Survival strategy for the hospitality industry during this covid 19 crisis.
The entire hospitality industry is devastated and no one has got exceptions during this crisis and measures to avoid cross-contamination through food, containers or human touch, have suspended the “culture of sharing”. The nationwide lockdown, preceded by a series of travel curbs, left most hotels struggling with near record-low occupancy, which is unlikely to improve much until September, according to industry executives.
src: https://www.peoplematters.in/
Hotels are struggling to overcome this crisis with strict government restrictions and strong emphasis on social distancing.
“The disruptions caused by the pandemic would result in 30 million job losses in the travel and hospitality industry and ₹15,000 crore loss between the months of March and April itself", said Jyotsna Suri, Chairperson, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry tourism committee, and chairperson and managing director, The Lalit Suri Hospitality Group.
There are a lot of articles written and published online, in regard to the bounce back strategies of the hotels and resorts, which should be implemented to gain customer confidence, especially on safety and hygiene parameters. I will definitely not address those strategies in this article. But what I am going to address is the most important role of a happy customer and how can they help you in these critical times. Below mentioned are a couple of strategies that we have implemented at Happy Retreats and found some positive hope.
Create a micro membership package: We have created a budget-friendly micro membership package, which is valid for 2 years and includes complimentary night stays and other member benefits. Obviously this is not rocket science for anyone in the hospitality space to create one but we named it as a fundraiser membership package and clearly defined our objective behind this initiative to the customers.
Be honest to the customers: We started calling all our happy customers, who availed our services before and honestly explained our situation right now and also explained, how can they play a very important role in our bounce back journey by purchasing the fundraiser membership plan. All the funds which are raised using this initiative are dedicated to the operations team’s salaries and their benefits. The operations team is the heart of any hospitality business and keeping them as the first priority is the need of the hour.
We were very skeptical about the acceptance of this initiative but our happy customers surprised us with their strong support and positive response.
Membership is not at all a new concept in the hospitality space but our honest approach and positioning of the package are helping us to survive through these difficult times. Please feel free to implement this strategy and share your feedback with me.
If you would like to contribute or know a bit more about this initiative click on the button.
If you are from the hospitality space and have got interesting bounce back strategies to share, please feel free to comment below and share your thoughts.
Source: Couple of stats mentioned in the article are from livemint.com
About the author:
Pradeep is a founder and chief experience curator at Happy Retreats. He also mentors entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs on time management and designing sales processes.
Note: please ignore the grammatical and sentence formation mistakes. I am still exploring my skill sets on writing.
