Maintain your lodge and keep the flow of business going for years

One can find a wide assortment of articles floating around on the web about how lodging should pay attention to social marketing, guest attracting ideas and on incentivizing the management based on revenue. However, revenue can be just one aspect of any successful lodgingventure. To truly add value, lodge management and owners need to make sure the profit is not gnawed away by poor maintenance. This is difficult to accomplish when sales and operations pull the chariot in different directions.Operations are traditionally based on margin or profit whereas Lodging Sales incentives are normally revenue or unit based. These opposing incentives could mean that the lodge management is missing a vital opportunity to generate long-term profit ideas that could build greater value for the lodges.

When there are contradicting incentives, it prevents the senior management from making good long-term asset maintenance and management. Unfortunately, the lodging industry executives have been favorable to revenue producing investments (cosmetic and service changes) for quite some time. This leaves the operations managers to struggle with the leftover resources so as to achieve even the slightest margin improvement, which proves quite a difficult task.

Revenue generation investment strategies can only be successful when the cost of generating revenue streams adds to the overall bottom line. Failure to invest in lodging asset management tools can and will ultimately result in operational expenses that exceed the original profit margins or erase them all together.

Many Lodging chains have discovered over the years that profit margin shrinkage can range from either a major asset breakdown (chiller, boiler etc.) or an asset negligence liability claim. The impact of a revenue investment strategy that is heavily weighted is that asset and maintenance management has been put on the back burner until the assets that draw guests start to age and deteriorate, breaking down more often than was initially accounted for.

After years of neglecting asset and maintenance management strategies that could lengthen the useful life of assets, lodging companies are faced with substantial amounts of capital expenditure at a time when financing is tough to come by and leaving them wondering what if the equipment could have lasted just a little bit longer?