Business costs for hotels and guest houses

Hotels are energy-intensive per square metre because hot water demand is continuous, laundry runs daily, and public areas are conditioned around the clock. The avoidable cost sits in guest rooms: heating, lighting and sometimes air conditioning running in rooms nobody is in. Key-card power controls and thermostatic setbacks on unoccupied rooms are the single highest-return measure in the sector, and older properties frequently have neither.

• Setback temperatures on vacant rooms, rather than heating the whole floor to occupied levels.
• Laundry is often the largest single load after hot water — check whether outsourcing changes your economics, because it moves cost off your meter.
• Kitchens attached to a restaurant carry their own extraction and refrigeration profile — treat them as a separate exercise.
• If you are half-hourly metered, your peak is usually a morning shower and breakfast overlap. Capacity charges are worth auditing against that peak, not against average use.

A hotel produces food waste from breakfast and any restaurant service, glass from the bar, high cardboard volumes from deliveries, and general waste from housekeeping. The problem is rarely the price per lift — it is that the schedule set in a good month is wrong in a quiet one, and vice versa. Because collection is priced per lift, a half-full bin emptied on schedule in February is money straight out.

• Ask for a contract that can flex frequency seasonally. Not every carrier will, and that is a real reason to change carrier.
• Segregate food waste — it is heavy, it contaminates recycling, and separating it usually lets you reduce general collections.
• Glass from a bar is heavy enough to distort a general waste contract on its own.
• Single-use toiletries and packaging are a growing volume item and an easy reduction with guest-visible benefit.

Accommodation carries exposures most businesses do not. You are responsible for guests’ property under the Hotel Proprietors Act 1956 where it applies, you are serving food, you are very often licensed, and you have members of the public sleeping on your premises — which makes fire risk assessment and fire safety compliance central to both your legal position and your premium.

• Employers’ and public liability — both, with public liability limits often specified by tour operators or booking partners.
• Guests’ property — check the limit and whether it covers items in rooms as well as items deposited with you.
• Product liability — you are serving food and drink.
• Buildings and contents — including fit-out, and reviewed against current rebuild costs rather than an old figure.
• Business interruption — set the indemnity period against a realistic rebuild plus a season to recover trade, not a default twelve months.
• Loss of licence, where you are licensed.

Guest wifi is one of the most commonly mentioned items in accommodation reviews, and poor coverage costs bookings in a way that is hard to see in a P&L. The technical problem is usually coverage across a building never designed for it, not raw bandwidth. The security problem is more serious: guest devices must never sit on the same network as your property management system or card terminals.

• Survey coverage room by room. A fast line at the router is irrelevant on the top floor.
• Separate networks for guests, staff, PMS and payments — this is a card scheme expectation as well as good practice.
• Business fibre at £25–£60 a month covers most small properties; larger hotels with heavy concurrent guest use are where a leased line starts to earn its £200–£600+.
• The analogue phone switch-off affects legacy room phones, lift lines and fire alarm dialers. Check all three.