Flying Blind in High Season: Why teams stop tracking when your rooms are full

Many tourism operators only track their resources during the quiet months, completely stopping the moment high season hits. In this episode, Samantha Smits explains why letting your team guess instead of measure during the rush is a major risk for your business. Learn how to keep up simple, two-minute weekly tracking habits for water, fuel, and electricity that protect your cash flow before the heavy post-season bills arrive. 

Connect with Samantha Smits on LinkedIn or her website.

Are you a tourism CEO looking to protect your international contracts and cut daily operational costs? Download your free copy of the B2B Tourism Blueprint here to stop cash leaks, satisfy international agents, and stay ahead of strict compliance rules.

Ready for direct advice? You can plan a Match Call with me here.

Love the show? Please follow, rate, and review The Sustainability Edge: Your Tourism Podcast on your favourite podcast app. Your support helps us reach more visionary leaders in the industry.

The Sustainability Edge is hosted by Samantha Smits, your guide to turning sustainability into a competitive edge.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is not something that shows obviously in your face. It really just shows up weeks after it finally became quiet or when that bill hits you and you have then no idea what started it or what caused it because you were not on it. Hi, I'm Samantha Smith and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, the tourism podcast. No Yargon, no fluff. We're breaking down sustainability and especially how to turn sustainability in a practical tool that gives you more profit, more time, stuff that's staying, and a business you can be proud of. Let's get started. The rooms are full, all your survivor vehicles are out, you're renting more, your whole team is moving crazy, there's calls 24-7, bookings are up, calendar full, and on paper it looks like obviously like one of the best months of your year. But as you are in this, yeah, well, let's say beautiful chaos, there's something risky happening in your back office, and it's not so loud, but no, it's not something you tend to notice, it's something you tend to notice afterwards, or if you notice it's something you don't see or take an issue with. But at the moment your team has quietly stopped measuring anything, really. And you might think, okay, well, what's the issue with that? What should be measured? If you listen to any of the previous episodes, you'll hear me talking very often about the use of measuring your resources, and with that I mean from electricity to fuel to water, any of the bills you continuously have, and that you have big influence on that you can basically change any day by changing your habits. So at this point, when you're hitting your full capacity in a busy season, tracking your resources is one of the first things that is gonna go. Everyone is exhausted, the phone's gonna keep ringing, guests are arriving, people start guessing instead of measuring, such as laundry liquids can just be going in by the eye rather than measuring cup. Then there is the drivers or the mechanicals who are not doing proper fuel checks, operations stop tracking the fuel that's actually used, and there are the bills, finance is just paying the electricity and water bills and the other bills without being too concerned about what's going on. And again, it it really seems like quick ways to just save some minutes in the busy day where time is very, very important, and but there's so much more, it really doesn't stop. You can imagine walking to a kitchen in accommodation during such a fully booked week, you see the same pattern, portions are more gassed, uh as in they're gassed by hand, and food waste not really locked anymore, so you will actually see when you stop measuring that that waste increases. So, because even such 30 seconds of a scale, we apparently don't have the time anymore. There's a lot of plates waiting, because of course there's a big number of orders, the front desk who's supposed to or to note any hours of the generator or the water meter, all of it is not coming coming through. And because yeah, the busy four families that wants a check-in, all of this looks like small shortcuts, prioritizing gas, and of course you have to prioritize the guests from the round, but it isn't any major win of skipping out on these because every one of these skipping out feels very harmless, but while they are happening across every department in your entire business during the exact week when your consumption and your bills are going to be at the highest, running your business on this guessing work is going to be a direct hit, and you will only see this it after the high season because then you start looking again. Hey, what did this high season actually cost me? Because I know that the majority of the revenue you have received before, but still most of the bills are happening during. So it doesn't really happen because you or the team is getting lazy. I mean, you're all honestly rushed and with a good reason, but the tracking routines that you have built, they were not really built in a way to survive this high season pressure because they they were the first things to get ditched immediately, and you're