2020 has been a roller coaster year for the hospitality industry; with more downs than ups. Most hoteliers believe that business will now be measured in pre- and post-COVID terms. As this tumultuous year draws to an end, they reflect on the challenges thrown up by the pandemic, in what manner they endeavoured to overcome these on personal and professional levels, and how they hope to use those lessons to become more flexible and resilient in the future.
Anshu Sarin, CEO, Keys Hotels
COVID-19 is a pandemic that has triggered a political reaction resulting in global closure of borders and various stages of lockdowns. This, in turn, prompted an economic collapse of unimaginable speed and scale leading to unpredictable market reaction.
The large unknown here is the emotional and behavioural change that this will engender in the short and long term. It makes great sense to separate things that one knows for sure and those one does not and then make some reasonable, educated and probable decisions!
Very importantly, the pandemic made us introspect and answer two key question, ‘What did COVID cause us to start doing that we should keep doing?’ and ‘What did COVID prevent us from doing that we should stop doing?’
Here are some learnings that we put to use by using a three step approach, which has held us in good stead:
1) Organize your cash flow: This is simply because cash is pivotal and creates options. As they say, you can always ‘un-cut’ but not ‘un-spend’.
2) Plan: This was applicable to everything, especially resilience in strategy and operations. Every business metric was held up threadbare for a relook to allow new opportunities to emerge for optimisation.
3) Act: Doing this precisely and decisively with an active review mechanism allowed us to tweak and surge as needed.
4) Communication: We informed the strategy and plan clearly to all stakeholders.
5) Reset: We have built dashboards and today that mind-set helps us run business as if it resets to zero every day.
Anuraag Bhatnagar, COO, The Leela Palaces, Hotels And Resorts
Personally, 2020 was a turning point in my career; I barely moved into my new role when the pandemic hit us. This was a time to pause, reflect and reassess our personal and professional situations. Safety and hygiene is front and center and here to stay. Working from home is not only possible but also very productive. Technology, a great enabler, brought the world closer. One’s health and that of the family
should be above everything else.
The ‘normal’ we return to will not be the ‘normal’ we knew before and the trends predicted at the decade’s start are no longer applicable. So, we spent the last few months thinking creatively about our operations and reimagining guest experiences based on our insights into how consumer behaviour will change.
While the new Leela experience may look different, we want our guests and associates to know that it is thoughtfully curated so they feel as welcome and comfortable as they did before. Our focus has been to Reimagine, Redesign and Reset. This began with safely reopening our hotels in a phased approach and carefully planning our teams’ return to work.
We gradually built consumer confidence and engaged with them and our associates, reassuring them about our relentless focus on the highest sanitisation levels. We devised initiatives to help elevate the guest experience and strengthen the brand positioning while driving demand through meaningful offers with value additions built around what matters most to guests.
Harshavardhan Neotia, Chairman, Ambuja Neotia Group
India’s hospitality industry is a labour intensive segment where business is directly proportional to the manpower to room, or seat, ratio. More than investing on extensive training, hoteliers should focus on adding staff in the housekeeping and kitchen domains.
2020 has been a year of many firsts and it changed the game. Was it possible to be a lone ranger and work with lesser manpower pre- COVID? Chances are no, as one would be branded an inferior outlet with poor service. The entire industry made drastic changes in their manpower ratios and guests soon accepted the new normal. We were forced to adapt to these changes to survive this fiscal and bring in quality along with intensive training and planning.
Additionally, we focused on cost parameters. This included concentrating on procuring indigenous raw materials, which not only reduced product cost but also helped the economy revive faster. There were lots of disruption this year; be it in eating patterns or growing preference for online deliveries rather than dining-in. Budget friendly platters and combo meals are available even at high end establishments now, while packed buffet and bento box meals are gaining popularity.
Another learning for the industry was ensuring smart use of energy to lower electricity costs. Unused areas were closed rather than keeping them ready 24/7 for guest show arounds. These were some attempts to reduce fixed costs, including re-negotiating rentals with landlords.
Rajan Malhotra, Director of Sales and Marketing, Shangri-La’s – Eros Hotel, New Delhi
Global events like the pandemic have a natural impact on our industry. All hotels and resorts learned to adapt and offer more interactive and innovative experiences to guests, whether they are at home staying at the hotel or dining-in.
