What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance is the proactive scheduling of maintenance to avoid breakdowns, rather than reacting with repairs when issues arise. A study of Hong Kong hotels showed that hotels spent 48% more on corrective maintenance than preventive maintenance, often leading to overspending. To manage costs effectively, hotels should find an optimal maintenance level, where preventive measures outweigh the financial and reputational costs of corrective actions.

Preventive maintenance programs help property and asset owners avoid downtime by systematically scheduling work orders and checks before equipment failures occur.  Preventative maintenance ultimately increases the life of any piece of equipment  or critical assets relative to reactive maintenance which occurs after equipment already has issues that need to be fixed.  Preventive maintenance plans are mostly developed and executed by maintenance teams in any organization and help to reduce maintenance costs in the same way that preventive healthcare saves on long term medical expenses.  For certain assets like a hotel air conditioning unit in peak summer, unplanned downtime can lead to lost revenue.  Throughout the lifecycle of critical equipment, engineering and maintenance personnel must perform condition monitoring checks throughout each asset’s lifecycle.

Daily Maintenance Tasks

Incorporating daily maintenance tasks can be an effective way to catch early signs of wear and tear. Daily maintenance tasks may include checking HVAC units, inspecting guest room appliances, and verifying that pool filtration systems are running smoothly. Routine, small checks performed daily prevent larger, costly problems in the future.

Preventive Maintenance Examples

Much of the most valuable preventive maintenance centers around electrical and mechanical systems, which have a relatively high cost for replacement compared with its ongoing maintenance. But there are plenty of areas in your property that could benefit from regular preventive maintenance, some of which have a direct impact on the guest experience should they stop functioning.

Some other examples of preventive maintenance in properties with high traffic, such as hotel properties, retail establishments, transportation hubs and office buildings, include:

• Plumbing and sewer systems

• Hot water heaters

• Pool pumps

• Electrical systems

• On-premise computers and software

• Refrigeration in your kitchen, restaurant and bar

• Espresso machines in your lobby cafe

• Grease traps and floor drains

• Carpets in hallways and guest rooms

• Pest control measures

• Trimming branches and other potentially damaging landscaping

• Changing filters on water systems and drinking fountains

• Cleaning gutters

• Inspecting roofs

• Emergency sprinkler systems 

Each of these items has a useful life that spans a range of years. By scheduling regular inspections and streamlining your hotel’s maintenance, you’ll get more out of your investments and keep using these assets towards the upper range of their usefulness.

Room Maintenance and Guest Impact

Preventive maintenance also extends into guest rooms. Room maintenance tasks should include inspecting in-room HVAC units, furniture integrity, lighting, and guest amenities. These inspections not only prolong asset life but also enhance the guest experience by ensuring comfort and reliability.

Hotel Preventive Maintenance Checklist

There are four types of actions on any preventive maintenance checklist: inspection, detection, correction, and protection. Inspection detects any potential emerging issues so they can be corrected as soon as necessary. Prevention prevents problems in the first place, such as cleaning laundry lint filters to prevent fire risk and reduce energy usage. 

Tasks on a preventive maintenance checklist can be time-based (eg. cleaning lint filters every Monday) or usage-based (cleaning the filters after 1,000 loads of laundry). For hotels, it's often much easier to do calendar-based inspections, which reduces confusion and increases consistency. Otherwise, staff may not really know where they are on a usage-based checklist and thus feel less urgency without a time-based deadline. A few notable exceptions are any vehicles or equipment with built-in usage tracking. 

High-traffic properties share some common items that absolutely must be on the preventive maintenance checklist. Here's a sample checklist for your hotel, broken down by focus area and including some overlap between major “deep cleaning” tasks that also function as preventive maintenance. 

Printable Hotel Maintenance Checklist: For ease of use, here’s a downloadable or printable checklist format. This helps staff quickly check off completed tasks and ensure that no critical items are missed.

