In early 2022 we launched an exciting project to move away from outsourced Maintenance Support and bring Maintenance Supervisors into all the owned/leased hotels, starting with the UK and France. The thinking behind this was that having a designated maintenance person on site would allow Hotel Managers greater control over maintenance costs and mean that we could act much more quickly to get out of order rooms back on line. The on-site maintenance support also enables each property to have an active preventative maintenance plan to ensure that rooms and public areas are in excellent condition as our guests would expect from such a reputable brand.
The Maintenance Supervisors on site also have a critical role to play in delivering our Low Carbon pledge and are working hard to ensure better control of our energy usage. They are also focussed on enabling the correct setup of technical plants to deliver out sustainability approach.
Each hotel is also provided with an extensive procurement platform, as well as a fully stocked storeroom, with all the critical spares/materials. The target is to repair any rooms deemed OOO and have them back on sale the same day.
Having this in place has shown the OOO rooms, steadily drop month after month during 2022.
As you can see, we have reduced the number of OOO rooms across the UK, France, and Spain, from over 7,000 to below 1,000 and will continue to ensure that all hotels follow a strict protocol when putting rooms OOO.
We hired our first MS in March of 2022 – Daniel Roberts, at Ipswich, and since then have employed Maintenance Supervisors at all the UK sites, as well as Paris Charles De Gaulle and Dublin. Andrew Elliot of Newcastle was recently nominated for an award for Frugality in recognition of his determination to save costs and build on his own skill set… Something, which could be said of all of our Maintenance Supervisors!
Each and every one of them have shown amazing commitment and their hard work in ensuring issues are dealt with as soon as possible, is greatly valued. Going forward the focus will be on building the MS team, with regular Teams meetings to share ideas, easy fixes, and using different materials/parts.
Under the wider supervision of Jamie Dunstall at the London Support Office, the UK Maintenance Team have made a tremendous impact.
Comments