You’ve spent years fine-tuning your guest experience. You’ve carefully chosen your decor. You’ve perfected your welcome. You’ve considered thread counts, cleaning rotas and turndown services.
But there's one thing that can undo all of your effort in just a few seconds… waste.
An overflowing bin. A bad smell that’s drifting from a service area to front-of-house. A recycling station that’s becoming a dumping ground. These aren't minor annoyances. They’re major risks to your reputation. And in an era where guests will readily take to review sites or social media to share a bad experience, the cost of overlooking them can be more than you think.
What guests notice
Your guests won’t comment on your waste management strategies, and they won’t take to websites or social media to write a review of them. What they will notice, however, is that bad smell near the lift, the overflowing bin outside of the breakfast area or the recycling piled up in the corridor.
All too often, venues pass this off as a housekeeping issue rather than a commercial one. But these aren’t things that you can put down to a lack of effort, or manpower. It’s not that your teams are ignoring the problem, it’s that the system they’re working within is failing.
When this happens, the evidence starts to stack up in places where your guests can see it. And that’s when it begins to impact on their experience and show up in your reviews.
Where are the gaps in your system?
The challenge for many venues is that they focus too much on the first and last steps of their waste management systems. But the problem for most organisations is not what happens at the bin. It’s what happens after.
Between the moment someone deposits an item in the right receptacle to the point where it reaches an external collection point, there’s a hidden phase that most venues barely monitor. It’s in this stage that your entire system is most vulnerable to breakdown and where the evidence starts to impact the guest experience.
The wrong trolleys and transport equipment means bags split. Odours spread. Journeys from front to back-of-house take longer, so waste sits in corridors while staff make multiple trips with inadequate equipment. These may sound like small things, but they are in fact systematic failures that cause a lot of the visible issues.
The good news is that the solution is simple.
By investing in the right tools for the job - purpose-built solutions that allow for effective, efficient and hygienic waste movement - you can reduce the amount of time waste spends where it can be seen (or smelled) by your guests.
Take a look at our range of carts, trucks and trollies designed to help you bridge the gap between internal and external bins easily.
Cut contamination
It’s not only the immediate guest experience that’s impacted by failing waste management systems, your entire reputation could be at risk too.
In an era where sustainability is more important than ever before, your guests want to know that you are doing your part to recycle more and waste less. That’s why contamination is a key concern. All it takes is one item to spoil an entire bin, compromising your waste streams and reducing the recycling rates you promised your customers you’d achieve.
It’s a challenge that’s particularly acute in hospitality venues. That’s not just because of the volume of waste that’s created but the very nature of your customers. Often, guests are one off visitors, perhaps they’re from out of town or another country entirely. That means they’re likely to be unfamiliar with the waste recycling requirements that affect your venue, or perhaps unable to read the signage you’ve put out to explain them. They’re also in a different headspace, less likely to be as attentive as they may be when they are at home.
That means your infrastructure has to be watertight, so that it can do what your guests might not be able to. Choosing bins with the right design and placing them in the right places is vital. As is creating a collection routine that ensures they are emptied before reaching capacity.
Get it right and you won't just deliver on recycling rates; you’ll also help to avoid the overflowing, odorous and unsightly situations that end up in a one-star review. Take a look at our blog for three tips for making your recycling system clearer.
Build a system that projects your reputation
The best hospitality waste management systems all share one thing - they didn’t happen by accident. Instead, they were designed specifically to work for housekeeping staff, for guests and for the environments in which they operate.
These are systems that carefully consider how they will operate in the real world and how people will use them. And when they work, they’re almost invisible. Which is exactly the point. Because when your waste management is working effectively no one will notice it. But when it’s not, they will. And you can guarantee they’ll tell everyone about it.
Your venue doesn't stop. Neither should your waste management. Check out our range of durable back-of-house and front-of-house bins built specifically for the challenges that face hospitality businesses like yours.
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