You can download HotelTechReport's free interactive hotel maintenance checklist template  in Google Docs,
PDF  & Excel Formats

Every property is unique. So, in addition to these standard preventive maintenance items, grab your management team and walk the property. Carefully document anything that you see that could benefit from ongoing maintenance. Look not just for the obvious but also for things that have a direct impact on the guest experience. Regardless of whether these things are visible to the average guest, Your goal should be to develop a comprehensive list of everything that must be maintained property-wide.  

Next, take that list and combine it with the recommended maintenance windows for all mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Finally, develop your preventive maintenance schedule based on both the recommended maintenance schedule and guest visibility. Items that could potentially jeopardize your reputation should be prioritized over others that are less visible and/or less impactful to normal operations.

What is CMMS Software?

A CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) is a software tool that organizes and automates maintenance tasks to ensure that assets remain in good working condition. CMMS software is essential in complex environments like hotels, where numerous systems and equipment require regular upkeep. This software centralizes maintenance schedules, work orders, and asset histories, allowing hotel staff to track and manage equipment health efficiently.

Though the term "computerized" may seem outdated in today’s digital world, CMMS is widely used across industries, from hospitality and apartments to factories. CMMS tools support preventive maintenance programs by providing automated reminders and tracking each asset’s service history, which helps to reduce downtime and avoid costly repairs.

Maintenance planning team members use software to get a real-time view into asset health without all the time-consuming tasks needed to do so.   For example, previously a hotel engineer would need to keep a detailed log of HVAC unit purchase dates and issues.  Today, software does all that for them where they load each new unit into the system and software then monitors average health to give automated alerts.

Effective asset management and preventing asset failure / equipment downtime can be huge drivers of profitability so investments in CMMS and preventive maintenance software tend to provide  very strong ROIs.  There's nothing worse than having critical equipment breakdown when it's needed most.

Seasonal and Energy-Efficiency Maintenance

Seasonal maintenance tasks, such as winterizing water pipes or checking air conditioning units before peak summer, can prevent costly repairs. Additionally, preventive maintenance can contribute to energy efficiency by ensuring that HVAC systems and lighting operate optimally, which can reduce energy costs and benefit your bottom line.

Safety Compliance

Preventive maintenance also supports compliance with safety regulations. For example, regular inspections of fire extinguishers, emergency lighting, and exit doors ensure that hotels meet safety standards. This aspect of maintenance can protect both your staff and guests while avoiding fines.

Preventive vs. Prescriptive Maintenance

The best maintenance management software offers predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Predictive maintenance uses equipment history and condition to forecast potential issues, while prescriptive maintenance leverages analytics to surface specific maintenance actions before issues arise. This proactive approach can be especially valuable during peak season when higher traffic can stress hotel systems.

Best Preventive Maintenance Software for Hotels

Managing preventive maintenance in hotels quickly becomes complex with the vast number of tasks and the specific frequency required for each. Relying on a calendar alone can lead to oversight and slippage, where just a few missed tasks can disrupt the maintenance schedule. Over time, this slippage causes your preventive maintenance to drift away from best practices, leaving your assets vulnerable to breakdowns and your team overwhelmed by reactive fixes.

To prevent these issues, many hotels now rely on preventive maintenance software. These tools help managers and maintenance teams stay on track by centralizing all maintenance tasks, schedules, and sub-tasks in one dashboard. The software automatically assigns tasks based on predefined intervals and updates progress in real-time. With this centralized approach, everyone remains on the same page, and maintenance duties are evenly distributed and consistently tracked.

An automated preventive maintenance workflow from Upkeep

These automated workflows can be enhanced with what's called prescriptive maintenance. This is where the system analyzes usage and surfaces potential maintenance issues before they occur. 

Prescriptive maintenance is especially powerful in peak season, with higher-than-usual traffic. As hotel managers, we know what happens when things get busy: maintenance schedules don't always adjust and systems break -- inevitably at the worst time! The best maintenance management software leverages smart analysis to prevent these nightmare scenarios.

Two other help features to look for are integration with your guest messaging platform so urgent repairs are quickly routed to the right person and an asset library that centralizes manuals and training associated with your property systems. 

Here are the top five software tools for hotel preventive maintenance, as rated by verified HTR users: