Outsourcing cleaning services in the tourism and hospitality business.

Outsourcing is an important part of most businesses and the hotel industry is no different. Managing the cleaning department of the hotel is not an easy business especially when there are no expertise to see it through. Outsourcing is a strategic way to improve performance by way of cutting costs, obtaining resources and by minimizing the organizational structure. These is done by sharing the non-core activities to other companies specialized in the field. This paper will be looking at why most hotels outsource the cleaning department and how it is managed. It is generally more profitable to outsource the non-core activities for Hotel business to allow more focus on the more important aspects, but when outsourcing is done wrongly there consequences are great and costly. This paper will talk about the challenges as well as the benefits of outsourcing cleaning services. Integrating cleaning service companies to align goals is an important part to overall success but achieving this cannot be simple. Having a proper tool and ways of guaranteeing this is essential. Some tools which aims at measuring success and failure is key performance indi-cator (KPI). KPI is an indication of how the business is doing and a good place to adjust and improve processes where appropriate. Having a service level agreement in the very beginning for any business is a must and the hotel business is no different. This enables the service provider to have a full understanding of the hotel’s goals. Once this is done, there is a solid foundation to measure performance which can minimize the supplier risk. There will also be suggestions of how SLA can help build and maintain a healthy supplier relationship management and how the suppliers can be integrated to share in the hotels goals