Surviving Disaster In The Hospitality Industry With IDS Next

Disaster Recovery For Hospitality Industry: How To Survive The Challenging Times

The hospitality industry has always been sensitive and vulnerable when exposed to natural or human-made disasters such as pandemics, climate change, weather hazards, street crimes, cyber-attacks, and terrorist attacks.

The last decade alone was sufficient to realize that in such disasters, hospitality businesses are compelled to look into new strategies, opportunities, and ventures. Tourism statistics show a drastic decline in tourist arrivals during the pandemic.

Steps for disaster recovery in the hospitality industry:

Ensuring guest and employee security

The protection of the masses during a disaster is vital in a highly people-centric industry like hospitality. In addition to their own staff, hospitality businesses are responsible for the safety and security of their current as well as past guests.

Initial steps to manage such situations include a strict maintenance management system. A lesson to comprehend from incidents such as the Surfside Condominium collapse in Florida includes negligence of maintenance, which, in turn, led to a major threat to those who utilized the property. Hotels can use maintenance management modules that consolidate maintenance-related queries, register complaints and assign jobs facilitating staff to track the due maintenance tasks and rectify them before damages become irrecoverable.

Guest and staff protection measures also include ensuring post-disaster safety. For instance, the usage of thermal imaging systems in popular tourist and shopping spots post-lockdown ensured safety against COVID-19’s highly contagious nature.

Hotels have also commenced investing more in contactless technology during the pandemic. Integrated solutions that combine ordering, POS operations, and front desk management through mobile engagement facilitate the staff to host the guests with minimal contact. Even before the pandemic’s effects completely simmered down, such solutions kept both parties safe but interactive.

Data backup and recovery with cloud migration

Most contemporary businesses rely on cloud computing for damage control and disaster recovery. Digitalizing helps hoteliers distribute more health and safety protocols easily, have uninterrupted access to vital data, and safeguard multiple operational systems against physical damage.

“At the heart of every hotel process or SOP, there is software that relies on cloud computing. It took a global pandemic for many hoteliers to realize this, but the trend will only accelerate as hotel staff back up quickly, create differentiated customer experiences, and recoup losses…”

Jordan Hollander, co-founder of HotelTechReport.com

However, this new movement makes businesses susceptible to attacks that leverage cyberspace, and it is now vital for hotels to invest in robust cybersecurity protocols to keep their digital operations uncompromised. It’s essential to ensure that hotels don’t give a chance for attack vectors to exploit vulnerabilities in digital architectures to access sensitive information.

This means several hotel cybersecurity best practices like zero-trust security architectures, multi-factor authentication and enterprise-level encryption, cybersecurity training to staff, and investing in cloud solutions compliant with local and international data security regulations.

Secure cloud operations—PA DSS certification and GDPR compliance, for example—have a much better chance of surviving the digital revolution.

Renewing sales and marketing strategies

From hoteliers’ standpoint, the continuity of revenue amidst and post-disaster requires special effort. The sales and marketing plans may have to change and be re-evaluated to respond to new economic situations.

Data monetization has also led to increased sales and brand image post-disaster recovery. Hotels need to review their analytics and sales/lead data collected pre- and post-disaster to learn the changing demographics and buyer behavior. The first global marketing campaign since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 by Hilton Hotels “To New Memories,”, reflects this strategy. The insights-driven campaign monopolized the consumers’ desire to reconnect with the people and places they love.

For hoteliers using software, such data is often available in EPOS, catering or even ordering and reservation modules which can easily be retrieved and shared between the decision-making parties and make new marketing and sales strategies.

Leveraging analytics and forecasting

Predictive analytics and forecasting have become elements that make businesses vigilant, particularly against disasters and the new market dynamics they create. Especially when supply and demand shift and markets are rehabilitated, the ability to interpret temporary changes, determine what to expect, and identify patterns can help control the damage.

Using short-term data, such as booking pace and order preferences to discover immediate changes in demand, and historical data to compare performances and patterns is immensely helpful to stay strong during market fluctuations. Having cutting-edge analytics tools integrated with the rest of a hotel’s service modules lets decision-makers view business-critical data in real-time and make decisions backed by valuable insights.

Hospitality businesses can gain significant rehabilitation and recovery progress when potential risks are pre-calculated, understand the climate, socio-cultural as well as economic changes that affect them, and develop better disaster management and contingency plans.

The takeaway…

Hospitality operators face several complexities during crisis times. However, effective management and implementation of suitable strategies will assist hoteliers in going through difficult situations with ease.

A combination of secure systems, cloud migration, and out-of-the-box thinking for marketing, and sales, along with efficient and intelligent forecasting tools, will contribute to the hotel industry building an efficient strategy to prevent and recover faster.