The Space Between
Hotel departments have never been stronger. The gaps between them have never been wider. Here's what lives in the space between — and what it's costing you.
“Did you talk to housekeeping about that?”
“No, I just heard about it from the front desk. I ran into engineering on the way over and asked them about it, too.”
This is a game of telephone that each one of us who’s worked in hotels has played. In a complex operation with only 24 hours each day, and many teams working to keep the ship running, this game is a natural outcome. Silos develop between teams, communication gaps show up in between those silos, and issues fall between those gaps.
In the real world, employees fill these gaps. A small handful act as communication points between departments, helping close these gaps and making sure the guest experience is maintained. The 9 year front desk supervisor who remembers the guest from last year is very particular about the temperature, that the AC fix on floor 3 was only temporary, and that the event tonight will spill noise up the stairwells. The 18 year room attendant who knows the curtains in 412 never quite settle into place and that the shower in 515 leaks just a little if you don’t clean it right, no matter how many times the team fixes it.
These two are the nervous system connecting the different parts of your hotel and breaking through silos. They cross that space, connecting the revenue strategy with the housekeeping crunch and know what the guest is about to experience at every turn. They don’t have a dashboard, a data pipeline, or a scalable tooling strategy. They know this because they talked to the maintenance manager in the hallway and they’ve worked with the concierge for 5 years. But what happens when that employee leaves?
The space goes back to empty. The decade of pattern recognition can’t be replaced with a new hire. They don’t know each room enough to walk it blindfolded. They don’t know that the Elite member who comes every March is very particular about their view and how they are greeted, nor that they had an issue and a comp last visit.
The nervous system and their institutional knowledge are gone. And in an industry struggling a 4% employee turn every month, it’s a question of when and not if.
The Tools Supporting the Gaps
Each team has systems in place to support their work, surely these fill the space? Revenue management, housekeeping optimizations, maintenance schedulers, all with strong tools investing deep in workflows. Each department’s tools are built to the specific needs of that department.
But each one of those tools only sees its own department. Your revenue system doesn’t know that the room it just priced at $445 is on the floor where three guests complained about AC issues this week. Your housekeeping tool doesn’t know that the room they’re about to clean is for a guest who always requests a move and they’ll need to clean the other one. The tools are strong in their departments, they just can’t see across the gap.
The Cost of Space
This morning, your front desk approved 28 late checkouts. The property adds additional revenue and guests love the flexibility at the end of their stay. It’s a positive choice. But now housekeeping has two hours less to turn those rooms, especially since maintenance needs an hour in each to complete an update. Suddenly a busy but manageable day turns into 19 guests still waiting for their room at 4pm, a few rounds of comps to keep order in the lobby, and overtime across two teams. Two guests go from leaving a positive review to silently leaving no review, and one writes a bad review that you now need to manage.
Every department did their job, and no major mistakes were made. But one domino fell into another, and suddenly a chain of events forms.
The most damaging ones can be even quieter. Not a queue of angry guests in the lobby, but a slow bleed of OOO rooms reducing revenue on a busy event night. This falls into the cracks between work order systems, PMS, and ends up with an underperforming P&L that gets attributed to market conditions.
The Numbers
These spaces aren’t a soft cost that can be ignored, they’re a real problem for your P&L.
Hotel operating costs rose 4.1% compared to only a 2.3% growth in revenue, compressing margins in a tight industry. Every property and management company is looking for where the money is going. Labor, insurance, maintenance, all rising. But those high-level numbers don’t show the real story, and how much of each of those costs came from important things falling into the gaps between.
Service recovery through comps and make-it-right gestures can total hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, with F&B comps alone rising by 3.9%. Overtime hours rose 12%, with overtime being more and more commonly an expensive flex tool to cover difficulties in hiring. How much of that overtime was planned, and how much was triggered by a chain that started in a different department, and how much could have been recovered 48 hours before the guest even arrived?
And the costs that never appear on any report may be the largest. Cornell’s research found that a one-point improvement in online reputation drives up to a 1.42% increase in RevPAR. A single negative review influences 40 to 50 potential booking decisions. The guest who waited 30 minutes for a room because late checkouts pushed housekeeping behind arrival demand didn’t experience a housekeeping problem or a front desk problem. They experienced a problem that lived in the space between the two. Their review doesn’t name the cause. It just says “room wasn’t ready, had to wait in the lobby, disappointing for the price.” And it suppresses your rates for months.
The Space Is the Problem
These spaces are frustrating for staff, painful for guests, and costly for your property. Your staff feel the pressure, your margins feel the squeeze, and you can sense the disconnects adding up into rough weekends and difficult calls with ownership.
Every department has gotten stronger. Better revenue tools. Better housekeeping optimization. Better guest messaging. Better maintenance tracking. Each investment made its department more efficient. Each investment also made the walls between departments a little higher, because now each department has its own data, its own dashboard, its own version of what’s happening.
The departments have never worked harder. The spaces between them have never been wider.
But feeling it and measuring it are different things. And right now, nobody’s measuring the space between.
Daniel
I'm Daniel! I used to manage the Front Desk, and now I'm building tools to fix the problems I lived with every day. If the space between your departments is something you've been fighting, I'd love to hear how you're handling it — reach out anytime!