HOUSEKEEPING ASSIGNMENT

QUESTION 1

As a housekeeping supervisor in a resort, you are in the process of preparing the a.m. guestroom check report when you discover that room 2004 is occupied while the night clerk’s report that you received early in the morning indicated that the room was vacant.

A)     What do you think could have happened for the discrepancy to exist?

B)      What do you do from there?

ANSWER

From this question, we should know the meaning of room status discrepancy first. The room status discrepancy is defining a situation in which the housekeeping department’s description of a room’s status differs from the room status information at the front desk. Refer to the question, this situation is maybe will happen in the hotel.

First of all, we should know the daily routines of the housekeeping staff. The ‘housekeeping day’ is divided into three shift which is morning, afternoon and night shift. The daily routine may differ slightly from one hotel to another hotel. ‘Opening of the house’ refers to a daily operational procedure whereby rooms are assigned for servicing to GRAs scheduled for work that day.

The night supervisor keeps ready the ‘night report’ or the occupancy report generated in the night by the front desk attendant. The night supervisor also passes on the list of arrivals and departures obtained from the desk to the assistant housekeeper. Then, the assistant housekeeper prepares the daily report and hand over the section work sheet to each floor supervisor.

The section work sheet has the room numbers of the section that the floor supervisor is responsible for, and identifies their status as ‘vacant’, ‘occupied’, or ‘check out’. This sheet thus indicates the room status of the entire section to the supervisor. This is then clipped onto the room attendant’s cart. Once each room has been cleaned and inspected, the floor supervisor puts a check mark against that room number on the sheet.

In many properties, to avoid disturbing guests just to check the status of the room, discrepancy report is generated by the inspection of only ‘on change’ and ‘vacant and ready’ rooms. In fact under this system, to save time, the Guest Room Attendant’s (GRAs) do not approach any guestrooms in the morning till they are ready to clean that room.

If there is any discrepancy between the room status received from the front desk and the actual status of the room, the GRA should immediately inform the floor supervisor, so that it can be cleared up with front desk. A consolidated report is then generated from the information received at the control desk by the control desk supervisor. This is called the housekeeping room status report.

The discrepancy can be left to the floor supervisor, who may inspect ‘vacant and ready’ and ‘no change’ rooms to be assured their status. Any discrepancy can be marked in the section worksheet clipped onto the room attendant’s cart. All supervisors, after completing the physical checking of the room status in their section, convey any discrepancy to the control desk. The control desk supervisor consolidates the information received and generates the housekeeping room status report.

The GRAs then begin servicing the guestrooms according to priority and the floor supervisor inspects the rooms in order. The rooms are the passed as ‘ready rooms’ to the front office for sale. As a conclusion, any room status discrepancy between the front office and the housekeeping department is resolved by a physical check.