How to Conduct a Hotel Maintenance Audit [+ Checklist]

In this article we cover what a hotel maintenance audit is, who conducts them and how you can optimize the process for your hotel. We also provide a free checklist template for creating and working through your own hotel maintenance audit. 

To continue your learning, check out our comprehensive Hotel Maintenance Management Guide

What is a Hotel Maintenance Audit?

A quick maintenance audit definition: a maintenance audit is a comprehensive examination of maintenance processes. These audits take a look at how maintenance protocols are being followed. At a hotel, these audits are often performed as part of an overall quality or health and safety audit at your property. The goal is to evaluate how maintenance processes are being performed, if brand standard protocols are being adhered to, and how effective your maintenance procedures are in maintaining guest satisfaction and quality standards. 

Maintenance audits aren’t just important because they verify compliance to brand and broad industry standards though—they’re also important because they ensure safety and protect your hotel from potential liability issues. Maintenance procedures keep your hotel and assets safe and operational for guests and staff. Even the most rigorous maintenance practices should be evaluated regularly to ensure everyone is meeting organizational benchmarks. 

These audits help leadership to get a full picture of what maintenance requirements are consistently being met and where there’s room for improvement over time. It holds the entire organization accountable for hotel quality and safety and keeps maintenance needs from slipping through the cracks, aiding in risk prevention. 

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Who Does a Hotel Maintenance Audit?

Hotel maintenance audits can be performed internally and voluntarily by your hotel maintenance manager as part of overall process improvement initiatives, or they can be conducted as part of a mandatory quality assurance audit conducted by an outside consultant or brand compliance leader at your organization. It depends on the type of maintenance audit you’re conducting at the property and your overall goals for it. 

A quality assurance inspector will often take a look at maintenance processes based on brand or industry standards and evaluate how maintenance procedures are being completed based on brand compliance. This examines maintenance based on your brand’s or industry’s specific protocols. If your hotel doesn’t meet standards for brand or industry compliance, you’ll have to re-evaluate how you’re completing maintenance processes at your hotel, and you could even be subject to a monetary fine in certain cases. 

If you’re conducting a voluntary internal audit, your maintenance manager may conduct a voluntary audit to simply determine if your maintenance processes are safe and streamlined or if there’s room for improvement. This kind of audit might also be used to determine if assets are receiving regular enough maintenance or if certain assets have been serviced more than planned and need replacing. 

How are Hotel Maintenance Audits Done?

Like any other carefully created process at your property, hotel maintenance audits often follow a specific procedure. Maintenance audit procedures often involve a form which consists of maintenance audit questions. These questions keep the auditor on track and cover different areas that will be explored during their evaluation—it’s usually a sort of checklist of what to look for during the audit. During the audit, the auditor will work through the list of questions and add details or check off what’s being completed to satisfaction and what’s not. 

For example, there might be a section of questions or checklist items that ask about how regularly HVAC maintenance is performed and when HVAC maintenance was last conducted. Or there could be a section about pool maintenance and how chemicals are checked, or even how regularly lightbulbs are being replaced in guestrooms and public areas. 

To save time and ensure accuracy and compliance, a digital tool like Xenia can be useful in tracking and completing maintenance audits. Software solutions like Xenia allow you to create digital checklists for audits, and your audit team is able to access these checklists from their mobile devices anytime, anywhere. This is especially useful for conducting voluntary audits in preparation of mandatory quality audits, so you always ensure your hotel is compliant to brand and industry standards. Plus solutions like this make it easy to spot patterns in your audits, with built in data tracking and analytics features. 

Hotel Maintenance Checklist: Free Template

To get you started with your own maintenance audit, we’ve included a checklist template below that covers some general things hotels look for during regular maintenance audits. You can download the template below and edit it however you like for your specific needs to get started. 

Xenia: One App to Manage your Facilities and your Frontline

Xenia goes beyond simple operations with a full suite of tools to help simplify, track, and manage every area of hotel operations. The software contains individual and group messaging, built-in analytics, checklists and inspection tools, maintenance features, and more. Check out the list below:

• Guest Request Management
• Housekeeping Management
• Team Accountability
• Quality and Safety Inspections
• Team Communication
• Custom Checklist Builder
• SOP Template Library
• Preventive Maintenance Management
• Inspections and Audits
• Asset Tracking
• Work Order Management
• Lost and Found

Xenia checklists make it easy to create and enforce standard operating procedures and inspection protocols, simplifying quality assurance and brand standard adherence across individual properties and entire portfolios. The system’s PM and work order tools ensure your maintenance team has everything they need to track fixes on the go and log asset information for a clear understanding of asset health. Plus the software features all the internal communication features you could need to encourage collaboration, increase autonomy, and decrease miscommunication. Managers are able to message team members one on one, create chat groups for departments and teams, and even announce organization-wide news and updates via a public feed, anywhere, anytime.

With Xenia, you and your team will be able to track and manage property assets and analyze detailed analytics reports on everything from inspections and maintenance to room cleanings and task assignments, allowing you to spot patterns quickly and make long-term improvements. And to top it all off, Xenia is fully flexible and customizable, so you can tailor your digital experience to fit the way you work.

To learn more about how Xenia can help streamline operations at your hotel, check out our website and schedule a free demo. Our solutions can help you set up and maintain clear SOPs, improve accountability and team management, increase visibility into day-to-day work, and more. We’re here to make your hotel the best, and the most optimized property it can be!