Success Story

The challenges of repair & maintenance management for a luxury resort

The Design Hotel has been using hotelkit on a daily basis since 2019. Felix Jerschabek, Director of Seaside Finolhu Maldives and Director of Corporate Development of Seaside Collection explains in an interview how the use of a software can be so important with aiding in successful repair and maintenance management.

Seaside Collection is based in Germany and Spain and runs exclusive city and leisure hotels in locations including Germany, the Canary Islands and now the most recent addition, the Maldives. From two years ago Finolhu is the company’s first investment outside of Europe. hotelkit software has helped to implement the high group standards in the engineering department and to organize the repair and maintenance jobs.

What have been the great challenges in your resort before you implemented hotelkit?

In the Maldives we have a harsh environment with frequent weather damages caused by strong winds, thunderstorms and heavy rain and not to mention the salty air which causes corrosion almost everywhere. A well-organized engineering department is essential to keep the high standards of a five-star resort and maintain the value of the property. Without a good IT solution, an efficient management of the day-to-day business of an engineering department can be very challenging and will consume extensive administrative capacity, which could be much better used to organize the difficult supply chain for the material orders. hotelkit simply helps us to schedule preventive maintenance and to report and follow-up repair jobs. In my opinion both pen & paper and Excel are very useful tools, but hopefully not the main organizational backbone of an up to date repair & maintenance management of a resort.

What would you say was the main target of implementing hotelkit?

The main target was to reduce administrative capacity, unnecessary work and to create more transparency within repair & maintenance management. Office work alone will not help us to repair the damage at the resort, so our aim was to reduce the time spent on unnecessary administration work.

Another reason we implemented hotelkit was to increase the efficiency of the engineering department and we found it to be the perfect solution.

Repair management can be quite precarious in a hotel. Finolhu Resort found a comfortable solution with hotelkit.
Felix Jerschabek Director of Seaside Finolhu Maldives & Director of Corporate Development of Seaside Collection

We also chose hotelkit based on the recommendation and success of our other properties using the software in Europe. The software is easy to use, and that is the most important thing to us. We always keep in mind that every team member needs to be able to work with this tool and therefore it needs to be a user-friendly solution.

How or for what did you use hotelkit during the pandemic when the resort wasn’t open for regular operations?

Finolhu is a very remote and beautiful island so we missed having our wonderful guests staying here with us but aside from our visitors we also have 320 employees back of house who live here full time. Finolhu has an entire village with accommodations for almost 400 people, a staff diner, and many other staff facilities. Unfortunately there is continuously a lot of wear and tear that needs to be reported, repaired and maintained. We used hotelkit during the pandemic not only for the guest villas and public areas, but also for all of the back of house facilities. The closure time caused by the pandemic was used to do a large-scale refurbishment and upgrade of Finolhu.

Why is hotelkit an important tool for you and your team and where do you see the biggest advantage?

For the management team and myself, it is important to have a tool that we can not only use on our laptops, but also on our mobile devices. The hotelkit App allows us to take pictures and to report damages on the spot during our normal duty or during our inspections at the resort. As equally important as having a proper reporting system is the seamless follow-up of the actions which have been taken – or not taken – to fix the damages. Furthermore, many statistical functions are available at hotelkit to measure the performance of the engineering department. 

For me, the biggest benefit of hotelkit is that I don’t have to ask many questions. I can monitor the maintenance and repair activities on a single screen and even from my office in Hamburg, Germany. This is just amazing!

Repair management can be quite precarious in a hotel. Finolhu Resort found a comfortable solution with hotelkit.
Felix Jerschabek Director of Seaside Finolhu Maldives & Director of Corporate Development of Seaside Collection

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