13 Mar How can you make your hotel stand out?
Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of guests, visitors, and staff is an essential part of operating any hotel.
While many hotels have good levels of security, the approach, execution and implementation of policies and practises is not always consistent or proportionate to their risk environment. Measures to protect guests can be discrete, meaning investment in security goes unrecognised. Travellers struggle to identify which hotels have effective security arrangements against those who do not.
Global hotel security standards should be as measurable and accountable as other high levels of service provided within hotels. Not only does this offer peace of mind for guests, but from a commercial perspective, it helps hotels to differentiate themselves in a crowded market.
Setting the benchmark
The Strand Palace Hotel was accredited by Global Secure Accreditation (GSA) and SFJ Awards in August 2019. It has been an iconic site in central London, welcoming guests with warmth and hospitality since 1909.
During the week corporate travel is particularly important to the Strand Palace – with up to 80 percent of guests staying for business. During the early part of 2019 David MacRae, Strand Palace’s Managing Director, recognised the importance of seeking an independent assessment of the hotel’s security. He comments: “The hotel has always taken health and safety and security very seriously, not least because of the size of the property; the bigger the property the bigger the risk.”
Recent widely reported incidents in London and Paris prompted Morne to seek external assessment of the hotel’s security. “The hotel management are extremely supportive of our efforts to ensure the highest levels of security and we are pretty sure that we are doing a good job, but the opportunity to have this assessed and accredited by a trusted third party was important.”
A return on investment
Independent accreditation of the hotel’s security standards has also helped Strand Palace to win more business.
Director of Sales, Kelly O’Neill, says: “The Global Secure accreditation is essentially a KPI that sets us apart from our competitor hotels,” she comments. “We are regularly asked to complete detailed RFP information for large corporates and travel management companies. These often determine how much corporate business we conduct. The accreditation has really helped in the RFP process with the answering of questions around safety and security of guests. Questions asked usually cover issues such as elevator safety, guest room floors, deadlocks, female-only programs and security cameras. Providing evidence of an additional accreditation where our answers have been fully and independently assessed, has proven extremely beneficial when dealing with global travel managers. They can see that safety and security is extremely important here at the hotel.”
Standing out from the crowd
Accreditation through GSA enables hotels to publicly demonstrate commitment to the most stringent levels of duty of care to guests and to meet and exceed the impending ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard which is expected to be implemented in 2020 and will provide additional assurance to the safety and security of travellers.
Want to find out how you can set yourself apart in a fiercely competitive market? Get in touch: https://www.gsaccreditation.com/contact-us/