going to see afterwards why that is such a disaster. So as an owner, I mean, imagine I've seen this that you you're walking into this operator office or into a lodge, and where there's normally a logbook with certain measures, you scroll to this, whether you're working there or me as an auditor, and all of it is empty, or the online Google Sheet has not been updated for some while, and no one even bats an eye. And then when I would ask the question, hey, what happened there? You didn't have the time, the answer is actually very it can go two ways. The answer usually goes from ah yeah, no, it's a busy season, we'll do that later when we find the time. So something that just accepts it, or one is like, ah, I know that we should be doing this, but so one is very apologetic, and one is like normalizing it. That's usually the two situations that I find. But yeah, then I do ask them if I mean if they've made time for my visit, for example, then there is time to ask them, hey, could you just pull up one of these bills at the moment and see? Is it like surprisingly higher? And then often, like, oh, whoa, we actually should check that. And then there is this feeling of surprise actually, in combination with being exhausted from the season, because they realize, oh, we really neglected this, that really isn't good. Because in general, anyone running a business, I mean, we're talking specifically about tourism, but in general, you know, without knowing what's going on, the data, the cost that you have, it would be very hard to steer the business into the right direction. I mean, how would an very different comparison? How would an airplane, how would the pilots fly the airplane without having all those numbers and all those buttons and all the details of the wind, the direction, the degrees, all of it? They need all of that to fly in the right direction. And that is the same for your business, truly. And this hits you extra hard in such a busy season because a longer time period comes over it, and there are more guests in your accommodation, there are more staff in your tool operator office, so there's much more use of those resource bills that you pay every month, so they naturally do increase, but at the same time, there's zero control and keeping them within normal boundaries or within budget. So, really, this is not an annoying gap in your paperwork. There's a real number attached to it that you are paying it already and paying anyway. So when we put a number on this, because we just lost track of things for a few weeks, it sounds very abstract until you do some of the math. But an example I often have, because you see that more often, a single leaking pipe from like or like a water tap or like for a no for a toilet, if it just goes unnoticed for like 10 days because nobody's doing the water meter or everyone is normalizing it, it can actually waste you thousands of liters without any exaggeration, huh? Because it drips day and night. And of course, there's an environmental concern in there, but even if you wouldn't have a care about the environment, you do care about your pocket. And the same if there's like a generator running slightly inefficient because nobody is logging it and nobody is turning it, it's not turning automatically off, and these kind of things, all that extra diesel burn, it beyond the environment, it also burns your pocket. So actually, with that in mind, now that that landed the bit for you, multiply that by every department that quietly stopped measuring during the rush, from laundry, kitchen, transport, finance, operation, front, back, uh field, anything, and just put that on top of each other. This during your busiest three months of the year. I mean, okay, you also have the Christmas holidays, the December holidays I would say, but it's it's one of your three busiest months of the year. So this is exactly where your consumption is going to be at its highest, and every small efficiency will bleed into a big, big invoice. And I keep making this economic point view because that's where most people will care about before, unfortunately, the care more will realize the environmental impact as well. So here, the frustrating thing for you is this is not something that shows obviously in your face, it really just shows up weeks after it finally became quiet or when that bill hits you, and you have then no idea what started it or what caused it, because you were not on it at the actual moment. And here there's some companies have a quality manager that stays on top of things, but when you don't, oof. So if you really want your cost to stay stable, as in when you're fully booked, it really helps to look at how do other companies help this, especially the ones that, for example, have a sustainability certification, or what does such a sustainability certification expect you to do in such a case? Because they are management systems, after all, that can help you solve such things. So if we look, for example, at certification logic here, then they do ask you to require, yeah, they do require tracking. What do we talk about all the time? The water, electricity, fuel, all of it, and usually by a monthly default, and of course, some months this is going to be easier than other months. That's the whole point, also, of this episode. But what will this look like in practice to