Project accommodation is what companies provide to staff members or a project workforce when it’s not feasible or safe for them to travel between the workplace and their private residences. The accommodation can be provided by a variety of service providers, from large hotel groups and exclusive lodges to bed and breakfast independents, hostels and rented furnished houses, apartment complexes and everything in between.
However, project accommodation is, in most instances, a grudge purchase; an expense you must incur that cuts right into your bottom line. Occasionally, a project comes along where the client reimburses you for these expenses, but these are few and far between.
Project accommodation is not only limited to a bed, a shower, and a continental breakfast. It usually includes an onsite lunch, a dinner of some sort, a laundry service, housekeeping and perhaps the most problematic of all, transport. The collective phrase for all these services and expenses is best described as ‘offsite services’, since all of these services are provided offsite. Because of this, it’s not simply a case of seeing what you pay for and comparing that to the satisfactory feeling you get when watching large quantities of equipment being offloaded, concrete being cast or cranes at work.
Offsite services are services you only notice when they don’t work properly. You notice them when transport providers block roads and your workforce arrive late, or not at all. You notice them when angry guesthouse owners spam your inbox about unruly residents, when the workforce is forced to arrive in dirty overalls due to laundry not done or when they’re served a sub-par lunch and complain about it. Perhaps most telling of all, you notice them in preventable incidents traced back to fatigue or even malnutrition of your workforce. In the end, you can tally the costs in production lost on top of financial cost if these offsite services are poorly provided.
Offsite services are services you only notice when they don’t work properly. You notice them when transport providers block roads and your workforce arrives late, or not at all.
iLodge can help you navigate the quagmire that is offsite services management. We will expose the obvious and not so obvious pitfalls, the dos and don’ts, the dangers and the solutions. Through this service we will bring about savings to project costs that are deemed impossible but are well-documented.
