Planning cleaning for the tourist season: how to do it

Planning cleaning for a tourist season means looking beyond the single week: every phase of the season (opening, peak, closing) needs a different way of organising staff, equipment and even quality control priorities.

Contents

• A three-phase plan
• The opening phase
• The peak phase
• The closing phase
• Adapting the plan to properties with different seasons
• Useful tools for planning the whole season
• Involving department heads in the planning
• Reviewing the plan mid-season
• Documenting lessons learned for next year
• A plan written before the season starts

A three-phase plan

The tourist season splits into three moments with different needs: the opening, which calls for training and fine-tuning; the peak, which calls for maximum staffing and the tightest timing; and the closing, which calls for reorganising teams towards more extraordinary work. Treating the whole season as one uniform block, with the same staffing and the same priorities from start to finish, is one of the most common and most costly planning mistakes.

The opening phase

In the first few weeks, the focus is on training new staff and bedding in processes, with wider time margins than the rest of the season, so any mistakes can be corrected before occupancy hits its peak. It is also the moment to gather structured feedback from staff on any process weaknesses, while there is still time to fix them before the peak arrives.

The peak phase

During the busiest period, scheduling extra shifts for peak season becomes crucial: reinforcement teams on standby, extended weekend shifts, and some flexibility to handle last-minute bookings without running available capacity completely dry. In this phase, every organisational decision should already be made before the week begins: there is no time to improvise solutions once the workload is already at its maximum.

The closing phase

Towards the end of the season, reorganising the cleaning teams shifts from the daily turnaround towards deeper work: extraordinary cleaning of common areas, maintenance that cannot happen while open, and preparing spaces for a possible winter closure. This phase is also the right moment for a review of the season just ended: what worked, where the biggest problems occurred, what to change in next year’s planning while the details are still fresh.

Adapting the plan to properties with different seasons

Not every Tuscan property shares the same seasonal calendar: a city hotel may see demand spread more evenly across the year, with peaks tied to events and fairs rather than the summer alone, while a farm stay in a rural area may have a much more concentrated season between May and September. The three-phase model still holds in both cases, but the length and intensity of each phase need calibrating to the property’s own specific calendar, not applied as a generic model regardless of context.

Useful tools for planning the whole season

A shared calendar, even a simple one, that visually shows the three phases with their indicative dates helps the whole team understand not just what to do today, but also what to expect in the coming weeks. This kind of visibility reduces staff anxiety during pace changes (the sudden move into the peak phase, for example) and makes scheduling time off and shifts far smoother than planning week by week without an overall view.

Involving department heads in the planning

A seasonal plan written exclusively by management, without input from the housekeeping supervisor or the outside supplier’s own manager, risks ignoring real operational constraints that only whoever runs the team day to day genuinely knows. A planning meeting with these managers, before finalising the plan for the season, makes it possible to spot practical issues early (the real availability of experienced staff for a given phase, for example) that would otherwise only surface once the season is already underway.

Reviewing the plan mid-season

Even the best-built plan needs checking against reality mid-season, not only at year end. A brief mid-season review (is the planned staffing enough? are occupancy forecasts holding up?) makes it possible to correct course with useful weeks still ahead, instead of discovering a significant gap only during the end-of-season review, when it is too late to act on that particular season.

Documenting lessons learned for next year

At the end of the season, before the details fade from memory, it is worth writing down in a few lines what worked well and what did not in each of the three phases: a training start date that was too late, staffing underestimated for a specific week, a supplier that did not respond quickly enough to a request for reinforcements. This short document, picked back up the following year before starting the new planning cycle, prevents the same mistakes from repeating season after season.

A plan written before the season starts

The moment to plan all three phases is before the season begins, not week by week as it unfolds. It is the approach behind how we build seasonal planning for our cleaning service for Tuscan properties.

Want to build a cleaning plan for your entire next season? Get in touch.