Picture it: You’re a Hotel, resort, motel, luxury spa owner or manager in Pinellas and it’s almost tourist season. You’re ready. You’ve been prepping and preparing and slaving away for the moment that the snowbirds flock in from up north. You’ve done all the necessary groundwork to fix up the hotel – you’ve remodeled, the pool is in top-notch condition, and you’ve upgraded to all of the finest amenities. You’re as ready as you’ll ever be.

Except you missed something.

The landscaping! You haven’t updated the Landscaping in months. Your flower beds are so last season, your colors are all wrong, the trees and shrubs have grown into a jungle-book nightmare! You wanted sophistication, elegance, and a real tropical feel, but instead, you’ve just got an overgrown, muddled up mess.

You’re not ready for tourist season, after all – but you can be.

At Landcrafters, we’ve been in the Florida landscaping game for over 20 years, so we certainly understand better than most how important tourist season is. That being said, we also understand better than most just how much your hotel’s landscaping is to tourist season, and to its overall success. That’s why we’ve put together a game-changing list of tips, tricks, best practices, and trends! We want to see you, as owners, managers, and hard-working folks, succeed in everything you do – we hope this list will help get your landscaping to where you want and need it to be!

Check it out:

It’s All in the Details

We know we don’t need to tell you this part – details are part of your profession. Including little details in your everyday landscape plans. Think about how painstaking the details are in the lobby, at the pool, in the rooms – those detail-oriented must-haves need to be matched by the landscaping. Perfectly groomed flowerbeds matter. Neatly trimmed shrubs and trees matter. Lush green grass, beachy palm trees with the right amount of coconuts, sandy features, they all matter. If you don’t take notice of the details, you’re not giving your location the full landscaping attention it deserves.

Emergencies are Going to Happen, Be Ready

One of the best practices for hotel managers, owners, and workers is to always be ready for emergencies. Even if you’re the most prepared hotel site in all of Florida, you need to be ready for emergency site visits. Even if you have a landscape Crew who comes every 7 days to work on basic things (mulching, trimming, weeding, etc.), you need to ensure that you have a crew who is on-call, flexible, and can make emergency visits and rush jobs for those emergency touch-ups you need.

If you’re looking to be the best, you need to work with the best, and that includes a crew that can get a call the night before and make necessary adjustments and touchups the very next day.

Site Visits Have to Increase as You Get Closer to the Season

One of the best tips we can offer our clients is to increase the site visits you have on the schedule, especially right before tourist season. Oftentimes, hotels will have companies come in once a week or every ten-to-twelve days. While that might be enough for a private residence, your commercial property is in the limelight all the time – it needs to look its best as often as possible, and multiple visits a week can do that. A good crew will be on the site two to three times a week to ensure that the flowers are neat, the planters are straight, and every part of the landscaping area is prim and proper. If you can’t swing it to have year-round attention like this, we certainly suggest doing so leading up to, and during, tourist season so that you know your grounds are going to pristine.

It’s Still a Hotel – Courtesy and Quiet Matter. Do Your Landscapers Know That?

One of the best practices we’ve found over the years is to work with hotels during the hours that make the most sense for their guests. Sure, it’s a fancy, luxury resort where things are going on at all hours of the day and night, but it’s still a resort, after all. People are still sleeping and requiring quiet time during certain hours – that should always be respected. The last thing a hotel guest wants is to jump out of bed at the crack of dawn to a mower – that really irks customers and makes your hotel much less pleasant to stay at. We suggest working with a crew who respects hours and is flexible with what works for your hotel. For example, set a hard and fast rule that landscape crews shouldn’t start before 10am.

Remember the Season and Your Plant Rotations

No, we don’t mean tourist season, we mean the ACTUAL season. Is it summer? Winter? Fall? Your landscaping appearance needs to reflect which season you’re in for consistency sake. We know, we know. We’re in Florida. We have never-ending summer, right? Sure, especially in Tampa Bay, it can be hard to steer away from the summer-tropical-escape landscape, and you don’t necessarily have to. It’s important to have a plan for plant-rotation – in fact, some hotels have up to five plant rotations a year in order to keep everything fresh, in season, and appealing. You might consider transplanting seasonal flowers in order to avoid bare spots, as well. Adding in some Spring time colors during the appropriate season, and properly rotating your flowers and shrubs can do wonders for your landscape theme and curb appeal.

Curb Appeal, Professional Appearance, and Sophistication Should Shine Through

Speaking of curb appeal, you better believe that matters, as well as professional appearance. It’s vital to your hotel that your landscaping crew doesn’t leave equipment around, drive around in rusty trucks, or overall, present an image that’s less than professional. Work with a crew that has clean vehicles (that store equipment well), reliable equipment, and professional, polite crew members. In the same way, it’s important that your crew has impeccable communication skills. While they’re not there to answer guests’ questions, it’s always possible that a guest might mistakenly ask a landscaping crewmember for information or directions. Ensure that you hire polite, friendly folks to work on your landscape to avoid any sort of guest discomfort.

Did our landscaping for hotels article help you out? We sure hope so! As a Florida-based business, you can bet we appreciate the tourist season, which means we certainly appreciate our hotels and resorts who do their best to make Florida (the Tampa Bay area specifically), a must-visit destination! If you’d like to work with us or just call and bend our ear, phone our office at (727)-201-3947. Need some more advice and information on how to make your commercial property sing? Check out our blog for all the up-to-date info you need to know! Happy reading!