Unauthorized smoking in hotel rooms can cost thousands of dollars in cleaning, room damage, and lost revenue. The primary driver of hotel guest satisfaction is cleanliness of the hotel and its rooms, and smell is a major component of guests’ perception of cleanliness. FreshAir’s smoking sensor technology can help detect and prevent smoking, helping hotels to provide a smoke-free environment, save money on cleaning, enhance safety, mitigate fire risk, and, most importantly, improve their guests’ satisfaction.

Now more than ever, hotel guests are adamant about the importance of rooms being clean. As cigarette smoking has become less common in public over the past few decades, tolerance for being exposed to smoke has declined dramatically. A noticeable percentage of review complaints for any individual hotel are related to smell or cleanliness, frequently smoking-related. Those who choose to express their dissatisfaction by giving bad reviews can significantly hurt a hotel’s overall performance.

Aside from the issue of customer satisfaction and its effect on hotel performance, unauthorized smoking results in extra costs associated with expensive cleaning processes, lost room revenue, and possible credit card chargebacks. A thorough room cleaning requires removal and cleaning of all of the soft goods and a time-consuming scrub down process. Frequently, the room also needs to be left offline for one to three days to air out, resulting in lost room availability.

FreshAir Sensor technology solves these issues by monitoring for and specifically detecting tobacco and marijuana smoke. FreshAir Sensor’s patented technology is used in Wi-Fi-enabled devices. The devices communicate with a cloud-based monitoring platform which tracks the sensor data in real time and provides around-the-clock monitoring and alerts. The immediacy is important, since rooms in which only one cigarette has been smoked can be treated quickly and rented out the next night, while more smoking translates into more expensive and time-consuming cleanup.

Hotels can choose what to do with the alert: some require staff to immediately visit the room and require the occupant to sign an acknowledgment that they have smoked and agree to pay a cleaning fee; others don’t inform guests, but instead charge a fee each time sensors indicate smoking in the room.

By tracking FreshAir smoking sensors in real-time, hotels can immediately address smoking, prevent smoke damage, and minimize negative effects on other guests. FreshAir technology means they can stop smoking before substantial damage is done.