Significantly growing a hotel portfolio comes with its own set of challenges. Oldham Goodwin Group found that out first hand after growing its hotel management portfolio to nearly a dozen branded, select-service properties. That’s when the team sought out a way to streamline its increasingly complicated maintenance processes across multiple properties.
Limited by an old system of paper inspection reports and to-do lists, the facilities management team wanted the ability to drill down on problems at the room level and measure the quality of work and completion times at a corporate level. The company identified a solution—a hotel management software by Quore that allows hotel engineers and maintenance staff to inspect and document problems from a mobile device, automate recommendations and work orders to fix those problems, and analyze the data from those reports to highlight trends and areas for improvement. Oldham Goodwin Group began rolling out the Quore platform in 2017 and has since onboarded most of its portfolio.
The cloud-based platform works across devices, so whether maintenance staff have been provided with iPads or iPhones, they can access the system. Each day, maintenance staff are given a to-do list in the platform. Once an employee hits “start” on a task in the program, the software begins gathering data—recording the time they spend working on a given task in the room, documenting tasks that they are unable to complete along with the reason why, and more. For example, if a part needed to fix a malfunctioning HVAC system is unavailable, the system will mark that task as incomplete and automatically create a follow-up tab for a work order. The data gathered through those reports can be used not only to track problems and maintain accountability for completing tasks, but also to analyze the effectiveness of the group’s entire maintenance program across its portfolio.
Oldham Goodwin Group’s Director of Facilities Management Tony Walker says that the technology allows the company to manage maintenance at a high level—from viewing individual problems at the room-level to monitoring the quality of maintenance work across the entire portfolio. “We get a weekly report that gives us pretty much the heartbeat of what’s going on throughout all of our portfolio. The general manager of the property gets one every day. It’s a good way for them to see if there were any issues to pay further attention to, and that’s the same way for us at corporate—when we get our weekly email, we can get our finger on the pulse and see who’s maybe falling behind a little bit, who needs a little bit more attention, and who’s doing well,” Walker explains.
But platform goes beyond responding to existing problems—it also features a preventative maintenance schedule that automatically alerts hotel engineers when equipment needs to be inspected. Walker says this automated system helps make sure that teams don’t drop the ball on preventative maintenance, and it can even improve the lifespan of hotel equipment. “Say for instance the hotel has a bar or a kitchen for breakfast—we build lists for all of that equipment, and Quore schedules those things to be done, which increases the longevity of the equipment because we’re actually putting our hands on it every couple of months,” Walker explains. “The same thing with the rooms—all the equipment in the rooms get a longer life because of the preventative maintenance schedule.”
Noel Mayes, the group’s director of operations, says that for a small management company with many different brands, a single platform used across all properties makes a difference in their ability to seamlessly communicate requests, get work done faster, and maintain the company’s high standards. “The ability to have a unified platform across all of our properties—especially for maintenance, but also for guest services, housekeeping, and even cost management—it really helps build cohesiveness and consistent, high-level quality.”
Mayes adds that staying on top of maintenance leads to better guest satisfaction overall. “For us, there’s the top line to take care of and there’s the bottom line. And the top-line is guest satisfaction—everything we do is about taking high-level care of our guests. When we saw in our test property an immediate, significant increase in problem resolution and guest satisfaction scores, that gave us the incentive to implement [the software] at other properties,” Mayes says. “For us, the proof was in the guest experience.”
Top photo: Courtyard by Marriott New Braunfels River Village in New Braunfels, Texas, an Oldham Goodwin-managed property
