The Mid-Season Meltdown: When It All Falls Apart At Once

Many tourism businesses swap proper maintenance for quick, temporary fixes the moment the high season hits, stopping scheduled checks just to save time. In this episode, Samantha Smits explains why skipping these routines during the rush is actually just scheduling your next major operational breakdown. Learn how tracking your maintenance by the numbers safeguards the guest experience, lowers unexpected expenses, and protects your business reputation before a nightmare review hits. 

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Transcript

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It always happens in that same week, right? Everything breaks at the same time, and it all happens with the same booking. So for that booking, uh you seem like a terrible company when of course you're not, you're doing amazing. Everything just happens to happen at the same time. 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. Hello, hello, and welcome back. Today I'm discussing something that might be one of your worst nightmares in the middle of your busy season, your busiest week, maybe even you're fully booked, you're running from one point to another. And of course, exactly at this moment, your laundry machine gives up, a safari vehicle gets stuck, uh your electricity gives up, just everything seems to feel working, or things exactly seem to get broken exactly in this period, at the moment that you are at your highest performance with full capacity, all your guests. Yeah, this is not usually I mean of course there is bad luck, like random bad luck, but really such breakdowns in high season, they're often also a result of skipped maintenance checks during the rush. Vehicles are running back-to-back transfers, rooms are full, and you have no time for any scheduled inspection or servicing. So you swap what you usually have for proper maintenance for some quick fixes, or you skip one round thinking it'll be fine for the next one. You just hope that it you don't even hope, you don't even have a thought about it. It's it will be fine, right? Especially when it all goes slows down again, you'll have a lot of time to work on it. But really skipping these quick maintenances or checkups or surfacing is actually what is costing you days of stress and actually real money. So when you skip such maintenance logs to save time during the rush, you're actually scheduling your next breakdown. Let's imagine or imagine I hear this happening all the time, for specifically first an operator, and in this case then, since I often talk about the East African or South African context, let's say safari operator, you see it so often that exactly in this period their safari vehicles get more and more in trouble because usually there's more time for maintenance upfront, so preventative maintenance instead of afterwards when something happens. And during the high season, there's usually more switches to oh something happened, now we have to service it, now we have to do maintenance. But then in the middle of the safari park, you get stuck in the mud when there well was some rain, even if there is dry season, you can also get stuck with some rough roads or when there's too many vehicles, you have to drive around it. You very often hear this happening exactly during such a season. And when you think about during the season for accommodation specifically, the example I just gave of a laundry machine giving up or something, these are the nightmares for your housekeeping, because it really slows them down and it slows down one of the expectations that your guests have. And I mean there's many, many more examples. Could even come from the kitchen that something goes wrong in the kitchen because it hasn't been serviced or something finishes, and you were not able to predict that it was going to finish. That is actually something I'll dive into a little bit deeper in the next episode. And just in any case, whether it's the troubled vehicle in the park, whether it's the broken washing machine, the whole point that things break exactly during this high season, will I mean I wouldn't say it's improvess because stuff happens, but it as arguments that I've often used before, your clients often don't really know the difference between back and front office, they don't know all the effort you put into this, giving them the perfect experience, what goes into that from the back office. They just see the end result and feel like some will see that it was bad luck, but others feel like this is not something they could have prevented, and it of course waste a lot of time, especially if they are stuck in the vehicle and have to wait for another one if it's that bad or for it to be fixed, or when their laundry takes longer or has to be returned to dirty, or when something else breaks, like the shower or whatever, or something in the kitchen, and then something with food is not possible. The whole point is it just get it comes with like a break or a hiccup in this what you promise as a perfect experience, and of course, life happens, these things happen at any time during the year, and enough will be understanding, but you will see that more and more of this happens specifically specifically during the high season, and some clients will even experience multiple hiccups during one of their stays, and then they will see it count up like oh there's a lot of bombs, not just during the ride, but during their stay, and then they can count it up together. Is this the normal way they run their business? Because once they can often see it's bad luck, but multiple times