Controlling Odours for a Sweet-Smelling Guest Experience
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It's too easy to focus on more tangible aspects, such as the look of a place with nice furnishings, and forget all about the smell. But smell plays a particularly important role in leaving the consumer with a good impression of your business, especially in the hospitality industry.
Upon entering a business, whether it is one that sells goods or provides a service, the customer is delivered some sort of experience, which is made up of all the sensory data fed to that person by their five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell).
So strong are our associations with smell, I'm sure, if asked, most people could recall the smell (whether good or bad) of an accommodation facility they have stayed at. Accommodation providers simply cannot afford to have malodours lingering in their establishment. Unfortunately, the hospitality industry is one where malodours come with the territory, given the sheer volume and variety of traffic that passes through the doors – smoke, pets, clothing, body odour, bodily fluids, weather – and they can all leave a less than desirable odour for guests.
Due to the need for products that could rid rooms of odour, a range of products called odour neutralisers were developed, and today the science of odour neutralising is somewhat advanced. Perhaps the most common method of dealing with malodours is with aerosol sprays; just think of good old air freshener commonly used to clear the air after someone has used the toilet. The problem with these is that air fresheners often simply mask the bad odours with the use of a perfume. True odour neutralisers actually remove the odorous particles in the air. How they work will be explained below.
When you smell an offensive odour, the olfactory organs are actually coming into contact with airborne odour particles. One particular method for ridding our environments of offensive odours developed by clever scientists involves using molecules with a particular charge that have an affinity for odour molecules. Once odour-neutralising molecules are dispersed into the air (e.g. via an aerosol spray) and bound to the odour particles, the combined new molecule is much heavier than the odour particle on its own. The combined structure sinks to the ground, thereby preventing it from entering a person's olfactory organs to be detected as an offensive odour.
Don't be fooled by products that only contain perfumes as they do not remove the offensive odours in the air, and once the perfume particles disappear, the offensive ones will still be there.
One of the most important things to remember when implementing an odour-control programme in your establishment is that any attempt at odour neutralising will be in vain if you do not remove the source of the odour in the first place. If the source remains it will keep generating new odour particles that will get into the air. Odour neutralisers generally have no smell as such, but often a fragrance or perfume is used to leave the room that has been treated smelling clean and fresh.
Once you have a clean slate, so to speak, having used an odour neutraliser to rid the room of offensive odours and removed the source of the odour, it is a good idea to use a maintenance programme that might include a perfume of your choice combined with an odour neutraliser.
Even though you may have removed the source of the odour, odours often remain embedded in fabrics, reducing the chance of the odour-neutraliser particles coming into contact with them.
The maintenance programme will also take care of any new passing odours that may arise.
Using a maintenance programme will also allow you to "brand" the experience of staying in your accommodation with a particular fragrance, rather than simply providing an odour-free experience. Imagine your clients were asked to remember a smell from a time they stayed in paid-for accommodation and they remembered your establishment because of the lovely fragrance that wafted through the corridors. That would have helped to leave a lasting and positive impression.