continue without a break, without a pause? Is the the sheet should exist. There is going to be a table, it can be a shared spreadsheet. And the point is you could do this on a weekly basis, and yes, even if you're busy, this should be a non-negotiable part. So just on a weekly basis update it quickly so that it doesn't become as much of a big task monthly. Because breaking something down in smaller steps, I mean, even for you, when you know that you're too busy, you rather have a small task and a big task, don't you? So when you're super busy, you'd rather do something small every week than something big every month. Because just from the word big, you already feel like I don't have time for that. You come with all the excuses. So by doing this just on a weekly basis, it will be like under two minutes by just reading the right numbers, by knowing where they are. It doesn't have to be very complex. The point is here being consistent. When you are consistent in this, you build a habit, it becomes part of your job. It is really important that someone keeps doing this, especially when times are at the busiest, especially when there is rush. And for such sustainability certifications, the requirement exists because, again, we keep repeating the argument. During peak season exactly is when use is at its highest. Keep reading the tank of the vehicle whenever it comes back and before it leaves. You can build an early warning system for yourself. And by keeping the the water readings up and you see a jump, you know exactly something happened and you can track the cause. You cannot track the cars a month afterwards and then you don't know what to do, how to prevent it again. Catching it the day or the week it happens will be a minute fix rather than to after a month finding out how do I ever ever backtrack this. It will just make your life so much easier to keep the habit going in high season, especially when you keep it going, it actually costs you less work. I know how it sounds by keeping something going instead of letting it go. Yes, it costs you less work because when you initially let it go, you I mean you let it go, but the problem doesn't let you go. The problem will still be there and it'll just come back bigger than ever. So actually you just decide to make the problem bigger at another time rather than keeping it small for now. So that is a choice you make. So help yourself and the team to shift them from guessing to measuring at all times. It will just protect basically your cash flow, your bills, which they will also appreciate because then they can get a nice bonus after the high season, no? So again, don't let this high season rush become an excuse to fly blind to compare it again to that airplane where you don't know where the wind is coming from and what direction to fly, where the location is. Because it isn't just admin for the quiet months, it really helps you to stay profitable, also, especially in the high season, because it is the properties that are out of high season that still have control of their bills that kept this up for them. This is a non-negotiable and they don't necessarily have a very fancy system because even with fancy systems, you need a human eye to read the details and to fill them in. Otherwise, there needs to be a way that something even if you think about AI, how can AI read those numbers? You would still have to take a picture of the number and send it to the AI, you know. So, in any way, you still need the time. It's much quicker for you to just type the number yourself. It's much, much quicker and less false sensitive. So those the successful properties and the ones that have sustainability certification are the ones who kept it simple, they just made it the normal two-minute daily habit or five-minute week, they just keep it up and know about the power of being consistent. So, wow, we've already hit quite some minutes. For you, if if you are now in that middle of the high season rush and you still feel very overwhelmed, maybe on this topic or beyond this topic, or you have opinions, feedback for me, you agree, you don't agree, do go to the show notes and do reach out to me on LinkedIn or anywhere and do let me know your thoughts. At the same time, I'm also happy to say that my newest blueprint has been live. It's called The First Three Steps to Tripling Bookings Through Sustainability, which is a bold claim to make, which I wouldn't make without having the case study behind it, which you can find in the blueprint. Actually, a two operator that did get certified, and because of the agents they got did triple in their business. It is happening today. So, do you want to know the first three steps to get to achieve the same result? Do go to the show notes and download the footprint. It's a practical roadmap for busy owners like you with first three steps to get to the same results. Alright, see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening, and congratulations on investing your time today to think strategically about your future, to make sure you never miss a step to understand sustainability better, how to grow your competitive edge. Follow the podcast right now, and if this was helpful, please leave a five star rating. It will help other people like you to find these tools. I'm Cymanda Smith, and I'll see you in the next episode.