A hotel or restaurant clearance is no small task, but preparing for it adequately can help make things run much more smoothly, lessening the impact on your guests and saving yourself a headache!
At The Hotel Clearance Company, we’ve carried out countless hotel and restaurant clearances, and whilst every project comes with its own unique challenges, we know what it takes to fully prepare your premises for a full clearance. The clearance process can be prior to selling, demolishing, or refurbishment, which are themselves complex processes which take time to plan and carry out. This means you should do anything you can to make things easier at the beginning!
Plan Ahead
Before you do anything that can impact your guests, you need to plan ahead to mitigate any disruption to their experience or loss of income. If you’re undergoing the clearance process to your property to prepare for a refurbishment, you may choose to close only certain parts of the venue at any one time, particularly in the context of hotels. This will mean you continue to generate income during the hotel refurbishment process, but takes a lot of coordination and pre-planning to carry out smoothly.
In smaller hotels, restaurants, and in cases where you’re clearing your property to sell or demolish, you’ll probably close your doors to guests in one go. This means you need to make sure no guests are booked in after your date of closure – if this requires you to cancel or move bookings, you’ll need to give your guests plenty of notice.
Communicate With Guests
When preparing for a restaurant or hotel clearance, you will need to communicate with your guests, offering them transparency about what is going on and how it will affect them. If you’re keeping parts of your premises open to guests during your clearance, you will need to carefully consider how this will impact their visit, and communicate this with them in good time. In hotels, you may need to offer discounts should your guests be unable to access certain amenities such as the spa or onsite restaurant. You should also consider the impact of any noise or mess.
If you’re closing your business, whether temporarily or permanently, you will need to set a date and let your guests know as soon as possible. If you offer online bookings, ensure guests cannot book after your date of closure. And if you need to cancel or rearrange any bookings, make sure you communicate this with your customers in good time, providing refunds when bookings aren’t rearranged.
Consider Your Staffing Requirements
During the hotel or restaurant clearance process, you may choose to keep your premises open with decreased occupancy or closed facilities. In that case, you should consider your staffing requirements and how these may change in comparison to your normal daily running. You may not need staff such as your chefs or masseuses while these areas of your hotel are closed, so you will need to consider how to handle this, especially if your staff are contracted a certain number of hours.
If you’re operating with a decreased occupancy rate – and therefore, fewer guests – you may also decide to decrease the number of staff you have in at each time in departments such as customer service and housekeeping. This can also help to balance your finances if you’re receiving less income due to fewer rooms or tables being available.
Conduct an Inventory
Prior to the beginning of the clearance process, you should conduct an inventory of each part of your hotel or restaurant, including kitchens, guest rooms, and lounge areas. This will give you an idea of what exactly needs to be removed, as well as anything you may want to keep if you’re refurbishing your property.
At The Hotel Clearance Company, we also carry out our own inventory prior to the beginning of the removal process. This is where we figure out what to do with everything we remove, including identifying what can be sold via auction or through private buyers, what is suitable for donation, what can be recycled, and what – if anything – will need to go to landfill.
Carry Out Room Inspections
If you’re preparing for a hotel clearance, you should carry out room inspections once the hotel (or part of the hotel) has been closed to guests. This is to ensure that anything guests have left behind isn’t removed and sold or disposed of during the clearance process, and can instead be kept and returned to their owners as per your own lost and found policy.
Find a Trusted Clearance Company
It’s essential that you work with a clearance or soft-strip demolition company you can trust to handle your assets and furniture with care. At The Hotel Clearance Company, we are hoteliers ourselves – which means we understand what is important to you and your business. As the leaders in our field, we have a fantastic range of channels to market your assets to achieve the best for you.
Our services are tailored to be as efficient as possible – all the while offering the best possible financial return to our clients. We take care of everything, so you can focus on what really matters – like running your hotel!
Develop a Clearance Strategy
We’ll do this for you. After providing an initial consultation and inventory assessment, we will develop a clearance strategy focused on your specific needs. You may need us to be discrete, making several small collections over several days or weeks to minimise disruption to your business. This will usually be the right choice if you’re keeping your establishment open to guests throughout the clearance process.
Other situations may call for us to be as fast as possible to allow you to get on with cleaning or renovating your property. Whatever you need, this is where we’ll get a comprehensive plan in place. Any items that are going to be rehomed and sold at auction will be placed into a secure storage facility until the resell of the item happens. The items removed from the hotel which aren’t going to be rehomed need to be disposed of properly. This may involve recycling certain materials, donating usable items to charity, or disposing of hazardous waste according to local regulations.
You’re Ready for Clearance!
Hotel and restaurant clearance is an essential precursor to many processes, including renovation and property sales. Assessing your property’s needs and planning strategically are crucial: using professional services like The Hotel Clearance Company will streamline your process, minimising downtime and costs.
If you’re looking to discuss your hotel clearance requirements in more detail, get in touch with The Hotel Clearance Company. Whether your business is due to go through a refurbishment, a change in property use, or you are liquidating assets, we are here to help.
Our expert team can be contacted by calling 020 8123 8241 or visit The Hotel Clearance Company and fill out our online contact form.