There are two major ways in which hoteliers get their guest room mattresses cleaned. We will be looking at each of those approaches to hotel mattress cleaning (what each of them involves), as well as the advantages and the disadvantages of each. We are, of course, coming from a background where guest room mattress cleaning tends to be one of the most challenging tasks hoteliers have to deal with.
The fact that the mattresses in the hotel guest rooms have to be used by many people of all types (and in quick succession) means that those are mattresses which need to be cleaned frequently. If guests are given dirty/stale mattresses to sleep on, chances are that they will take note of that fact, and subsequently make a point of not patronizing the particular hotel in the future. Most hoteliers would rather undertake frequent hotel guestroom mattress cleaning, rather than risk losing clients of account of something as petty as this. And in the final analysis, as mentioned earlier, the hoteliers find themselves with two options in terms of ways in which they can get their guestroom mattresses cleaned. Those are:
By deploying their own staff to do the cleaning: some of the bigger hotels actually have some people employed specifically to clean the mattress in the guestrooms, as the need for such cleaning becomes necessary.
There are other hotels where the guestroom mattress cleaning is undertaken by the ordinary cleaning staff – that is, where there are no special mattress cleaning staff members employed. These are hotels which make it clear to the cleaners, at recruitment time, that one of their tasks will be that of cleaning mattresses. The arrangement is usually one where they have a roster, on the basis of which they undertake mattress cleaning for certain rooms on certain days. They then move onto certain other rooms on certain other days… till all mattresses in the establishment are cleaned, and the cycle repeats itself.
Many of these hotels have mattress cleaning machines, meaning that the task is not so involving at a physical level. Therefore the ordinary cleaning staff members in question only need to make some time for it, and get it done as per the schedule.
The advantage with this approach to hotel guestroom mattress cleaning is in the fact that it is typically very cost-effective, as no third party service providers are brought it to undertake mattress cleaning.
The disadvantage with this approach to hotel guestroom mattress cleaning is in the fact that it can overwhelm the in-house hotel cleaners, leading to extremely staff high turnover rates. That would be especially the case if no investment in mattress cleaning machines is made, and the task therefore has to be done manually.
By engaging firms which specialize in mattress cleaning: this is where, in the spirit of outsourcing, the hoteliers bring in third party mattress cleaning service providers, to be cleaning the mattresses in the hotel guest rooms as need arises.
The advantage with this approach is in the fact that the mattress cleaning ends up being done very thoroughly, seeing that in this case, it is done by ‘professionals’ who specialize in that sort of thing. This approach can also turn out to be more cost-effective than hiring extra staff on a permanent basis to be cleaning the mattresses as need arises.
The disadvantage with this approach is in the fact that the services provided by third party mattress cleaning service providers can often turn out to be very expensive. Furthermore, some hoteliers are reluctant to let ‘outsiders’ so deep into what essentially turn out to their core business operations.