At our property, we launched alternate business opportunities that were well received by guests. ‘Shangri-La To Go’, our contactless food delivery service, offers them signature dishes from our restaurants. With ‘Shangri-La At Home’ they can host celebrations in the comfort of their home while a team of our culinary experts, butlers, and housekeeping professionals manage every aspect of the event. We will also offer guests a chance to recreate the Shangri- La Wonderland at their home with our DIY Décor Kits this festive season.
We have curated a ‘The World Delivered On Your Table’ experience at our international cuisine restaurant, Tamara. This re-imagined buffet experience offers guests a bespoke dining option
with individually portioned European, South-East Asian and Indian delicacies delivered to their table. With ‘Shangri-La Workspace’, guests can recreate their private office with flexible packages, daily refreshments, technical support, etc.
The implementation of these initiatives helped us stay connected to our guests. It enabled us to delight them with renewed and reimagined experiences while we adapted to the new normal.
Rohit Vig, VP-Development, StayWell Holdings and MD, StayWell Hospitality South Asia
2020’s pivotal lesson is to constantly reset and re-orient the approach of doing business. It is important to work on strategies that increase the vividness of positive prospective. The ability to work from home has become viable, especially for management, professionals and support jobs. We found that remotely working employees can be productive and focused.
We developed COVID-19 hygiene and sanitation standards in conjunction with Bureau Veritas, which adhered to their SafeGuard Assurance Program. It complements our existing stringent standards that has guest and employee safety front and center. It will be challenging to drive business in the next three to five months due to cynical following national and international travel restrictions. To maintain the operational ecosystem, we launched staycation offers like ‘Discover the Local’ by collaborating with key consolidators and OTA partners.
We also stayed in touch with customers across various touch points without being physically present, which helped us to gain loyalty. These strategies have yielded results. When Park Regis Goa reopened in November, it was sold out for several dates. Many important dates for weddings functions are already booked at Leisure Inn Jaipur during November and December.
It won’t be business as usual for hotels, especially now that COVID-19 crisis is driving long-term changes in travel. Hoteliers must adapt their functioning and relook into the distribution and marketing strategies to meet guests’ changing demands. They should embrace the digital ecosystem to enhance business sustainability.
Shwetank Singh, VP Development & Asset Management at InterGlobe Hotels
In the initial stages of the pandemic, our focus was firmly on health and safety of our teams and guests. Realizing that it could be a while before we would witness healthy cash flows again, we hunkered down to put in place cost optimization measures.
Once we got a hold of the situation we shifted to revival mode and ensuring that our systems and people were geared up for the challenge. Several innovative ideas were implemented, including strengthening our compliance monitoring systems. We were constantly in touch with government bodies to make them aware of the issues and bring about policy level changes to assuage the industry’s long term pains.
We relooked at our entire business to make it more agile and launched IGH 3.0+ programme. Every business aspect – from cash conservation to our approach towards learning and development – was thoroughly examined. The findings were presented to the leadership teams and immediately implemented.
One key aspect was a working on ancillary revenues. Over 40 ideas were mooted, discussed threadbare and put into practise. One classic example was pitching our hotels as a potential marriage venue.
We also course corrected in several ways, like offering our rooms for mandatory quarantine, hosting health workers and COVID positive patients, tying up with corporates for business continuity, opening our doors to new segments etc.
We built a common platform to manage contactless F&B orders from aggregators like Zomato and Swiggy, social media platforms like Instagram and our in-room dining and restaurants. Another step was establishing the ‘Contact-Less Check-In’ process for guests.
Sudeep Jain, MD, South West Asia (SWA), InterContinental Hotels Group
While COVID-19’s impact on the industry cannot be underestimated, we believe it will recover in time. In managing this crisis I focused on being nimble across our operations, responding to the evolving situation in the SWA region and ensuring that we work closely with our owners to strike a balance and create bespoke solutions together for every individual hotel.
We learnt a great deal from our initial experience in China and brought best practices to our global operations. We are already seeing the benefits of being agile and working closely with our owners globally.
