When one walks into a hotel, they secretly want to be blown away. The hotel lobby should get all customers excited about spending their nights in a beautiful, friendly and well-looked after hotel – all of which is decided from the moment they walk through doors and into the lobby. Now, how do you achieve an amazing first-impression with your guests? Well, there are a few things your hotel lobby needs in order to do that.
You can have the highest quality furniture and expensive art all over the lobby walls, but it won’t mean anything if the lobby is dirty. This is an area that needs to be cleaned every day – dusted, swept, vacuumed, polished, fluffed, organised and aired – it needs to be in best possible form every single day.
From counters to carpets and curtains, it all needs to be cleaned and presented beautifully. As people travel in and out of the lobby on a daily basis, dirt will always find its way in and it’s important to make sure that any large dirt incidents are taken care of as soon as possible. It will be a testament to the quality of service your hotel promises its guests.
If you have a relatively large lobby area, you need to make sure you have some sort of signage that guests can follow when they walk in. It can be quite embarrassing and frustrating for a guest to have to walk and ask around for where the check-in area is. And if you do have signage, make sure it's visible. Not above a high archway where people won’t naturally be looking, or hiding behind an overgrown indoor plant.
Place it just before or after the front door where they enter and have clear directions as to where the different areas of the hotel are. You can even supply a map of the entire hotel plot that will also show guests everything the hotel has to offer.
Once they walk in, especially if it is a family, group of people or general enquirer, they will need a place to sit and wait while others are being helped or while they wait for the appropriate person to talk to. For this reason (and many others), your lobby needs a seating area.
And in this seating area, you will need a comfortable lounge suite, coffee tables with the latest magazines (not your personal collection of Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health from 2013) and a complimentary watercooler station. You can also include a mirror for those who wish to fix their appearance while they wait and it’s a good way to reflect the rest of the lobby area.
For these guests who are sitting and waiting, you should offer free wifi. Even if you think about your guests who made online bookings and need to access the emails on their phone for proof of payment or whatnot, they should be able to do that from a wifi hotspot.
You don’t have to offer a completely open wifi for the lobby area (but definitely for the rest of the hotel), but a complimentary 30-minute access should be more than enough. You do it this way because you also don’t want people who aren’t intending on being guests to stand outside of your hotel doors and use up all your wifi.
Okay, so this suggestion seems to be a pretty obvious one, but that’s part of the problem. Many hotel lobbies don’t have a prominent front-desk that encourages guests to interact with them. The more space you have at your front-desk, the more guests you can accommodate at one time and the more organised the actual desk-area can be. You don’t need the top of the desk to be cluttered with paperwork and personal belongings, guests won’t be confident in your organisational skills if you do that.
Your front-desk also needs to be manned at all times. You never know when walk-ins will, uh, walk in or when current guests will come down and inquire about something.
And on that note, your lobby needs to have friendly staff. If guests walk in, they usually want to talk to someone to find out information or check themselves in. So, there can’t ever be a lobby with no staff on the floor. You’ll need your front desk person or people, someone to show guests to their rooms and someone to act as security by the front door.
Having these staff members there is one thing and them being friendly is another. Remember, the lobby is where first impressions are made and your staff form part of that impression. Staff members should smile, be helpful, attentive and genuinely invite guests to enjoy their stay. It will make guests so much more excited to be staying in your hotel.
