Client

95%
Average room occupancy during peak demand
2x
Increase in the rate of room turnover
100%
Accuracy of charge sheets provided to lodge clients

Sodexo Drives Room Occupancy Up to 95% and Streamlines Billing at Sella Ness Lodge
About The Client
Meet Sodexo: An integrated services provider offering best-in-class remote lodging
About the Operation
Sodexo tasked to manage a 426-room lodge serving the Shetland Gas Plant located on the Shetland Islands
Sodexo took over the management of the Sella Ness Lodge, located in the Shetland Islands of Scotland, in June of 2018. The lodge houses crew working at the Shetland Gas Plant, a natural-gas processing plant owned jointly by Total E&P UK and Dong E&P. The plant operates at a processing capacity of 500 million cubic feet of gas per day.
At the Sella Ness Lodge, Sodexo is responsible for:
- Managing the room allocation of 426 lodge rooms for various incoming work crews
- Maximizing room occupancy at the lodge, a top priority during heavy crew rotations
- Overseeing daily front- and back-of-house operations on-site, including: check-in and check-out, dining, housekeeping and routine property maintenance
- Streamlining billing to the Shetland Gas Plant project operators housing workers at the lodge

The Challenge
Legacy systems used at the lodge left rooms underutilized and made accurate billing difficult to produce for paying clients
Before working with Camps & Crew, Sodexo used multiple un-integrated systems and depended on manual data entry to manage room allocation and day-to-day operations at the remote lodges. When work crews began to grow in size as the project in Manitoba ramped up, it became increasingly more difficult to manage rooms and daily operations at camp in an efficient manner.
Sodexo faced challenges common among lodges serving remote projects scaling towards peak construction. Their challenges included:
- A lack of visibility into real-time room availability, resulting in suboptimal room utilization
- No ability to allocate room types based on staff type or seniority
- A broken line of communication between the front desk and housekeeping staff that slowed room turnover down during times of high occupancy
- Charge sheets that did not provide a complete audit trail of reservation bookings and related modifications

The Solution
SmartLodge increases occupancy as room demand peaks and ensures maximum billing accuracy at Sella Ness Lodge
After implementing the Camps & Crew Smartlodge system at Sella Ness Lodge, Sodexo has successfully driven up room occupancy and improved transparency of the billing process to the benefit of both Sodexo and its paying clients.
Smartlodge has optimized lodge management at Sella Ness in various ways, including:
- Driving room occupancy up to 95% on average, when Sella Ness experiences peak demand. Staff have achieved this high rate of occupancy due to a real-time view of room availability that always reflects the most up-to-date booking data related to room cancellations and modifications.
- Ensuring all lodgers are placed in their proper room type,in accordance with their staff type or seniority level. With room allocation powered by a system providing real-time room counts, staff can ensure room type inventory always meets or exceeds the needs of incoming crews ahead of their arrival.
- Increasing the rate of room turnover by 2X by ensuring the front desk and housekeeping are always in communication about the room status of every room across the lodge.
- Guaranteeing complete accuracy in billing, powered by charge sheets that break down all service days down to the individual lodger. Charge sheets provide a complete audit trail of all reservation activity, including: cancellations, modifications, no-shows and other billable activities occurring on-site.
Download the PDF
Receive a downloadable PDF copy to review in your spare time or to share easily with colleagues.