While most people were preoccupied with challenges faced by large hotel chains in 2020, they forgot about the difficulties independent hoteliers were tackling. Primary amongst this was building trust in a post-COVID era.
The larger brands had it relatively easier, since they were known for their processes and also had large marketing budgets to support their reputational management. For smaller hotels, this expense was disproportionately larger.
However, rather than lament about these complications, Shruti Shibulal, CEO and Director of Tamara Leisure Experiences identified advantages that would stand the company in good stead. The first one was leveraging agility in decision-making across several operational facets, starting with hygiene initiatives at its five properties.
“Our major challenge was building trust with guests and employees, so we focused on that from the day we went into lockdown. We worked on the ‘Raksha’ initiative, which is a set of standards and processes to prevent COVID-19’s spread,” she stated.
Alongside training employees about these protocols, documentation about guidelines were created for internal purposes by enabling cross-departmental collaboration. Moreover, medical professionals were invited to speak to staffers about the virus and how it spreads. Additionally, Tamara used social media to maintain constant connect with its guests and shared details about the ‘Raksha’ initiative in all their consumer communication. “Our three focus points included bolstering external communications with guests, internal communications with staff and revisiting cost structures to reduce and optimise expenditures,” Shibulal stated. This is where corporate nimbleness came in handy for the boutique hotel brand, as its flexibility helped it efficiently restructure operations.
A STEP AHEAD
The hospitality industry has dealt with some major business disruptions over the past few years – be it demonetisation, implementation of GST or environmental factors like flooding in select cities. Each of these severely impacted business, especially of boutique hoteliers.
Having weathered these challenges Shibulal understood the merits of learning from these experiences and continually building resilience. “We invest heavily in maintaining and improving our quality processes. A crucial component of this is conducting risk assessments,” she revealed. This is done every six months, and is conducted across the organisation to understand the fault lines and implement precautionary measures to avoid serious challenges.
Shibulal believes that steps like these can help independent hotels better manage their revenue forecasting and management process to deal with unexpected challenges. Moreover, pre-emptive financial planning and analysis is needed to understand changing customer behaviour, especially in the new normal.
“For instance, we predicted early on that the most important shift would be a focus on trust and a sense
of safety. Our goal was to ensure that people felt so comfortable that they would talk about it,” she stated.
Hence, the brand started focusing on personal recommendations, and was fairly successful in this move. As soon as guests visited Tamara’s properties, they started posting their experiences the safety protocols on social media platforms. According to Shibulal, this proved to be a more successful promotion strategy than any PR, advertising or marketing could have been.
When Tamara’s first resort re-opened for business, the company quickly implemented contactless check-in and also created an app for guests to submit their health forms.
ROLLING WITH THE FLOW
Alongside these hits, there were some misses. “I would say it was honestly the inability to predict the boom that resorts have seen over the last few months. We never expected revenge travel to emerge as strongly as it has; we are currently beating our forecast,” Shibulal claimed.
Her team quickly recapitulated and today has a better idea about changing consumer preferences in the new normal. So when Tamara’s first resort re-opened for business, the company was quick off the bat to implement contactless check-in and also created an app for guests to submit their health forms.
This agility was possible partially because of the group’s genesis and Shibulal’s own background. Her father, SD Shibulal, was one of the seven founding members of Infosys who later managed the tech behemoth as CEO and MD. Hence, embracing technological resources is part of the family’s corporate DNA.
“Tamara already has a strong foundation in tech-enabled facilities. Hence, when it was most needed, we were able to leverage that infrastructure to implement technology in a cost-effective manner,” Shibulal candidly stated.
PEOPLE FIRST
In terms of financial planning, Tamara undertook enormous amount of cost rationalisation in the past few months, with a deep focus on bringing down every possible variable expense. However, Shibulal maintained that the company was clear about its organisational priorities: people always came first.
This is evident in the fact that it did not lay off anyone, unlike many big hospitality brands. Instead, it applied nominal salary cuts for the top 3% of the organisation, so that the rest of the staffers remained unaffected.
“We also realised that our staff would need engaging material to endure this uncertain time and made it a priority to really invest in our people,” Shibulal recalled. Tamara’s HR department created interactive and constructive training sessions and over hundreds of hours of training was provided to the staff, including cross departmental training. It slowly moved people around to different units to show how COVID protocols were being implemented in case specific ways.
Realising that the lockdown was breeding lot of uncertainty and fear amongst hospitality workers, the
independent hotel chain extended mental health support to employees. “We worked with non-profit organisations to offer one-on-one counselling sessions that addressed how to manage mental wellbeing and stay engaged in productive ways,” Shibulal explained. “We embraced every tech-enabled facility we could to improve communication across the organisation.”
As a result, many employees brought fresh ideas to the table. These perspectives were used by the organisation to navigate important operational changes such as cost reduction. These proactive actions show that independent and boutique hoteliers are blessed with one characteristic that bigger brands often lack – dynamism. They are well-placed to leverage it in fundamental ways that can be beneficial to them in the long term, their size notwithstanding.
