Tracking DND Rooms in Housekeeping Productivity

Many hotels choose to track Do Not Disturb rooms that were not cleaned.  If DND rooms are captured, they are typically set with either a minutes per room (MPR) target of zero (since the rooms were not actually cleaned) or a very minimal MPR target of 2-5 minutes (since the housekeeper may incur some time checking on the status of this room).   

There are three main advantages of capturing DND rooms:

1. Improves housekeeping forecast in Scheduler – the default assumption in the housekeeping forecast model is that you are going to clean all of your rooms.  If you typically have some guests who are DND or no service rooms that are not cleaned, the system can include a forecast of how many of the rooms are typically DND to account for all of your rooms sold.
2. Simplifies ensuring data quality – many of the housekeeping productivity reports compare rooms cleaned to prior day rooms sold as a control to ensure all of the rooms are being accounted for.  DND rooms can cause a variance between rooms cleaned and prior day rooms sold that may need to be explained.
3. Shows accurate room assignments across housekeepers – some hotels may have policies that require a uniform number of rooms be allocated to each housekeeper (e.g. each housekeeper receives 16 rooms/day).  If DND rooms are not tracked, it may appear that one housekeeper received fewer initial room assignments than other housekeepers who did not have any DND rooms.

How the system calculates hours and MPR when using DND rooms

A really important point to understand is that the system will not subtract DND rooms from the total rooms cleaned.  It actually just assumes that DND rooms are a type of room cleaning just like a check out room or stay over room.  This has some real strengths because it accomplishes the advantages outlined above.  In addition, by treating DND rooms just  like any other room cleaned, it allows the hotel to give a small MPR target for these rooms if they choose.  

The disadvantage of this approach is that it can lead to some confusion about MPR calculations for a room attendant with multiple DND rooms in one day, particularly if the hotel applies a 0 MPR target to DND rooms.  

We’ve included an example below that is helpful to show how the minutes per room targets will be calculated if you have DND rooms with a 0 MPR.  

Our recommendation is to focus always on the actual hours vs. the target hours for each housekeeper and the overall numbers. The MPR figures may appear to be low if a housekeeper has DND rooms.  This is by design, and it impacts both the actual MPR and the target MPR.