together, what's that about for their side? And then when you are stuck in such bumps of repeating things breaking down and just all stacks on top of each other, one thing upon another, and another and another, you get stuck in this circle of having to fix something that happened, and then the next thing comes up and you fix it again, and so forth and so forth. You get stuck in this reactive cycle, and I mean that's gonna keep you busy as well while you actually are already busy, so busy on top of busy is a nightmare. So, one of the only ways out of this reactive cycle is looking at this maintenance and this servicing really as non-negotiable, not a nice to have. If you before the ISIS and were able to do preventative servicing, preventative maintenance, keep that up. Even though you think it's one of the quickest ways to save time, it actually is just delaying time, because whenever something breaks down, it costs you much more time to fix it rather than atenance or service. So when we tie this together with sustainability, as I'm always doing, and it's part of the purpose of this podcast. As illustrated before, the the verb of sustainability, if you would find it in an English dictionary, it will say to sustain, and to sustain something means to make something durable, to make something last longer. So basically you servicing your vehicles, your equipment, your tools and all of it is core sustainability because you ensure that it lasts longer, you don't have to buy something new quickly, because if you have to buy something new every single time or very often, first of all it's expensive, but it's also not sustainable because this equipment has to be produced and the more quicker you go through things, the more quicker you have to buy something new, the more has to be produced, which for the producer is good money. But if you look at where it comes from, more resources are being used. So if you look at your expenses and at the sustainability argument, it is a win-win when you can use your vehicles, when you can use your equipment as long as possible, and it also maintains the quality when you keep them serviced. So if you're looking to run your business sustainably, even pursue a certification or whatever, this is a specific part of this because you cannot run any sustainable or responsible or whatever title you wish to put in it. You cannot run any of such thing as a business operation if you are constantly quite literally burning through your equipment, your vehicles and anything just from neglecting the service, the standards that are asked for during certification or just top class business performing standard, they do ask maintenance by hard numbers and that thing, because even if we talk very specifically about vehicles, I mean we know that in general when equipment in its general sense is maintained beforehand, so preventive, the quality remains better, it will last longer, but that's also with a vehicle, of course, but also especially it will become I mean in a vehicle will always have emissions except if it's fully electric, but then you could even backtrack where does the battery come from. But let's talk about the exhaust. And of course, there's more exhaust, there's more fumes, there's more emissions when a vehicle gets more troubled, which is another extra sustainability argument where mainly also the standards really care about. No matter how busy your week is, this has to be part of it. It has to be part of someone's job or someone's task to keep this going. It it is exactly what keeps your equipment running smoothly, precisely when you need them the most, because also for your equipment, it's a high performative week, high performative season, not just for you. So protect those your equipment with data, and thereby also your business from the disasters that happen. If I mean disaster might be a big word, but oh it it is a nightmare, isn't it? It always happens in that same week, right? That everything breaks at the same time, and it all happens with the same booking. So for that booking, you seem like a terrible company when of course you're not, you're doing amazing. Everything just happens to happen at the same time, but oh most of it could have been prevented, and the client doesn't always know, which then can become a nightmare review-wise, or they demand a refund, or all of these things. So it just adds work that you could have prevented by a smaller task, and it'll just add more bigger tasks on your plate. When you take care of your equipment by the maintenance and numbers, it also will take care of your business, reputation, and the profits. Alright, if anything of what I've just discussed has triggered any thoughts, whether positive, negative feedback, you agree, you disagree, anything going through your mind, do go to the show notes and find my link in there or hop on a call with me and share them with me. Please let me know your thoughts or challenge me. I would love to hear what your experiences are, with your accommodation, with your operator in the season, what you how you experience this. And at the same time, you'll also find in my show notes one of my recent new blueprints that you you hear me often name dropping, sustainability certification standards. If you're interested in, oh, I'm not sure if I'm fully ready for such a thing yet, what are three steps you could take first to go into that direction? Do download the blueprint in the show notes for free and see where it takes you. Alright, short and sweet, and I see you on the next one. Bye. 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 Samantha Smith, and I'll see you in the next episode.