Miami Airport's new director prioritizes restroom cleaning‘If you’re walking through a terminal and you see a restroom is not clean – it’s everybody’s responsibility’ – Lester Sola, Director Miami International Airport.
Restrooms make or break a facility and the new director of aviation at Miami-Dade Airport USA agrees. According to an article by Douglas Hanks from the Miami Herald, Lester Sola doesn’t think much of the bathrooms at Miami International, and now he’s ready to do something about them. “It’s really a pet peeve of mine,” said Sola, a 26-year county employee recently tapped by Mayor Carlos Gimenez to shift from running Miami-Dade’s Department of Water and Sewer to running its Department of Aviation. “I think we have a great operation here. But I think if there is an area of improvement, cleanliness is one area I’d like to focus on.”
As Sola makes his first big moves as MIA director, he said he wants to focus on areas where the airport leaves passengers confused or frustrated. “This is a very large airport. Lots of people walking through it,” he said during a recent afternoon stroll past airline check-in lines and baggage-wrap kiosks. “People want to come to Miami,” he said. “But you want to make that first impression a good one- from the gate, all the way through the facilities, restrooms, and really the signage making it easy to manage your way through the airport.”
In the latest J.D. Power ranking of the nation’s largest airports, MIA finished first when it came to dining and shopping options inside the terminal. But ‘so-so’ customer reviews in the other areas - including baggage claim and terminal facilities- kept it out of the overall ‘Top 10’, with Orlando snagging the No. 1 ranking.
Sola said he has already had a meeting with C&W Services, the contractor responsible for cleaning MIA’s bathrooms. “I told them that, at least in the ones I had seen, there was room for improvement,” he said. A representative for C&W said the company is already implementing technology upgrades to keep the bathrooms cleaner, adding “we embrace Lester Sola’s forward thinking and priorities”. The majority of cleaning facility managers say restrooms are the toughest areas to keep clean, according to the Facility Cleaning Decisions 2017 Reader Survey.
And not surprisingly, a separate Facility Cleaning Decisions survey revealed that the restroom is the area of a facility that receives the most complaints.
Reproduced from ‘Cleanlink’
|
|
|
|
