What kind of things do you need to take into account to be prepared for hospitality incident reporting?
Things like well-informed employees, brilliant incident reporting policies, easy-to-fill forms, and a platform to track incidents are useless if you don’t know what to monitor and prepare for.
For smooth sailing, here are 20 types of incidents hotel management should track and be prepared for.
1. Customer incidents
When customer incidents, such as accidents, slips, trips, and falls happen it's important for your personnel to report them.
By keeping track of and reporting hotel incidents that affect your customers or involve them in reporting their observations of your hotel's operations, you can not only increase satisfaction and experiences but also learn how you can improve your property condition, operations and services so that similar incidents don't reoccur.
2. Food poisonings and suspected food poisonings
There are strict regulations and standards for food health in hospitality and a single food poisoning might put your business’ brand, quality and reputation in danger. That can further lead to financial and legal implications such as fines, business closure, and in extreme cases, imprisonment.
To conduct thorough risk assessments, track and review any food-related hotel incidents that occur, and make tickets and reports for lessons learned in order to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
3. Hygiene deviations
It has become particularly important to inspect all hygiene incidents after the COVID-19 pandemic. Hygiene is incredibly important to stay on top of, as it has been linked to illnesses, infections (e.g. food poisoning), allergy triggers, and more.
The hotel staff should therefore make it a rule to thoroughly check the hygiene of different areas of the premises, and report any deviations so that they can be handled before the guests notice them and complain.
4. Accidents
Keeping track of employee and guest accidents, and near misses is essential. Doing so helps you to spot trends of what incidents happen the most, and where on the premises they occur. When you know that, you can implement safety measures to deal with the most common risks leading to accident claims and reports.
For example, putting clearer ‘slippery floor’ signs after a slip is an example of a simple solution that makes all the difference.
5. Safety observations
Safety observations, just as accident and near-miss reports are important to track. Make sure that any safety-related incidents are handled swiftly so that your personnel and guests can feel comfortable and happy on the premises.
Engage your personnel in proactively reporting any incidents they notice, and make sure to do periodic inspections so that any safety-related issues are kept at a minimum. Reporting, tracking and addressing these types of issues helps you avoid incidents before they happen.
6. Walkouts
Anyone working long enough in the hospitality industry can attest to walkouts happening. Walkouts could result from delayed or poor service, no rooms, a rush to checkout, forgetting to pay before leaving, etc.
Monitor your reviews online to see what you could improve to reduce walkouts and track any conditions that might have led to a walkout when one occurs.
7. Loitering
Having unknown individuals at your hotel, who aren’t paying customers, can be a safety issue for guests.
Make sure that your personnel is informed of loiterers as they appear, and create an action plan on how to handle this type of situation. Report when loitering happens, and have the responsible personnel answer follow-up questions about what led to the event. In that way, you can prevent similar instances from happening again.
8. Disruptive behaviour
Many guests visit hotels for holidays, downtime or work, seeking quiet, comfortable and peaceful surroundings. It’s important to cultivate this environment for your guests and to discourage any disruptive behaviour.
Disruptive behaviour is, for example, when a guest becomes too intoxicated and as a result, gets loud in common areas, loud music or noises in rooms that are disturbing other guests, or violent demeanour.
By reporting and tracking these incidents, you can create action plans to better prevent them from escalating.
9. Threats
Take all threats seriously (verbal and physical). Record all details of a threat incident, including the threatening party’s details as this could have legal validity if the threat escalates.
10. Harassment or Discrimination
Harassment and discrimination, like threats, can be both verbal (e.g. hate speech) and physical. Both forms can have legal ramifications and shouldn’t be tolerated in any way or form.
Make sure to report and track them to create action points for when they happen.
11. Crimes and Frauds
Crimes and frauds can happen in hotels, as likely as in any other business. Make sure to be tracking previous crimes, so that you can implement preventive measures, share best practices and assess potential costs from the incidents as well as any legal recourse.
12. Property damages
Property damages will happen in daily operations. Therefore, tracking them is necessary in order to know what needs fixing, maintenance, replacement and notice.
It's important that you log property-related incidents and handle them before your guests observe them. Also, make sure to track the damages so that you have a full picture of your property's condition.
13. Service requests and Work orders
This point is related to the one above. Your maintenance crew ensures that everything on your premises functions smoothly.
To ensure that all is well, record service, maintenance requests and work orders, monitor progress, and check completed tasks off. Reporting these through a mobile platform will also benefit you with more clarity and more effective communications as the maintenance team is automatically notified about new needs.
14. Housekeeping issues
Housekeeping is one of the areas that the guests will notice first. If their room is left uncleaned, or they find any missing room essentials, they will immediately call reception and notify them about it. In order to be on top of this, you can develop a reporting checklist as you would do for maintenance issues to uphold your hotel’s housekeeping standards.
If any reports about issues come in, make sure that you log these and track them so that you and your housekeeping team are aware of when these happen, and how they can be prevented.
15. System failures
There are so many systems behind the smooth-running of a hotel (i.e. HVAC, WIFI, security systems). Conduct and record system maintenance and check-ins to prevent failures.
If system failures happen, report them on the spot, and track how long time it takes to fix them to get the systems up and running again. Doing so will leave you better prepared for future issues.
16. Customer complaints
As hospitality is a people-based business, complaints happen. Following through with every complaint you receive shows customer care and support.
Track complaints to identify what is wrong and how you can improve your customer experience.
17. IT security / Privacy incidents
Nowadays, guests can book, check in and do basically everything online. That means all their information is available digitally, making cybersecurity a top priority.
Your guests need a guarantee of privacy at your hotel, even in the digital space. Therefore you need to track any incidents relating to IT security and data privacy and take measures to ensure that you have the full coverage needed to prevent any leaks or weak spots for hackers.
18. Lost & Found
Having a record of lost and found items enables you to quickly identify what items went missing, when it happened and where.
If a guest simply forgot an item you can save it and keep it for them in case they come back or request it sent to them. In case of theft, you will be able to pin down what areas of your hotel would need more security measures such as surveillance.
19. Fire alarms
Fire alarms protect the safety of staff, guests, their belongings and your property. Conduct alarm checks regularly and keeps track of fixes to ascertain that they work. In many countries and regions, having functional fire alarms is a part of fire safety legislation and standards. If your hotel isn't complying you could risk getting fined or worse.
Therefore make sure to report and track if fire alarms stop working, need maintenance or are replaced prematurely.
20. Ideas and Initiatives
Last but not least, note ideas and initiatives suggested by your personnel and guests to improve your hotel and its services.
These are the main stakeholders that are in contact with your business daily, and they may, therefore, have a better understanding of what can help the hotel to function even better.
Final Thoughts
Tracking incidents in a hotel environment isn’t just about avoiding costs or accidents. It’s about caring for people - personnel, guests and other stakeholders alike - that are in contact with your business every day.
Incident reporting also opens a channel for improving the customer experience, as it allows you to spot, track and create preventative actions for any problem areas in your daily operations.
If you're looking to implement a modern incident platform that can help to monitor all the areas mentioned above, we've got you covered. Falcony | Observe is easy-to-use, fast to set up, has customisable workflows, vast integration possibilities and more. Contact us for more information.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
