Running a Resort in Peak Season Without Running Your Team Into the Ground

Ana Sanchez

Operations Director · Sno Hotels

Ana Sanchez manages operations at Sno Hotels, a resort brand serving high-demand seasonal markets. She has led the redesign of Sno's housekeeping scheduling, maintenance dispatch, and guest communications stack to handle peak-season volume without proportional headcount growth.

May 6, 202652 min

Key Takeaways

  • Peak season exposes every process that works by feel rather than by system. If it depends on one person knowing the right thing to do, it will break when volume doubles.
  • Housekeeping scheduling was our highest-volume, highest-error process, and the hardest change to sell internally. We ran a 30-day pilot on one floor before rolling it out.
  • Automate the dispatch. Keep the judgment. A system can route a maintenance ticket to the right person faster than any radio call. It cannot decide whether to pull a guest out of their room to fix it.
  • Guest communication in the 48 hours before arrival is high-volume and highly templated. We automated it entirely. Zero complaints from guests. Significant relief for front desk.
  • The morning briefing was 45 minutes because the data lived in four different systems nobody could see at the same time. One dashboard cut it to eight minutes. That is six hours a week back to operations.

Resort hotels face a pressure no city property does: demand that doubles or triples in a six-week window, with the same team, the same rooms, and guest expectations that do not adjust for occupancy. Ana Sanchez spent two seasons rebuilding Sno's operations infrastructure to absorb that pressure. Her approach was methodical: map every process that touched a guest room or a guest request, score each one by error rate and team time, and automate the rules-based, high-frequency ones. In this conversation she walks through that triage list, explains the three automations that landed fastest, and talks about the judgment calls she refused to hand to a system.

We were not understaffed. We were under-systemised. The same team, the same rooms, the same season — but the right tools in place — and we handled 40% more rooms per housekeeper with fewer errors than the year before.

Ana Sanchez, Sno Hotels

The guest does not know or care that it is peak season. They booked the same room at the same price. The system has to absorb the pressure so the team can absorb the guest.

Ana Sanchez, Sno Hotels

Transcript

Full transcript coming soon. In the meantime, watch the episode or download the white paper for the key frameworks from this conversation.

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Questions from this episode

By automating the rules-based, high-frequency tasks first — housekeeping scheduling, maintenance dispatch, and pre-arrival guest communications — and freeing the team to handle the judgment calls that require human presence. Ana Sanchez at Sno Hotels handled 40% more rooms per housekeeper in peak season after automating scheduling, with fewer errors than the year before.
Map processes by frequency and error rate. The highest-volume, highest-error process is the first target. For most resorts, that is housekeeping scheduling or maintenance dispatch. A 30-day pilot on one floor or one process type is enough to prove the case before a full rollout.
For templated, pre-arrival messages — yes. Communications in the 48 hours before arrival are high-volume and predictable. Automating them removes pressure from the front desk while maintaining consistency. Sno Hotels reported zero guest complaints after automating pre-arrival communications entirely.

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