The 4 Most Important Housekeeping Trends for 2023

Much has been said about the hospitality trends you will see everywhere in 2023. The return of business travel, short-term booking windows, swift tech adoption as hotels try to do more with less… But let’s discuss trends in housekeeping, a department abundant with opportunities for streamlining and growing your hotel business, and how to best adopt them in your hotel.

4 Housekeeping Trends You Should Consider for 2023

Below are four housekeeping trends that can help you streamline and grow your hotel business.

1. Sustainable Housekeeping with Eco Practices

The first housekeeping trend is sustainability. Sustainability is more than a trend; it’s a global necessity. According to Skift Research, 83% of travelers believe sustainable travel is vital. As awareness rises about the environmental impact of hotel practices, upholding sustainability should be every hotel’s focus in 2023.

Here’s why:

• Going green reduces adverse effects on the environment
• You will win the goodwill of guests and fulfill their expectations
• Hotels that go green lower costs through better use of energy and resources

Housekeeping is the best department for quick and easy implementation of sustainable, eco-friendly practices. Start by embracing automation and reduce your hotel’s carbon footprint by enabling 100% paperless communication. The next step is to ensure your housekeepers use green, non-toxic cleaning products, creating a safer environment for staff and guests.

Going green will result in fewer complaints from sensitive guests, cleaner rooms, and lower housekeeping overhead. You can also introduce towel and linen reuse programs, allowing guests to indicate when to change their sheets and towels.

In many hotels, guests can skip daily housekeeping for perks such as complimentary breakfast and drinks or a discount voucher—word of caution: before introducing this initiative, discuss it with your staff. Many housekeepers complain about the unsanitary conditions of the rooms that are not cleaned regularly. Avoid greenwashing, too – pretending to be eco-friendly just for appearances’ sake is more likely to upset guests than inspire them.

Besides being bad for the environment, greenwashing negatively affects a hotel’s reputation, so be sure to prove your claims and legitimately support sustainable behavior.

2. Using Technology for Housekeeping Training

Another trend in housekeeping is using technology in training. No matter how experienced your housekeepers are, ongoing training will improve their performance, keep them engaged at work, and expand their skill set. Training is necessary for the seamless onboarding of housekeepers; ensure not to neglect your veteran staff.

What is the best way to cover both? Leverage technology. Create digital content that helps trainees reference instructions whenever they need a refresher or detailed guidance. Photos and videos deliver the best training results because they clearly define work goals and show staff how to achieve them – all in incremental, easily manageable steps.

Start with photo tutorials for housekeeping tasks full of visual particularities: what a made bed should look like, how to stack towels, fold the sheets, etc. Photo instructions can also be used to showcase presentations in hotel rooms and dining areas and show how to wear employee uniforms. When training new staff, videos are great for expediting onboarding.

Create short and straightforward videos featuring the most effective cleaning techniques and the results expected from the housekeeping staff. Your videos can also show how to stay safe by maintaining the cleaning equipment and adequately using cleaning products.

3. Implementing Robotic Help

This housekeeping trend is soaring at the moment. The market size for service robots in the healthcare and hospitality sectors is projected to grow by 942 million USD from 2020 to 2024 (Technavio, 2020). Hotels that have implemented robotic infrastructure are experiencing the following benefits:

• Relieving employees from mundane tasks
• Decreased risk of human error
• Improved work efficiency and productivity
• Increased customer satisfaction

In housekeeping, robotic devices help perform repetitive tasks, such as vacuuming, mopping, and disinfecting floors in public areas. Some advanced robots can even clean toilets and collect used towels and sheets. Robots that deliver heavy bins of fresh linen to the appropriate floors are great for reducing strenuous manual labor.

Increased guest expectations regarding health safety protocols are another excellent case for using robots. Unlike humans, robots cannot transmit or spread germs and viruses. Some have been specifically engineered to disinfect surfaces exposed to germs or bacteria, which is critical in the post-COVID era.

Although robots can deliver a greater degree of accuracy and consistency, it’s essential also to value the skills of housekeepers who can quickly adapt to unanticipated situations and use their experience to solve problems on the spot.

4. Multinational Housekeeping Teams

The last housekeeping trend, but not the least, is multinational housekeeping teams. Multinational hotel teams have always been the core of hospitality, but the trend has also spread among housekeeping teams. So, how can you overcome language barriers and make it easy for international housekeeping teams to communicate and collaborate? Enter automatic translations and emojis.

Automatic translations are a feature of housekeeping management software, like Flexkeeping that automatically translates messages into a selected language. That makes it easier for managers to onboard new team members without miscommunication and stress, regardless of their language. On the other hand, the staff is less stressed as they can receive tasks in their local language and understand what is expected of them.

Did you know emojis can improve the communication of multinational housekeeping teams? Global hotel groups like Selina use emojis in their housekeeping checklists, thus creating a visual language that can be universally understood, even by staff members who can’t read.

Not only does this let everyone perform their tasks efficiently, but it also helps foreign team members feel like part of the team and be more successful in their workplace.

Adopt and Adapt to Create an Unstoppable Housekeeping Team

These housekeeping trends help you to make your housekeeping team unstoppable. Your housekeepers are an essential part of the hotel and play a key role in achieving guest satisfaction, so empower them to do their best with the right tools and support.