Featured in The Caterer: Cleaning & Hygiene, Hotel Focus | October 2024

With Britons increasingly keen to holiday at home, hotels have never had more reason to make a good impression. Customers value cleanliness extremely highly – a bad experience here can ruin an otherwise spotless getaway. We take a look at the products and processes to ensure your hotel is pristine.

Paul Robinson has been involved in the cleaning industry for over 30 years and joined Truvox International 18 months ago as UK National Sales Manager.

The cost of a stay in a hotel has risen exponentially over the past couple of years, so if customers are paying more, they expect more – and cleanliness and hygiene are crucial if you want to avoid getting poor reviews and customer complaints.

Hotel receptions are open 24/7, so there is always a need to clean when there are guests around. Since the pandemic, hygiene has become the biggest priority in all premises and cleaning has become more of a ‘front of house activity’, so it is important to use floorcare machines which look really professional, clean and well maintained.

Many hotels are cleaned by FM companies and they tend to prioritise cost, so ensuring machines are reliable – to reduce down-time – and easy to use and maintain is crucial. Investing in the correct machinery to efficiently clean the variety of flooring types used throughout the hotel pays dividends. Quality upright dual motor vacuum cleaners are a must and a good scrubber-dryer will achieve excellent results all floor types.

First impressions start in the lobby, where there are specific challenges, due to the variety of flooring types from entrance matting to hard flooring and carpets. We’ve all walked into a hotel reception on a rainy day and noticed that the floors are sticky and squeaky, or that our feet slip, and that’s because the damp on our shoes has reactivated residual cleaning products. Using a scrubber-dryer to thoroughly rinse and remove soiling and detergent residues from the floor with fresh water, resolves that issue, enhancing the overall appearance and safety of the floor.

The Multiwash™ PRO range is effective on all flooring types, and washes, scrubs and dries in a single pass, giving improved and unrivalled cleaning results, and leaving floors ready for your guests and staff to walk on. We’re introducing the Multiwash™ PRO Battery which is perfect for hotel lobbies as with no trailing cables, it minimises the risk of trips and slips.

Once in their room, guests will quickly notice if floors aren’t perfectly clean, so regular vacuuming is essential and we recommend the powerful Valet Dual Motor Upright, or the high-performance, manoeuvrable compact VTVe tub vacuum. Meanwhile, for spot stain removal on carpets and upholstery, such as wine or coffee spills, the compact and easy to use Hydromist Lite is a perfect choice.

To help facilities managers choose the most appropriate floorcare machines, we offer a site visit. Taking into account the environment, the flooring type, the footfall traffic, and the required cleaning frequency, we can then recommend the right machines.

Once the machines have been specified and supplied, we can provide training for operatives, and that’s supported by what’s available on our website and on YouTube. All our machines are reliable, simple to use and easy to maintain. Our online training videos provided step by step guides on how to get the best from each of our machines, and we also have a training facility at our recently opened showroom in Southampton.