A Short Guide to Hotel Inspections

Hotel inspections are a crucial part of maintaining your hotel's operations. In fact, there is a direct correlation between high inspection scores and customer satisfaction. Staying on top of your hotel’s health and safety inspections and regulatory compliance can be challenging but there are ways to make it easier. In this short guide we will show you how to pass your next inspection with flying colours!

First let’s paint a picture. You're an inspection team leader at a busy hotel chain. Across your hotels, every inspection and regulatory compliance must remain consistent. This makes inspections a lengthy endeavour for you and information then needs to be shared amongst all locations. This makes it nearly impossible to implement any tangible improvements and you come away from the process none the wiser. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, there may be a simple solution.

What is a Hotel Inspection?

Hotel Inspections evaluate the performance of your hotel’s health & safety and compliance in areas such as your safety & security procedures, workplace accidents & injuries procedures, food & beverages department, and fire safety procedures in order to offer advice and direction for the development, implementation, and success of your hotel programs to meet hospitality industry standards.

The assessment is run on the basis of accumulating a minimum number of points by a Pass/Fail system for each component and hotels are required to correct all Failing components within 30 days.

The level of risk associated within each area can be categorised by a numerical value or by colour. Low Risk is coded green, Medium Risk is coded Yellow and High Risk is coded Red. In this guide we will show you have to reduce your risk levels across all sections of a hotel inspection and help you ace your next hotel inspection!

Importance of Hotel Inspections

While many think of hotel inspections as daunting they are actually a fantastic way to ensure your standards are always kept up to date and as high as possible. By scoring well in a hotel inspection you are assuring your guests that when staying at your hotel you will provide them the highest quality service and therefore this yields better reviews. Evidence of providing higher quality service than your competitors can help your guest justify a higher price point for room rates ultimately improving your bottom line. So let’s dive into some tips for each area.

Tips for ensuring Compliance

1. Establish a Safety Committee with members from your Maintenance, Housekeeping and Guest Services divisions and ensure a tailored Safety Agenda is in place highlighting actionable measures that can be taken to reduce risk.
2. Ensure all equipment such as your HVAC, maintenance tools and lifts are properly inspected on a regular basis with a full trail of reports.
3. Train staff on the knowledge of all regulations and compliances required.

Tips for ensuring Health & Safety

1. Ensure an established process for incident reporting in the workplace is in place so that new policies and regulations can be put in place to improve the safety and quality of your hotel.
2. Verify that your staff have the appropriate PPE gear at hand and they are clean and operable.
3. Establish general workplace health and safety by inspecting safeguards such as ventilation systems and by adhering to a rigorous cleaning schedule.

Tips for ensuring Fire Safety

1. Train staff to respond accordingly in the event of a fire and of what preventative measures to take. 
2. Perform regular fire safety walks checking that fire safety equipment is tested & signage is maintained.
3. Check all electric sources regularly and ensure faults are reported and repaired immediately.

Tips for ensuring Food & Beverage Compliance

1. Certify that food hygiene standards are to be maintained and they meet all regulatory requirements.
2. Check that your liquor licence is up to date and in place where applicable. 
3. Ensure that food storage and preparation equipment is maintained and meets industry standards.

All of this can be hard to track on paper and ensuring that all checks are carried out on time, accurately and by the correct person is even more of a challenge. Not only this, but when the inspector comes knocking for your health & safety reports you don’t want to be fishing through boxes of paper to find the exact one they need! Even more so if you manage multiple hotels or are still doing everything on Excel. So what if you already had your own proof of inspection even before your hotel inspection gets underway? That’s where hotel technology can help you stay compliant. One such technology is Snapfix. 

Let’s break down how Snapfix can help you with every aspect of your hotel’s inspections to make it easier:

Compliance

Snapfix helps your hotel have confidence in compliance as weekly and daily inspection reports will keep you informed on the compliance standards. It is instantly clear which areas require attention, who flagged the issue and you can keep track of the process to resolve it. All of this is controlled in the palm of your hand via your smartphone or desktop.

Health & Safety

Snapfix ensures that all your equipment maintenance, health & safety checks, and cleaning schedules are carried out on schedule and on time. They are completed with full accountability with signature sign-offs from your team members, so you know who exactly is responsible for what. You can also use NFC smart tags for proof of location for further assurance of accountability. Track all the work carried out by your teams, and know the status of each task, piece of equipment and safety-checks in real-time and with a full audit trail for when inspection time rolls around again!

Fire Safety

Hotels across the world are using Snapfix for their fire safety inspections, maintenance of fire safety equipment and for carrying out their daily fire walks. Snapfix makes these duties easier by having features such as being able to mark checklists items as pass, flag or fail, similar to a hotel inspection, and leave notes, saving valuable time. You can also mark fire safety equipment with NFC smart tags to ensure accountability within the team. Every day Snapfix sends you an updated daily report with full details of the inspection and you can even see it presented on the handy Snapfix dashboard.

Snapfix is the must have tool to get ahead of your hotel inspections. It will help you save time and money by ensuring your hotel is always compliant with industry standards and health and safety checks never get missed or forgotten. It is a simple all in one, easy-to-use platform which streamlines your entire hotel operations. It’s the dream platform for any hotel!

Don't believe us? Read what some of our customers say about Snapfix in their hotels here

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