Fitted carpet cleaning for hotels and horeca

The rhythm of a hotel

A room is vacated in the morning and taken again in the afternoon. Between the two there is a window of a few hours, and housekeeping is already working in it. A heavy wash cannot be brought into it without losing the following night.

So we work in batches: reception blocks a small number of rooms on one floor, we treat them together, and they come out of block when they are dry. The next day, the next batch. A whole floor can be done this way without a single night being lost.

This is settled with the head housekeeper, not on the telephone the day before. Occupancy rules: we move fast in a quiet week, we slow down at the peak of a trade fair or a congress. It is the one part of the job that cannot be planned months in advance.

The corridors, which cannot be closed

A floor corridor is also an escape route: it stays usable, at night included. We treat it half-width at a time, one length at a time, with signs at both ends and a dry strip to walk on.

It is also the most heavily loaded surface in the hotel. Suitcase wheels crush the fibre into two parallel lines along the wall on the room side, and the square metre in front of the lifts takes everything that soles bring in from the street.

Drying is the real question there. A floor corridor often has no window that opens and weak ventilation. Without a forced airflow, the moisture settles into the backing and the smell arrives within two days — the one a guest notices coming out of the lift, before even having opened the door.

Seminars, banquets and the restaurant floor

A conference room lives in bursts. It is empty, then it takes a whole assembly, coffee flasks and a standing buffet, then it is empty again. The floor takes it all at once, and almost always in the same places: around the poseur tables and in front of the bar.

The window for the work is the one during the strike-down, between the last delegate leaving and the set-up for the following day. It is short: we then choose encapsulation, or extraction with reduced water and extra dry passes, and we dry by blowing air.

In a restaurant or brasserie dining room, the dominant soiling is not the stain: it is a greasy film. The kitchen throws it out as an aerosol, it falls back, settles on the pile and fixes the dust to it. A dining-room carpet that looks dull with no visible stain is almost always a greasy carpet — and grease cannot be vacuumed out.

Emergency stain removal, and what the floor staff should do

In a hotel, most stains are reported by the floor staff, not by the guest. The useful reflex comes down to three actions: blot without ever rubbing, work from the edge towards the centre so as not to spread it, and stay with cold water — heat coagulates blood and milk and fixes them in the fibre.

What follows is our job: red wine, coffee, urine, make-up, fake tan, candle wax and anything that has already dried. We come out on call, room by room, without tying up the floor.

Send us the number of rooms, the running length of corridors, the area of the function rooms and your quiet periods: a costed reply within 48 working hours, with a schedule that follows your occupancy rather than ours.