Meeting the needs of a premier hotel in the heart of a busy city
In the heart of Washington, D.C. is a luxury hotel with a soaring atrium, lush outdoor terraces, and lavishly appointed guest rooms with designer touches of bronze and oak, along with floor-to-ceiling windows that take in expansive views of the capital city.
Like so many other hotels right now, though, the property also has extensive needs when it comes to cleaning, disinfection, and maintenance. Recently, UG2 began its partnership with the hotel and even from the initial walkthrough, it was clear the building’s previous services provider had not met expectations.
Identifying the Needs
To address the physical distancing required by COVID-19, the hotel had to shut down temporarily, barely a year after it had first opened. Aiming for a reopening in late August, the hotel’s management team wanted to ensure it would meet even higher standards than before the brief shutdown. But that came with challenges.
In an initial inspection, UG2 found areas of improvement:
- Marble flooring throughout the property was not polished regularly, giving the floors a dull look.
- Predecessor cleaning company hosed down kitchen equipment to clean it, which resulted in fryer damage and some minor appliance damages.
- Improper and infrequent cleaning of the kitchen floor caused consistent grease residue, presenting a slip-and-fall risk.
- Poor maintenance of floor mats in the kitchen and prep areas resulted in mold growth, another health concern.
- Extensive meeting spaces, both indoor and rooftop, required cleaning and disinfection for safe usage.
Items like these indicate a minimum level of care and cleaning that can easily extend across an entire property. If the marble floors are ignored, what do the elevators look like? What about dining areas and guest rooms?
The luxury hotel needed to ramp up its appearance quickly, since renewed travel in Washington led to over half of its rooms being booked for opening weekend—with consistent reservations of 30 to 70 rooms a day into September.
Moving Ahead
To address immediate needs for a much higher level of cleaning and disinfection, UG2 worked to ensure that the hotel could meet the recommendations for the chain’s established cleanliness program.
This protocol was put into place for all of the chain’s brands, and involved new procedures for housekeeping in guest rooms, changes to in-room service for contactless food delivery, increased cleaning of public spaces, and improved solutions for event planning for more safety.
UG2 transitioned the luxury hotel’s health and safety procedures to an even higher level, thanks to our experience with facilities maintenance. That meant UG2 teams were able to track cleaning and sanitizing in a meaningful way that ensures no areas will be neglected, even if they seem unused.
Because the hotel’s kitchen area was a particular concern, UG2 team members made sure that daily cleaning addressed formerly problematic issues. For example, on a daily basis, UG2:
- Cleans and soaks filters in the stoves’ hoods.
- Degreases and wipes fire sprinkler pipes and drains grease traps.
- Keeps floors cleaned and degreased, including floor mats.
- Removes carbon deposits and residue from stoves, ovens, broilers, and grills.
- Cleans and sanitizes exterior and brushes debris from interior of wood stone pizza oven.
This is just a brief list of the many intensive daily cleaning tasks undertaken by UG2. This enhanced attention to detail was implemented in the hotel’s public restrooms, employee locker rooms, back-of-house corridors, the main entrance, and the expansive lobby area.
UG2 also ensured CBE compliance by subcontracting to Total Services, LLC, a minority, women-owned business that offers buildout and remodeling services for commercial spaces.
The pandemic is certainly not over, and we’ve all come to accept that we don’t know when there will be enough of an endpoint to make us feel “back to normal.” But even when that time comes, having extensive cleaning and disinfection practices will remain key for providing healthy and safe shared spaces for occupants.
As the hotel welcomes guests, UG2 is dedicated to making sure they can have the confidence that comes with a focused, comprehensive approach to facilities management.