The pandemic that paralyzed hospitality

Many segments of the economy are paralyzed by the Coronavirus pandemic, including the hospitality sector, including hotels, resorts, receptive tourism, travel agencies, airlines. Anyway, it is a whole production chain that revolves around hospitality, which moves billions in the world.

The businessman who says exactly what will happen in the future can only stand before a crystal ball. It doesn’t work that way. The post-Covid world is going to be as uncertain a period as what we’re experiencing. This requires all hoteliers in the world to re-evaluate their strategies and reevaluate their operations for a slow and unworkable recovery.

In the post-Covid world, hotels around the world are expected to adapt to this new reality, which will require a series of adjustments. Have you thought about the hotel’s ability to hold large events and the guarantee of respect for social distancing?

What about the hotels’ apparatus on the hygiene of indoor and common spaces? Even if your client is undemanding about cleaning and sanitizing, now this is a crucial point for him to decide for his hotel. What is your strategy and action plan on this?

Resumption should be slow and gradual

We already know that the recovery will be slow and you, as a manager, need to breathe 24 hours your sales strategies, be very judicious in your cost management and take care of the reputation of your enterprise.

The resumption of leisure or business trips should possibly be gradual but time-consuming, causing people to travel by car to nearby locations. How can you explore domestic tourism as a competitive advantage that you can plan now to put into action post-Covid?

During the pandemic, with the hotel closed, you stopped talking to your greatest future asset, who is your usual guest?

It is necessary to maintain this relationship with your client, leave open the dialogue, demonstrating all planning that is being done for when the activities are resumed.

And even more: showing empathy and approaching him at such a delicate time. You can be sure that this gesture of affection and attention will never be forgotten. And most likely it will leave a residue on your mind when everything is resumed.

That’s transparency with the market, with your client. Hiding or omitting this data only distances your future guests. You need to be together with your customer, whether physically, online or offline. That’s what I call relationship and transparency with your brand.

Transparency is essential

I love a large hotel chain in South America that comes to the public to say openly what they are doing in their hotel operations, especially in relation to essential items such as cleaning, hygiene, maintenance and health-oriented safety, in addition to the management of their workforce.

This hotel chain comes out ahead and gains point with its customers, guests, employees and owners in general. It is not enough to do, but it is necessary to demonstrate your concern with cleanliness and safety standards.

I know companies that are on TripAdvisor for being, because they never even responded to a customer survey and often left it in a vacuum, with no feedback on their positive or negative opinion.

This customer probably complained about cleaning up his hotel before Covid 19, but what didn’t matter before now is a matter of survival in the market.

I put myself in the client’s shoes and see that it is a time for hoteliers to rethink their strategies. If the company wants to win over customers, it will have to adopt flexibility in 100 of its negotiations, since large and small hotels can compete for the same event or client.

Seasonality is over for now

Now is the time to use all your intelligence and ability thinking about the survival of your business. Remember that such seasonality, with a warmer second half, is over for now. Therefore, put all the expertise of your team at the service of your hotel operation, such as technology, sales, costs / expenses and operations.

The time is for mindset change. Nothing will be like before, because the post-covid market will be totally different from what we lived until then.

The return to “normality” will happen in other terms, with a new economic scenario, a new guest, different care, new demands, but also new opportunities that we must explore in the midst of the crisis.