COVID-19’s ruthless global march is foremost a human tragedy and then an economic one. The hospitality industry felt its massive impact due to the pause on global travel, tourism and restaurant services as well as the migratory nature of the work force.
Himanshu Lodha, Founder and Director of AH International (AHI) explains how this uncertainty, coupled with evolved customer expectations, compelled hotels to review their existing service offerings. This relook required them to adapt to changes in elevating customer experience, shift in consumption patterns, and quality asset management.
How did the pandemic highlight the importance of housekeeping?
Post-COVID, health, safety and hygiene are keywords in today’s business. Hotels, restaurants, spas, etc., are asked to put in place many sanitary adjustments that increase the cost function of the supplier. This has made housekeeping’s role more critical than ever. Also, integration of technologies like contactless and digital solutions is the new reality. All this has shifted the focus of Operating Supplies and Equipment OS&E procurement towards customer safety and hygiene. We now see a surge in demand for sanitary products, particularly in the housekeeping department.
OS&E represents a wide range of daily use items used by hotel guests and employees. How can working with a reputed service provider on a regular basis ensure that hotels enjoy significant savings?
The uniqueness of our company is more than our ability to adapt to changing customer’s expectations. It is a passion that requires foresighted planning, commitment to implementation and a great deal of attention to detail.
We focus heavily on service quality and invest in it, both in the form of technology to seamlessly integrate into our customers’ processes. We are able to consult, organise almost any product in desired quantity and design and curate a one-stock turnkey solution platform with a basket of diverse products that meets the needs of brands like Ginger or The Ritz-Carlton.
Our primary objective now is entering more geographies and extending our network of owners and partners globally. We also want to add a personal touch by creating custom-made products and solutions for this industry.
How has its regular association with Hotelier India Awards helped AHI drive its commercial strategy by interfacing with the relevant audience?
Over the years, AHI has worked closely with Hotelier India through its magazines, digital publications, and awards in meaningful ways to leverage its influence on an unequivocally maturing industry. This has drastically improved our audience reach by connecting us to the right stakeholders.
In the hospitality business, connecting to the right people is essential. We adopted newer models over the years to reach hotel owners, investors, asset managers, hotel operators, general managers, club operators, cruise ship operators, hotel franchisees and independent restauranteurs.
Nonetheless, the most effective practice has been working with organisations that cater directly to these people. It is intrinsically more fitting for us to push the envelope of our business model and marketing strategies by establishing a stronger relationship with Hotelier India.
How does participating in the 12th Hotelier India Awards help you highlight how industry stakeholders should assess products best suited for their requirements and budgetary needs?
The 12th Hotelier India Awards event is the perfect stage to interact with hospitality experts about novel OS&E propositions. It permits us to demonstrate AHI’s stratagem over the past few years where we remodelled our business blueprint by embracing intricate models. This enables your hotel’s procurement costs to be transparent to the executive management team and every arm involved in the procurement process and hierarchy.
We’ve been developing the most effective methods to activate strategic sourcing and approve, order, track, receive and pay for goods, using innovative technology to create a centralised access to supplier profiles, order history, cost difference and product guides — where necessary, saving money through pre-negotiated pricing on thousands of F&B and operating supplies.
AHI has also joined hands with merchandising partners to improve buying efficiency using comparative analytics and performance dashboards to gain insights from data and purchasing patterns provided by account support experts. Hence, this event is a great opportunity to exhibit our value proposition as an OS&E aggregator who continuously pushes the envelope of innovation while opening our doors to bright talent at all levels to support our rapid growth.
COVID-19 is still creating supply chain issues. How will you leverage the Awards to educate hoteliers about the need for a well-stocked OS&E inventory?
The disruption of the supply chain has stressed the importance of trusted supplier relationships. When it comes to lead times and product quality issues, hotel owners need to work with trustworthy suppliers who can fulfill their needs and show empathy for what they went through in the last couple of years. This means transparent communication between suppliers and customers has become increasingly essential.
In the current environment, it’s best to have two weeks or more worth of OS&E on-hand. Of course, this leads us to yet another almost universal issue—the space to house the OS&E and the ability to organise it in a way that makes it easily accessible for both restocking and inventory analysis.
Hence, we offer a ‘one-stop solution’ experience so that you can access our bespoke product range and get you better pricing on supplies you already purchase for your operation. Hence, we strengthened our supply chain resilience through our ‘Supplier Diversity Program’ and strategic global partnerships, we’ve also pioneered a brand-in-brand business model that combines our hospitality lifestyle brands and adapts them to fit each individual project to optimise development costs and maximise return on investment. This allows project developers and owners to partner with us as a single purveyor to create a customised local solution based on their desired market and brand positioning.
