Preparing Your Hotel for the Holiday Season

The holiday season can mean a lot for your hotel. Depending on your location, it can mean a hectic time for hospitality—or it can mean your hotel hallways are practically empty!

Projections in 2018 predicted a surge in overall travel, including 1.6 million additional US airline passengers during the Thanksgiving holiday alone, with a total of 112.5 million expected to travel during the year-end holiday season. And with surveys revealing that 61% of respondents would prefer not to stay in a family member’s home during the holidays, thousands of travelers will be looking to book a hotel stay.

If these trends continue, one way or another, preparing your property for the impending travel season will be incredibly important. Whether you’re trying to sort through the incoming rush or attract more guests to stay at your hotel, we’ve gathered a few tips to help you and your team ensure your hotel is holiday ready.

If Your Hotel Is Typically Packed for the Holidays…

Ensure you’re properly staffed.

If possible, ask your team who is willing to work for the holidays and, if you can, offer additional holiday pay as an incentive. Having a team of willing, motivated workers on the holidays helps make sure that your holiday staff won’t be completely burnt out or resentful for being scheduled during the busy season.

Give your team a vacation day deadline.

Last-minute vacation requests can really shake up scheduling and put management in the stressful position of having to reject staff vacation time or risk being understaffed. Get ahead of those concerns by giving your team a deadline for requesting time off for the holidays.

Quore Tip: Using Quore, you can send out a memo to the entire hotel team letting them know when to get their vacation requests in!

‍Get the holiday schedule out ASAP.

Make sure everyone is on the same page by getting the holiday work schedule out well ahead of time. This ensures that everyone has enough time to sort through any conflicts and polish out any necessary changes.

Quore Tip: You can upload holiday schedules to Quore using the Documents app so everyone on your team has access.

Put plans in place for unhappy customers.

Travel can wear down anyone—especially guests dealing with hectic holiday travel plans! With the added stress of crowds and wait times, guests might have less patience with delays or mishaps. Discuss this with your staff and make sure you have plans in place to help them turn guest complaints around quickly and efficiently without getting frustrated.

Quore Tip: Quore allows you to manage and track customer complaints and schedule callbacks in our system, so nothing is missed.

If Your Hotel Isn’t Quite So Full During the Holidays…

Offer a package deal.

If you can offer a holiday special or package deal to draw guests to your property, do it! For example, the Hilton Anaheim in California offered a Winter Warmerland package for travelers coming to California to escape the chill of the winter season. The deal includes accommodations, a breakfast buffet and health club passes—and the hotel offers themed holiday events on the premises through the month of December.

Include special amenities.

You could offer adult guests champagne or coupons to nearby attractions, and include complimentary milk and cookies or other holiday goodies for children staying at your property. Get creative about what kind of special amenities you might be able to offer guests during the holiday season! Just remember you’ll likely have guests who celebrate various holidays toward the end of the year, and factor that into your brainstorming.

Schedule in-house events or activities.

If your property includes breakfasts with guest stays, bring some holiday sparkle to their morning with themed breakfast items—you can even offer holiday coloring pages or drawing activities for the kids.

Your team can put together arts and crafts opportunities for families as well, such as:

• Making their own Christmas ornaments if they decorate a tree for the holidays
• Constructing their own dreidel using strips of colored paper for Hanukkah
• Crafting an African Drum for Kwanzaa
• Cutting simple paper snowflakes to ring in the Winter Solstice
• Or putting together an easy paper chain to countdown for any holiday celebration!

For new years, you could offer decorative pages or templates for guests to write their resolutions or goals on, or do a lantern-lighting where guest write wishes for the new year on their lantern and send it into the sky.

Post on social media.

You and your team can help to draw holiday traffic to your hotel by posting more frequently on your property’s social media channels. Share themed posts wishing past and future guests happy holidays! Post about any holiday specials or upcoming events and any exclusive amenities. This gets the word out there in a somewhat organic way.

Happy Hotels for the Holidays

Whatever you and your team do to prepare your hotel for the holidays, remember that it doesn’t matter whether your tactics are large or small—what matters most is your dedication to your guests! As long as you’re working hard to provide your guests with the best possible stay, your hotel will have a happy holiday season.

To learn more about how Quore can help you manage and track your hotel processes, checkout quore.com. To read more of our industry tips, take a look at our other Quore Blog posts.

Happy holidays—from our team, to yours!