September 13–19 is International Housekeepers Week. Most hotels will celebrate with a cake, a team photo and a nice post on LinkedIn.
And that’s good. Housekeepers deserve the cake. But they also deserve more.
If we really want to show our appreciation for the vital work they do, there’s something far more valuable we can give them: a workday with less friction.
Let people work in the language they think in
Walk through the back of house of almost any international hotel and you’ll hear multiple languages before you reach the service elevator.
That’s part of the magic of hospitality: five languages in one hallway, but everyone’s saying the same thing, working together to move the guest experience forward.
The problem is that many hotel systems weren’t designed for the people actually using them. A housekeeper may think in their native language, be it Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, Haitian Creole or countless others. It takes time and mental effort to translate that thought into English, figure out how the system wants it entered, and only then report the issue.
English fluency doesn’t dictate the ability of a housekeeper. They’re trying to clean a room, not sit for a language exam. But a system that forces them to work in a language they’re less confident in will only slow them down.
Flexkeeping, a Mews company, changes that.
A team member can use voice input to create a task in their own language. Flexkeeping can translate communication across 200+ languages and help route the work to the right team.
No hunting for the English word for grout. No finding the one bilingual coworker who became the unofficial translator for the entire fourth floor.
Your team just says what’s needed, the system understands it and then sends the task to the relevant person. It’s fast, efficient and removes unnecessary stress. That’s what happens when technology adapts to people instead of forcing people to adapt to technology.
Say goodbye to walkie-talkies
The walkie-talkie deserves some respect. It survived decades of hotel operations, countless dropped calls and approximately twelve billion instances of: “Can you repeat that?”
That being said, it shouldn’t be the operating system for your housekeeping department.
Good communication is an essential part of an effective housekeeping team. Up-to-date information needs to be shared constantly. A room is cleaned. A room needs inspection. A guest needs extra pillows. Maintenance needs to look at the AC.
Someone shouldn’t have to chase down a supervisor, call the front desk, or hope the right person happens to hear the radio message.
With Flexkeeping, operational tasks, guest requests, housekeeping and maintenance activity are managed in one centralized system and updated in real time. Having that single source of truth is a gamechanger for productivity and accuracy.
The workflow is simple.
- Your housekeeper checks the app and sees what needs to happen.
- They carry out the task.
- They update the task in the app.
- Everyone else sees it and knows it’s been done.
That’s it. You can even set up notifications for when tasks are created, completed or overdue. Thanks, walkie-talkies, but we can take it from here.
The best hotel tech is invisible
Your guests don’t care about your technology stack, and nor should they.
When a guest asks for extra pillows, it doesn’t matter to them which department owns the request. All that matters is that the pillows arrive quickly.
When a guest is waiting to check in, they don’t care how many systems your team uses to check the status of their room. They care whether the room is actually ready.
The best hotel technology is invisible. It works in the background to ensure requests get to the right employees faster. That staff know exactly what needs to happen. That the room gets turned, the issue gets fixed, and the guest gets what they asked for.
This is the foundation of great guest experiences. And very often, the person making that experience happen is the housekeeper pushing a cart down the hallway – empowered by technology.
How to mark International Housekeepers Week
What does appreciation actually look like? For International Housekeepers Week, celebrate your team. Buy the cake, take the photo, write the post. This kind of recognition – internal and public – matters.
But then think about the other 51 weeks of their year.
- Give them technology that speaks their language instead of asking them to translate themselves into the system.
- Give them real-time information instead of information filtered through three people and a walkie-talkie.
- Give them a way to report something once and know that it goes to the right person.
- Give supervisors visibility without requiring them to spend their day chasing updates.
- And most importantly, give housekeepers more time to do what they are actually great at: taking care of the hotel and the people staying in it.
A cake lasts an afternoon. Removing friction from someone’s job lasts all year. That feels like a pretty good thank you.
Want to see how Flexkeeping works inside Mews and helps to automate up to 70% of admin?
Written by
Joseph Gazarek
Joseph Gazarek has spent more than 20 years in hospitality across hotel operations, sales and technology. Today at Mews, he works closely with independent hoteliers and hospitality teams to modernize the systems behind the guest experience without losing the human side of the industry. A former hotel operator himself, Joseph writes about hospitality technology from the perspective of someone who has lived the operational challenges firsthand, not just sold software designed to solve them.