Guests might review the great food and stylish decor of a hotel, or the wonderful facilities and friendly staff. However, it’s a safe bet that housekeeping rarely gets a mention, unless it’s to comment on defects. The quality of a hotel’s housekeeping is expected as a given, with cleanliness and order the norm. In this post, we discuss the importance of a housekeeping checklist and give you itemized lists for different room types. You can also download this list and customize it for your own hotel’s needs.
Why do you need these checklists in the first place? Cleaning checklists are essential in hotel housekeeping to ensure consistency, efficiency, and quality. They standardize cleaning procedures, ensuring every room and area meets the same high standards, which is crucial for guest satisfaction and the hotel's reputation. It also simplifies the supervision and quality control processes, as standards are clear itemized, and easy to follow.
Now that we established that housekeeping checklists are essential, let’s see the itemised lists by room type:
If you'd like to download these housekeeping checklists, you can submit your information here, and you'll be able to download printable checklists that you can distribute to your staff. You'll also be able to find an empty, fully customizable template that you can fill out yourself :
On leaving the freshly cleaned guest room, take the same overall super-critical look around. Pause at the entrance and view the areas as a guest will on arrival. Have you achieved everything necessary to make them feel special, and comfortable during their stay?
Oh, and please don’t forget any personal items or equipment!
The amount of detail you decide to list in a housekeeping checklist is very much down to your own experience, and that of your housekeeping staff, but never assume that everyone will know or remember everything. By its very nature housekeeping is a repetitive process where it’s quite easy to forget a step, which could be a dealbreaker for a guest. So err on the side of caution and provide comprehensive checklists for your staff that are not open to ‘interpretation’. Clarity is always best.
Checklists are easy to alter and update - after all, they are only a simple set of descriptions of things to be done. For example, until recent times towels were changed on a daily basis, but on environmental grounds many hotels now leave that to the discretion of guests. If that’s now your hotel’s policy, then change the housekeeping checklist accordingly.
How often should a housekeeping checklist be updated? As often as is necessary, but a significant factor is that with modern Property Management Systems, it’s possible for checklists to be available to cleaners and maintenance personnel through their own mobile device, so that updates are easy, and dynamic. This also means that staff can be diverted to rooms which are free earlier than planned when guests have checked out, or sent to ‘problem’ rooms that might require more intensive cleaning or even repair. The process is not just one-way either, as staff can use the app to report issues, such as lost property or damage to the room, providing a much faster and more responsive environment.
We know about the technical dimension because we are SabeeApp, and for over eleven years have been supplying PM Systems to the hospitality industry, covering every aspect of the guest journey, and the needs of hotels. We care about the success of all our hospitality clients, and that’s why we’ve created a simple, downloadable checklist for you to share with your staff.
It’s also well worth checking out our PMS and Smart Solutions for hoteliers, and in addition seeing some of the fine detail around how we can help with housekeeping scheduling and duties.