Many housekeeping attendants often express confusion about the proper order in which guestrooms should be cleaned each day. The ideal order should be based on ensuring the front desk has an appropriate inventory of clean and vacant rooms to assign to arriving guests, as well as honoring special requests from current guests:
- Honor guest requests for early cleaning first.
- Make up VIP rooms of stayover guests. Note: Any VIP rooms that request early cleaning should always be cleaned first.
- Clean any rooms that are blocked for early arriving guests, assuming the room is vacant or was placed out of service the previous evening.
- Thoroughly clean vacant, dirty rooms. Start with the guestroom closest to the one being serviced at the time.
- Service remaining stayover guestrooms that are currently vacant.
- Attend to any remaining guestrooms that have not been cleaned yet.
- Of course, any request from the front desk for a “rush” on a particular guestroom or room type must always take priority. Determining the exact order will continually evolve throughout the workday based on which rooms become vacant.
Dr. William D. Frye, CHE, is an associate professor of hotel management at Niagara University and coauthor of AH&LEI’s textbook Managing Housekeeping Operations.