Our half-year financial results reflect the strengths of our business model and the effectiveness of our actions when it comes to supporting our guests, hotels and owners. It showed IHG ahead of competitors in key areas like RevPAR, guest satisfaction and occupancy.
It is also mirrored in the confidence owners have in their future with us, with IHG signing one hotel daily on average in the first half of 2020 and opening over 90 new properties. In India we signed four hotels in 2020, which underlines the confidence owners have in IHG, especially in light of our response to the COVID-19 crisis.
While the nature of every disruption is different, looking to our future growth, our ability to invest in our brands, technology and loyalty offers has meant we’ve historically grown market share during a downturn. We expect to do the same again now.
Sunjae Sharma, VP and Country Head, India, Hyatt Hotels
We swiftly responded to the pandemic and adopted innovative measures to ensure our guests could still experience their favourite hotels at home. With a focus on safety first and wellbeing always, we are reimagining the hotel journey with new amenities and offerings while taking comprehensive steps to implement enhanced protocols.
Hyatt reimagined the colleague journey to include new work procedures, colleague resources and reorientations, to ensure their safety and wellbeing. Daily colleague surveys have been introduced to measure their comfort and wellbeing, enabling hotel leaders to address opportunities, make adjustments as necessary and meet colleagues’ needs in real time.
Our way forward focuses on welcoming back guests to Hyatt hotels and assisting them in every possible way to once again experience the joy of travel safely. We believe that the industry is at an inflection point and our expertise and innovation could go a long way in normalising travel and hospitality in the new normal.
Hyatt has always supported the communities in which it operates. In an effort to care for our local communities impacted by the pandemic while reimagining the hotel experience for guests, we introduced ‘Hyatt Loves Local’, a worldwide effort to collaborate with and uplift small businesses while delivering local culinary, wellness, fashion and art experiences to Hyatt guests.
Vineet Verma, Executive Director and CEO, Brigade Hospitality Services
2020 is a year that we will want to forget, yet won’t be able to. We were compelled to think and act very differently. What was earlier deemed unconventional has become the new normal.
Digitisation in the hospitality sector, which was ‘work in progress’, had to be fast-tracked to meet new norms. What is impressive is the speed at which we adapted to the changed scenario – be it the introduction of contactless experiences within our properties, digital payments, QR code-based menu options, assisted buffets or hybrid wedding events.
A big learning was doing more with less. Due to a sudden drop in business with almost zero occupancies, most of us had to severely cut down on our fixed costs to survive. This included temporary rationalisation in salaries and reduction in staffing. The idea was to revert the staff count whenever business recovered.
Much to our surprise, we realised that the earlier ‘staff to room’ ratios might not need to be restored to pre-COVID levels even when business is back to normal. We can be as efficient, and in fact more productive than before, with lesser numbers.
We remain ‘cautiously’ optimistic for the coming year. While the announcement about vaccines boosted our confidence, the recurrence of fresh COVID-19 cases in the USA, Europe and other countries, may result in further delay in resumption of international travel. This may impact our prospects as most upscale business class hotels are largely dependent on global travellers. Hence, we should look at mining the rich potential of the domestic market.
Zubin Saxena, MD and VP-Operations South Asia, Radisson Hotel Group
Innovation, compassion, flexibility and continuous evolution are keywords at Radisson Hotel Group. So, the only way to look at this disruption is by considering it as an opportunity. As a company, this crisis reaffirmed our faith in our India Unification Plan (IUP) business strategy, which is at the heart of our plans. It leverages our expertise as a hotel management company to drive value to our owners in the form of reduced costs, higher returns and improved efficiencies.
We initiated many strategic imperatives ahead of the crisis. This included ramping up our focus on F&B, investment in technology and managing hotel flow-throughs. Most these actions have begun yielding returns and we are now fine-tuning them as long-term sustainable models. IUP has strongly guided us in these tough times and besides sustaining our business, we could unlock new opportunities.
We received positive feedback for many initiatives such as ‘Meetha’, ‘Cross Selling Incentive Program’ and numerous F&B initiatives, which opened alternate revenue channels. The key factors for success in our roadmap is our speed, innovative thinking and value-driven mind-set. As the situation unfolds, we are positive that our operational strategies will hold us in good stead.
