That’s Disgusting!

Anyone who has ever stayed overnight in a hotel or motel has probably experienced a moment of disquiet on walking into their room for the first time. In a high-end facility it’s easy to convince yourself that the Housekeeping staff has laundered every piece of cloth in the place and sterilized everything else until you could do surgery on the coffee table or assemble electronic components in the sink. But even those exceptional cases you know for a certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers have slept in the same place in which you’re about to, and in middle-price and economy properties you’re counting on the efforts of a single hideously over-worked and under-paid employee to take care of everything in the measly amount of time the company allows per room. It’s almost enough to make you want to take a black light and inspect the room – and, if fact, Best Western has started doing just that…

A story running today on the CNN Travel page explains that Best Western International has just announced a new cleaning program that will include ultraviolet sterilization procedures for just about everything in their rooms that can’t be washed, comprehensive washing of everything that can be washed (not just sheets and towels but pillows, blankets, and so on) for each new guest, and the use of black light inspections to detect “biological matter and other particles.” The company insists that its facilities have always been this clean, but since the technology now exists to guarantee that every room meets their standard every time, it’s only sensible to deploy the equipment. Pilot projects have demonstrated that this program adds significantly to guest satisfaction for a minimal increase in operational costs…

What makes this initiative interesting in a business sense is how much value it adds for the customer relative to the cost incurred. We’ve talked in this space about attempts to add value in hotel properties that do nothing of the kind (e.g. business centers and restaurants that are not open when needed) or that actively subtract from the value of the room (wi-fi services that cost extra, complimentary breakfasts that a diabetic can’t eat, etc.), but one of the universal requirements of hotel guests is that the room (and its contents) be clean, or at least clean enough to use without anxiety about what previous guests may have done there. If Best Western’s new "I Care Clean" program can increase their customer base by even a single percent it should pay for itself in a matter of days, if not hours, and there’s no telling how much business it might generate from improved customer relations…

And who’s even mentioned the potential savings in Health Department fines that will be avoided by the new cleaning and inspection program yet?

The whole idea behind the “value added” strategy is to increase the value provided for the customer at the lowest possible cost to the company. If Best Western can provide rooms that are cleaner than you would find at a Four Star hotel for a fraction of the cost, they have an excellent argument for why you should give them your business as opposed to any competitor. If they can do so at minimal additional cost to themselves, they should also succeed financially. Of course, just buying the gear isn’t enough; they’ve also got to train the Housekeeping staff to use it – and make sure that local management follows through. As with most value added programs, it’s not enough to just say you’re implementing one; you have to actually produce the value when the customer arrives. But this one seems like it might be worth keeping an eye on. And if you own a business, you might consider whether you could try a similar approach…