this down, but this is more or less what I’m finding.
Second, the tips that people _do_ leave for housekeeping are surprisingly small. We’re talking $2-3.
Third, if you pay a hotel housekeeper federal minimum wage, and require them to do two rooms per hour or you will lay them off, then you are basically paying them roughly $4 per room. In practice, most hotels are paying more than this — but not a lot more. We are talking on the order of $10/room. (Again, assuming a 2 room / hour minimum quota, and that the housekeeper isn’t making more than $20/hour. So, if you are thinking, hey, just raise the federal minimum to $15! Well, that would be $7.50/room, not really that impressive, right?)
Now, when most of the rooms that a housekeeper is maintaining require trash removal, replacement of consumables (shampoo, soap, towels, TP, makeup wipes, tissue box) and bed making, maybe run the vac over crumbs around the table and a quick wipe of the sink, mirror and counter at the vanity, and make the bed, $4-$10 is not outrageous. It’s not great — if you had a choice that wasn’t picking strawberries or peaches or whatever, you would take it — but it isn’t life threatening. However, when most of the rooms that the housekeeper is maintaining require all of that, vac the whole room, scrub the combo and the toilet and _change_ the sheets on the bed, $4, $7.50, $10 / room no longer seems like a good deal. It is sounding kinda painful.
For reference purposes, I live in a 4 bedroom center hall colonial with more than 2K sq ft but less than 3K. While I haven’t had it cleaned by someone else for a while now, when it was being cleaned, it cost me $99 to the agency and I tipped $20. A typical hotel room in this country is more than 300 sq ft but well under 400 sq ft. A little math suggests that an equivalent fee based on square footage (for reference purposes, I said 2600 sq ft for my house and 325 sq ft for the hotel room and $119 for the amount I paid to have the house done weekly) is a little under $15. 2 rooms / hour implies $30 an hour.
Now, _to be fair_, a typical 325 sq ft hotel room does _not_ have a kitchen, and anyone who cleans houses knows perfectly well that that’s where the worst of the mess is, with the downstairs lav or bathroom (or only bathroom) being a close contender. OTOH, people do frequently have coffee, a pastry, pizza, takeout, etc. in that 325 square feet. So. Not sure which way you should adjust the pricing.
Let’s talk about time now.
My house was spec’ed at a 3 hour job. (Making the same assumptions: 2600 sq ft for my house and 325 for the hotel room.) That suggests 22.5 minutes per room. So I don’t think that requiring 2 rooms per hour is inherently wrong, altho that’s super tight in terms of allowing time to transition in and out of and to the next room.
My sister’s solution is, Tip Heavily! Personally, I think that daily housecleaning should go away entirely, the wage should increase to reflect the increased physical difficulty of the job, or, more time should be allowed because having to rush through housework is where almost all of the awfulness lies. And I think that the quota in general should have some adjustments made to it. Here are some possible adjustments.
(1) How many people are in that room? If you use my family of 4 in my house as a basis of comparison, anything more than a half a person (literally, a half a person) will be generating more work (on the theory that the more people are in a space, the more of a disaster it becomes. They’ve got data. They could have a reference team of cleaners go into a room with one person, a room with 2 people, a room with 1 person and a toddler, etc. They could then run the information they generate through something and come up with an adjustment. 1 person = 30 minutes to do the room. Add a toddler, and you get an hour. That type of thing.
(2) Age of people in the room (see toddler example in (1), but I’m sure you can think of other situations.)
(3) Amount of cooking facilities (a room with a mini fridge and a microwave, for example, should get extra minutes.)
The above discussion suggests that this is a horribly complex situation. And I honestly have not at any point asked why there isn’t a fleet of robot vacuum cleaners cleaning the floors. That, right there (no, not the robots — the complexity of the underlying reality) is why policy is terrible (if this were simple, management would have already done it) and the union response is kinda random and evil. Hey, Let’s Blame Environmentalism! Sure, if we pit Greens against SJW, that’ll turn out _spectacularly_ well as rhetoric.
Basically, the union is throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. I hope to hell this one doesn’t stick, because I do NOT want to live in a world in which my desire to treat the environment well and have it be nice for the kiddos and future generations in general must go toe to toe with my desire to treat other people well.
ETA:
Some scheduling formula / discussion from a management perspective:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-amount-of-time-housekeeping-spends-per-room-at-a-5-star-hotel-to-prepare-for-a-new-guest
This is from _pre_ incentivizing declining daily housekeeping. I’m currently searching for discussion of how to adjust the formula for post incentivizing declining housekeeping. Note that the discussion of the formula factors in pretty much everything I got into above, right down to number of people in the room. They did not get into age of people in the room / presence of toddlers. They may know something I don’t.
https://www.hotelmanagement.net/operate/housekeeping-best-practices-to-improve-productivity
This describes how to quantify the expected difference in cleaning time for a checkout vs. a stayover. AGAIN this is pre incentivizing declining daily housekeeping.
https://www.hotelmanagement.net/operate/housekeeping-best-practices-to-improve-productivity
I would _expect_ that as long as it takes to clean a checkout AFTER daily housekeeping through the stay, it would take even longer to clean a checkout with NO daily housekeeping through the stay (or only on the 3rd day or whatever). Someone’s got a formula, if only I could find it...
This is not about formulae — this one is about a specific app being used to assign rooms to clean. It has some issues. One hopes that they will be addressed in updates; certainly that is what Unite Here is working for:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/hotel-housekeepers-schedules-app-marriott-union-hotsos-20180702.html