7 Ways to Ensure Smooth Hotel Room Service During Peak Hours

There are seven different strategies to help with your peak hour challenges.Keep the number of orders the kitchen accepts at a time low, limit the number of dishes per order, time the delivery of your order, limit the number of dishes on the peak hour menu, let the runners know their job, eliminate the runners having to call for a pick up, and don’t have the runners wait for a call before picking up a tray. Using these will help shorten guest wait times and keep the team calm.

What causes challenges with peak hour room service?

A school canteen at lunch time is chaotic. The bell goes and suddenly there are students streaming in, forming a long line, whilst the poor helpers are running around like headless chickens. They get tired, and the food goes cold. That’s what happens every day in hotels as well. When many guests arrive to order at the same time (i.e. breakfast at 7am or dinner at 6pm) and the kitchen gets swamped. A guest that has been told to expect their food for 30 minutes is still waiting at 50 minutes and becomes a one star review. Luckily for you, there are some easy and not expensive changes that can be made to improve this. Here are seven that can be game changers.

1. Put a limit on orders for each time slot

A kitchen can only cook so much at one time, no matter how hard the team works. Figure out how many orders yours can really handle in 15 or 30 minutes, and once that number is hit, stop taking more for that slot. Say your team manages 12 orders in half an hour. The 13th guest just sees the next free time. That feels fair to them, and your cooks aren’t drowning. Guests will wait quite happily if you’re honest from the start. What they can’t stand is a promise of 20 minutes that turns into 45.

2. Don’t let one huge order block everyone else

Every hotel kitchen has seen this. One room orders twelve dishes, and twenty other guests, who only wanted coffee and toast, wait behind them. A simple cap fixes it. Maybe five dishes per order at dinner (test the number for your own kitchen). 

If a family of eight really wants twelve dishes, send them in two rounds, about 15 minutes apart. They still eat well, nobody else is stuck in the queue, and the chefs can plate properly instead of rushing.

3. Let guests choose “now” or “later”

When the only option is to push “as soon as possible,” a crowd forms and 8 o’clock hits like a lightning strike. Add scheduled delivery and that strike breaks up into small pieces. Guests can pick times 30 minutes apart and the kitchen can plan. People actually like this system because they can get food when they want instead of when the kitchen is free. 

A gentle reminder (in your app, or on a door hanger for example) can help people see the system. “Order now, eat at 7:30” for example works great. This tip can be easily used at any time.

4. Keep your rush-hour menu short and smart

Not every food can travel well. A sandwich or rice bowl can travel well and keep its shape. A fancy, beautifully plated dish might arrive a bit of a mess. So, for those really busy times, move the quicker, more stable dishes to the front and keep the more time consuming, fancier dishes for when it’s slower.

Keep your digital menu or QR code up to date and show your current offerings in real time. For a rush, point your guests to quick and pre-plated dishes. Guests don’t miss the choices when the food arrives on time.

5. Give your team clear jobs

A stressed team usually isn’t a lazy one. Most of the time it’s a team where everyone is doing three jobs at once. Three small changes can help: Dedicated runners. In peak windows, have people whose only job is carrying orders to rooms. Cooks cook, runners run. Cross-training. Teach your banquet or stewarding staff the basics of room service so they can step in when it gets busy. 

In slow hours you’re not paying extra people to stand around. Simple SOPs. An SOP is just a step-by-step guide. Keep them short, one for taking orders and one for setting up trays, so everyone does things the same way. When people know what’s theirs, things move faster, and the mood in the kitchen gets better too.

6. Watch every order on one screen

Paper tickets get lost and shouted questions get missed. A kitchen dashboard solves both. It’s one screen showing every order and where it is right now: received, cooking, ready, on the way or delivered. 

It works even better when it’s linked to your POS (the billing system) and your PMS (the hotel management system), because then nobody has to type the same order twice and mistakes drop. Staff also get an alert the moment a dish is ready. Picture a chef noticing that Room 412 has waited six minutes and pushing that order up the line. Without a dashboard, nobody would have caught it until the guest phoned to complain.

7. Pick up trays without waiting for a call

That leftover dinner from last night looks unappetizing in this morning light. It’s also a safety hazard and can warrant a poorly reviewed hotel. Utilize the “tray ready for pickup” button on the in-room guest-controlled tablet or smart hotel app. 

Some hotels use tray sensors that alert housekeeping instead. Either way, guests don’t have to call the front desk, and your hallways stay clean.

Bonus tip: Match the Menu

Some hotels let guests customize their room service orders or offer exclusive dishes to select guests. It protects the experience of your best guests when the kitchen is under the most pressure. It provides friendly opportunities to upsell without overstressing your team.

Where should you start?

You don’t have to overhaul your systems in one go. You can gradually implement the following:

• Week one: Look at your order data and find the two busiest hours of the day. In these hours, limit the number of dishes you are taking, and offer scheduled delivery.
• Week two: Shorten your rush hour menus, and allocate one or two runners per peak shift.
• Week three: Put up a Kitchen dashboard, and tray pickup alerts. Ask your guests how it went.

What happens when you get it right?

Hotels that implement the above systems observe four main things:

1. Your guests get food on time, hot and in a better condition.
2. Your staff feel less stressed and less burned out.
3. Your guests who speed order, order more often.
4. Less complaints in your reviews.

Conclusion

With these small systems in place you can easily keep your guests happy and your staff less stressed. Nothing is difficult to implement and they help keep a calm system in the kitchen. Try one or two of these this week, and see what effect it has on your wait times. For more contact TheNOQueue.

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