You aim to create a positive review and a repeat customer for each guest that enters your hotel’s lobby. Lighting is something that affects your guests for the duration of their stay. To ensure they have a positive experience from beginning to end, the lighting in your hotel needs to be on point throughout your facility, from the lobby to the rooms and everywhere in between.
Keep reading to discover the top four challenges hotels like yours face in lighting their building and how you can overcome them.
The Top 4 Lighting Challenges & Solutions for the Hospitality Industry
1 Lighting the In-Hotel Restaurant
For a restaurant, whether it’s attached to your hotel or otherwise, the goal is always to create the best possible experience for your guests. If lighting is too dim in your restaurant, guests will struggle to read the menu, will not be able to enjoy the look of their meal, and may even bump into things on their way to the restroom. Conversely, if the lighting is too bright, your guests may spend their whole meal trying to avoid glare from an open window or shiny piece of decor. They may also get a headache from squinting to block out the excess light. Neither of these experiences will make them want to dine there again, or leave a positive review.
To ensure the lighting in your restaurant is not too dim or bright for your guests, do a walk-through at every table at different points throughout the day. This exercise will show you the areas that are getting too much or too little light, and you can add shades or additional lighting accordingly.
In addition to brightness, you’ll also want the color of your restaurant’s lights to be spot on. This will make the food and drinks you serve appear more appetizing and encourage more orders. To establish the perfect lighting color in your restaurant, pay attention to the light’s color rendering index (CRI). When it comes to CRI, the higher the better. But, the general rule of thumb is not to select anything below 90.
Getting the proper lighting, brightness, and color will go a long way in creating a relaxed and comfortable mood and a positive experience for your customers.
2 Lighting the Hotel Room
Your guest’s hotel room poses a similar challenge to your restaurant – dim lighting. The two most common complaints about hotel rooms from guests are poor vanity and reading light, along with the lack of multiple sources of light. Many hotel rooms have one primary light rather than multiple lamps and lights for each part of the room.
To increase your hotel rooms’ brightness and increase positive reviews, bolster your rooms with additional task lighting for the bathroom, closet, and vanity mirror. You can improve your guests’ experiences by installing dimmer controls so they can control or customize their space to meet their needs.
3 Spending too Much on Electricity
Energy Star estimates that hotels spend $2,196 per room on energy every year, which translates to about six percent of your average annual operating costs. All lights need electricity, but new lighting strategies and technology can offer huge savings on your electric bill if you implement them correctly.
One way many hotels waste energy and unnecessarily increase their electricity bills is by lighting empty rooms. However, you can avoid this wasted energy by installing controls to automate when lights turn on and off. Below are three of the most effective options for lighting controls:
Dimmers: Dimming light bulbs reduces energy usage and allows you and your guests to set the desired ambiance for the room.
Sensors: Installing occupancy sensors in conference rooms, photosensors in parking lots, and motion sensors in areas you want to keep secure all minimize wasted energy and ensure light is provided when needed.
Timers: If you know certain rooms only need to be lit for a specific portion of the day, timers are the way to go.
4 Keeping up With Lighting Maintenance
Your hotel has lighting throughout every inch of the facility, which means you have many areas to maintain, even the places that guests never see. In addition to making your lighting aesthetically pleasing, lighting maintenance must be a top priority because it ensures all areas throughout your hotel are well-lit and safe.
If your hotel is struggling to maintain all of your lighting in a reasonable time frame, here are three ways to get the job done efficiently:
Group replacements: Rather than climbing a ladder every time a bulb burns out, replace all the bulbs in one area all at once. This method is especially effective if you’re dealing with hard-to-reach fixtures or high-traffic areas, like your lobby.
Scheduled maintenance: Schedule regular lighting maintenance on a calendar. Once this calendar is created, you don’t have to worry about maintenance, and you can prevent unexpected outages.
Maintain Lighting Inventory: Work with a trusted provider to keep the most commonly used lighting products in stock at your hotel so you can address problems as quickly as possible.
Ready to improve the lighting at your hotel? Speak with a Hospitality Lighting Expert from the GCE National Team today.
