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It’s a scene that every seasonal hotel manager has already experienced.
July. 92% occupancy. A guest request comes in through an instant messaging app, gets lost in the group chat, and nobody knows who’s handling it. The guest comes back down to reception, frustrated.
And there you are, scrolling back through the messages, trying to figure out who saw the request, who was supposed to deal with it, and why it wasn’t done. You check with reception, call the floor, chase up maintenance. Five minutes wasted investigating, five minutes where you’re not with your guests, not running your property.
And it’s not a one-off. It happens several times a day, every single day of the season.
It’s not a goodwill problem. Not your team’s, not yours. It’s an organisation problem. And it gets fixed before opening, not in the middle of the rush.
The mistakes we always see on the ground
Procedures passed on verbally. Onboarding a new team member by explaining how things work “in this hotel” through a series of informal conversations between departments is a risky bet. Everyone remembers what they understood, every manager explains things their own way. The result : inconsistent practices, recurring mistakes on the same issues, and a heavy reliance on the “veterans” who actually know how things work… which becomes an even bigger problem when those veterans aren’t around.
Testing your organisation mid-season. This is the most costly mistake. Trying out your communication tools, information flows and coordination processes in the middle of the rush means training your team at your guests’ expense.
Using messaging apps for everything. Urgent requests get buried in casual conversation, new staff have no access to message history, and nobody really knows whether a request has been handled. We have nothing against WhatsApp. It’s simply a personal messaging app, not a hotel management tool. We go into more detail in our article : Why WhatsApp is not suited to hotel management.
What the hotels that get it right actually do
They centralise operational communication. One single platform for all requests, reports, instructions and inter-department exchanges. Every team member, whether at reception, in housekeeping, in the kitchen or in maintenance, has access to the same information at the same time. Feel free to read our article on hotel digitalisation.
They make their procedures accessible. Instructions aren’t stored in a manager’s head or in an Excel file buried on a shared computer. They’re available, easy to find, and up to date.
They track requests end to end. Every guest report, every in-room intervention, every supplier request is logged. You know who handled it, when, and how it was resolved.
They connect every part of the hotel in one shared space. Reception, floors, kitchen, external suppliers, management : everyone works with the same tools and the same information.
When the season starts, their team, even if partly new, knows exactly how things work. They run their season instead of surviving it.
Opening your season in the next few weeks ?
Book a free demo and see how MySharingSystem can transform your organisation before your first guests arrive.