By Larry Mogelonsky, MBA, P. Eng. (www.hotelmogel.com)
Staycations and drive-market getaways have become the going
trends to help revitalize leisure travel for a summer season where we are still
battling COVID-19. But most hotels don’t build and grow rate from fully
independent travelers alone, nor can they keep their ledgers in the black
without midweek occupancy during off-peak periods. We all need to make groups
travel again; the question is how.
To answer this, hoteliers must empathize with the current
plight of company managers, event planners, conference organizers or anyone
else involved in authorizing a room block reservation. They all want to host
meetings, weddings, tradeshows and so on as one simply cannot network as
effectively or celebrate an extraordinary moment in time when we are all apart.
But for this other half of all group contracts, there is still a huge amount of
risk in bringing people together – too much to warrant signoff.
As many large-scale gatherings have now been traced back to
be ‘super-spreader events’, just imagine, for instance, that you are a couple
hosting your wedding and upwards of a quarter of your guests end up testing
positive within 14 days after the wedding. This isn’t something anyone wants on
their conscience. Take this a step further, though, where corporate executives
have a duty of care to protect their teams from harm. In such cases, not only
would an employee contracting the virus while traveling to an event for work
represent a moral and reputational blow for the company, but it may also turn
into a lawsuit, which can multiply quickly if the employee infects other
employees after returning from a business trip.
So, from a purely risk management point of view, there would
have to be a very strong argument made in favor of endorsing an event and a
host hotel in our present situation. While obviously much of this Covid-safety
factor is being solved by government actions, the airlines, the distribution of
a vaccine and other industries doing their part, our roles are still
instrumental in restoring confidence in group travel.
Practically all properties worldwide have taken some
measures to heighten cleanliness, sanitization and physical distancing to
reassure guests, but this may not be enough for groups. Namely, there’s no
express guarantee that all the necessary precautions have been followed
correctly or as frequently as the property has indicated. To verify that a
space is clean and therefore safe, what groups need are technologies to audit,
enforce and display compliance.
And this can only be solved through the deployment of new
technologies that may include hardware and software to track a hotel team’s
adherence to the required specifications of what areas were cleaned, for how
long, with what equipment and how often. Our teams must stay lean in order to
maintain a feasible budget, so data and automation are essential to supervise
all these touchpoints.
To explain this in more depth, Parminder Batra, CEO of
TraknProtect, a real-time location solution provider which just launched its
new TraknKleen™ product, added, “It’s not just a matter of delivering on all
the new cleanliness initiatives and measures. It’s that a property may be
automatically excluded from a group’s consideration without the underlying
technologies in place to guarantee that those measures are precisely
administered and certified completed. Hotel managers need alert systems to
monitor then rectify any infractions, while travel planners may not feel
confident enough without an electronic record and audit trail of all cleaning
activities.”
This thought about consideration is also being reflected in
internet travel search and aggregate services, with new features that motivate
guests who prioritize cleanliness and sanitization above price or onsite
amenities. Prominently to this end, TripAdvisor has recently launched a filter
for users to narrow hotel queries by the safety measures that have been put in
place, along with validation as part of the review process. Expect similar
features to be unveiled for the OTAs and other meta search websites.
What this means for groups is that if you aren’t keeping
pace with the current guidelines – and enforcing them – your property may be
out of the running well before a decision is to be made on where to book and
host the event. For instance, a travel planner may cross-reference any hotel
bid against the TripAdvisor safety filter to check not only for the property’s
level of compliance but what past guests have noted. Any cited errors may
generate skepticism and thus jeopardize the negotiation.
But this also can be a worthy method to protect average
daily rate because, in today’s spooked travel climate, groups will be inclined
to pay more for a ‘verified clean’ hotel. As previously stated, the only way to
truly deliver on an onerous guarantee of this nature is to deploy various
technologies to support – as well as audit – your housekeeping services.
Especially as our teams will have to stay lean for quite some time moving
forward, you can’t simply have room inspectors and supervisors monitoring every
staffers in a one-to-one ratio akin to some Big Brother environment; you have
to let technology automate as much of the blocking and tackling as possible.
As for specifics, there are already a few management
software companies with new modules to address the particular concerns brought
up by Covid – ALICE, PurpleCloud and StayNTouch as three examples. These can be
deployed to supply viral safety checklists, manage PPE inventory, document
contact tracing records, regulate room cleaning buffers, sequester teams for heightened
social distancing and provide a myriad of other features. On the hardware
front, products like TraknKleen™ use IoT-enabled staff cards and inventory tags
to log an audit trail of housekeeper movements and room cleaning details,
thereby ensuring the execution and delivery of the ‘new normal protocols’ in a
property’s housekeeping standard operating procedures.
While to some this may seem a bit too 1984, steps are being
taken by all vendors to ensure data aggregation and anonymization. With
staffers workflow uninterrupted, these technologies definitely merit further
investigation so that any property can spotlight its verified clean status to
help give groups peace of mind and spur them to book.
About Larry Mogelsonsky
Larry Mogelonsky
One of the world’s most published writers in hospitality, Larry Mogelonsky
is the principal of Hotel
Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice. His
experience encompasses hotel properties around the world, both branded and
independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Larry is
also on several boards for companies focused on hotel technology. His work
includes five books “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012), “Llamas Rule”
(2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Llama is Inn” (2017) and “The Hotel Mogel”
(2018). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business
challenges or to book speaking engagements.
Media Contact:
Larry
Mogelonsky
Email: larry@hotelmogel.com
Website: http://hotelmogel.com/
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