5 Steps for Hotel Preventative Maintenance [+ Checklist]

In this article we’ll cover what preventative maintenance is, the benefits of conducting regular preventative maintenance at your hotel, some key steps for hotel preventative maintenance, and we’ll provide a free checklist template to get you started managing  your preventative maintenance goals.

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

What is Hotel Preventative Maintenance?

Hotel preventative or preventive maintenance is regularly scheduled maintenance activities that aim to keep hotel assets and areas safe and functional for optimal guest satisfaction.

Some examples of preventative maintenance could include: 

• Regularly checking hotel lighting to ensure they’re in working order
• HVAC checks and regularly scheduled tune-ups 
• Checking pool readings on a consistent basis 
• Monitoring the function of electrical systems
• Servicing the plumbing facilities on a scheduled cadence  

Whereas reactive maintenance is a sudden response to an asset breaking down or experiencing issues, preventative maintenance aims to—as the name suggests—prevent maintenance problems before they can arise. If your hotel maintenance technician responds to a broken HVAC unit, that’s reactive maintenance. But if your hotel maintenance technician is giving an HVAC unit a regularly scheduled tune-up, that’s preventative maintenance.

What are the Benefits of Hotel Preventive Maintenance?

Having a hotel preventative maintenance program keeps your hotel prepared by creating a log of asset wellness and ultimately aims to extend the longevity of assets. Because it helps your maintenance team stay on top of your assets’ lifecycle, preventative maintenance often results in cost savings and easier budget preparation. By utilizing a preventative maintenance plan, you can keep a log of asset health and better anticipate when something needs replacing so it’s in your financial plans from the beginning and there aren’t any surprise costs. 

Preventative maintenance also helps with overall customer experience at your property and lends to reputation management. It helps save guests from struggling with items while they’re at your hotel, maintaining your property’s reputation and aiding in avoiding the dreaded negative review. When your team is on top of maintenance, your guests can simply focus on their stay. 

5 Steps to Hotel Preventative Maintenance 

Step 1: Identify areas where preventative maintenance can help 

The first step in creating a preventative maintenance plan is identifying areas where preventative maintenance can save you and your team time and money in the long run. Some common areas hotels generally perform preventative maintenance around are: 

• Heating systems
• Flooring and carpeting
• Refrigeration systems 
• Wall paints, wallpapers, and wall decor
• HVAC systems
• Lighting fixtures
• Guest room TV units and services 
• Room furnishings
• WiFi connections
• Faucets and plumbing 
• Staff and guest computers
• Phone lines

Step 2: Create standard operating procedures (SOPs) 

Once you’ve identified areas for preventive maintenance at your hotel, then you can start to look at creating standard operating procedures, or SOPs, around maintenance needs. 

Having a SOP provides a regulated method for completing preventative maintenance to ensure that hotel compliance standards are met and everyone is on the same page. It also helps you to set standards of cadence for regular maintenance needs so preventative maintenance is consistently completed according to protocol. 

Step 3: Create a hotel preventative maintenance checklist 

Once you’ve identified your standard operating procedure, you can create a checklist to help track and log preventative maintenance. Checklists provide a clear way for your team to work through preventative maintenance and allow you to easily keep track of which assets regularly pass or fail inspections so that you can anticipate and plan for further maintenance needs over time. It also helps hold your team accountable for maintenance responsibilities. 

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The elements of a good checklist include clear, accessible language and the necessary steps for preventative maintenance completion. This allows your team to work more autonomously too, so you can provide less guidance and instruction and save yourself and your maintenance techs valuable time. 

Step 4: Create a hotel preventative maintenance calendar

By now you should have a list of assets that require preventive maintenance, standard operating procedures to conduct the preventive maintenance and a checklist to track progress. The final piece that you need to deploy an impactful preventive maintenance plan, is a maintenance calendar. Using a preventive maintenance calendar allows managers to organize the tasks necessary to minimize equipment downtime and safety risk. Calendars allow managers to confidently schedule contractors and manage equipment outage related guest experiences.

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Step 5: Utilize a digital operations software to simplify preventative maintenance processes

You can use modern, digital hotel solutions to create and store SOP documentation, complete maintenance checklists in real-time, log asset information, and even examine maintenance and asset analytics over time. The right solution streamlines and simplifies all of these processes, saving your organization even more time and money. 

A solution like Xenia allows hotel teams to not only create, manage, track, and complete preventative maintenance directly from their mobile devices—it also allows teams to communicate digitally on the go, access necessary information and documents with just a few taps, and view deeper insights via customizable reports. 

Xenia’s team messaging features allow your maintenance team to communicate instantly while ditching the noisy radios to reduce guest interruptions. And the reporting features allow you to spot patterns in asset health over time, view maintenance details for specific items in specific timeframes, and more. A solution like Xenia gives you all the tools you need to streamline maintenance operations, all in one place. 

Free Hotel Maintenance Template Library

To help you hit the ground running with your preventative maintenance initiatives, we’ve included a checklist that covers the general maintenance needs of many hotels. Simply download the template via the link below and edit the checklist to suit your team’s needs. 

Xenia: One App to Manage your Facilities and your Frontline

Xenia goes beyond basic 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, most optimized property it can be!

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