"The AC isn't working": what's behind the complaint and how long it takes you to solve it

"The AC isn't working" is one of the complaints that comes up most often at a hotel front desk. And it almost never describes a fault: it describes a guest who is too warm.

Four different things can be behind it. The unit in the wrong mode, a room that started too late, a thermostat that doesn't respond to the touch, or a dirty filter. Only the last one has anything to repair.

None of the four can be told from reception. That's why what decides how the call ends isn't the cause: it's how long it takes you to know which of the four it is.

How this gets solved today

It depends on what you have installed. Three scenarios, from the most common to the best.

1. With no system at all

The call comes in and there's no way to know anything from downstairs. Someone from maintenance goes up, knocks, walks into the room of a guest who is already uncomfortable, and looks at the controller.

And looks at it right then. You don't know what time the unit was switched on, or what temperature the room was at when the guest walked in, or whether it has spent half an hour coming down or half an hour flat. Without that history, a good part of the diagnosis is guesswork.

It usually ends one of two ways: it gets fixed in ten seconds by pressing a button, or the conclusion is that "it works fine" and they leave. Worst case, a work order gets filed for a healthy machine.

2. With a centralised screen

Plenty of hotels already have climate centralised on a screen at the front desk, and that is already a lot. But it's worth looking at what can actually be done with it.

At Sercotel Granada Suites, before we connected it, reception had their screen and could do two things from there: change the mode and change the temperature. Anything beyond that got passed to the maintenance manager, who was the one with access to the full system.

Three limits, then:

• Only from that screen. If the person who knows how to read it isn't at the desk, it's no use.
• Only the current state, with nothing about what happened in the hours before.
• Only two actions. Mode and temperature. For anything else, somebody has to call somebody.

3. With the climate connected to a platform

That's what our Automatic Climate does. The call comes in, you open that room from your phone or from any computer, and there is everything you need to decide: whether the unit is on, in which mode, at which setpoint, what temperature the room is actually at, and how long it has been running.

A concrete example, from a hotel where we have the system installed. The maintenance manager told us it had happened to him more than once: the guest reports that the AC isn't cooling, he opens the app and the unit is in heating mode. He changes the mode remotely and that's that. What he saves is the trip up to the room, which between climbing, knocking, going in and coming back runs to about twenty minutes.

See how Automatic Climate works

What you find when you go and look

The unit is in the wrong mode

The guest touches the controller, switches to fan (or to heating in summer) without meaning to, and the unit does exactly what it was asked to: move air without cooling it.

It gets mistaken for a fault because the unit is on. It blows, it hums, and it doesn't cool.

The same story with a different face is the fan speed at minimum: it cools, but moves so little air that the guest doesn't notice, especially if the bed is far from the vent.

Both are fixed remotely in under a minute. Both, with no system, cost a trip upstairs.

The room started far too late

A closed room in summer isn't at room temperature: it's at the temperature of the oven it turned into over the course of the day. Our measurements give an average of 30.4 °C in a closed room in summer with the AC off.

If the guest walks into that and turns the AC on, the unit can be perfectly fine and still take a good while to bring thirty degrees down to twenty-two. Meanwhile they are too warm, and they draw the obvious conclusion.

There is nothing to repair here and nothing to fix remotely. It gets avoided earlier: if the room is pre-conditioned from the booking, the call never happens.

The thermostat doesn't respond to the touch

We saw this one at Sercotel Palacio Gamboa. The thermostats that were installed have the main board plugged into the base, and it comes off easily. Someone handled it, it ended up badly connected, and the thermostat stopped responding.

For the guest it's identical to a broken AC: they press the buttons and nothing happens. And for the hotel it's the only one on this list that really does require someone to go up, because it's physical.

The difference is getting there knowing it. If, from the screen, the unit obeys the commands you send it remotely but not the ones the guest gives it on the wall, you already know to look at the thermostat and not at the machine.

The AC cools less than it should

When the unit is properly configured and still underperforms, the first thing to check is the filters. Víctor Pons, director of Sercotel Palacio Gamboa and Granada Suites, told us so when we asked whether he had had any climate incidents: he had had none involving thermostats, and what had coincided was a stretch with filters pending cleaning. "The filter clogs up and stops letting as much air through."

This is the actual fault on the list, and it's the cheapest of all of them if you find out in time. The problem is that it doesn't announce itself: no symptom until a guest notices it isn't cooling much.

What each call costs you

None of the costs have anything to do with the repair.

The review. A guest who spends the night too warm doesn't write "the unit was in fan mode": they write that the hotel doesn't work. The technical cause doesn't count towards the score.

The time, even in a normal hotel during normal hours. Every call takes someone away for a while: go up, knock, go in, look, come down. With a night desk that's one person fewer downstairs. In a building with no reception it's a whole trip. And often, to press a button that could have been pressed from a phone the moment the call came in.

False work orders. A good part of that work ends up as a fault report for a machine that is fine. When part of the maintenance list isn't faults, it's harder to prioritise the part that is.

In short

Of the four causes, three have nothing to repair. And of those three, two are solved remotely in under a minute if you have the room's status in front of you. The fourth, the filters, is the one worth catching early.

The difference between a hotel that handles this well and one that doesn't isn't better equipment. It's being able to answer, without going up, what is happening inside that room.

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Want to see what this looks like in your hotel? Book a 20 minute call and we'll show you the dashboard with a case like yours.

You can also take a look first at how Automatic Climate works or read the Sercotel Granada Suites case, where all of this is up and running.