As the world gets ready to live with the virus, at least till the near future, life is not going to be the same. And definitely not for the travel and hospitality sectors. Desperate times call for desperate measures. And more often than not, desperate measures lead to great innovations and disruptions. The hospitality sector, and luxury hospitality in particular, seems getting ready for a slew of such disruptions.
Alongside the ever smiling and hospitable reception officers at the check in, guests will be co-welcomed by a team of paramedics and path lab professionals. The food menu will focus more on immunity than taste buds. In a nutshell, the word luxury is bound to find new meanings. There will be many a new normal and many new expectations.
Touch less hospitality is one new norm that hotels across the world are striving for. From contactless check-ins and check outs to digital food menu, hotels are not only adhering to the regulatory guidelines, many are pro-actively going way beyond. “The top priority is to instil the confidence in the minds of the guests that if they come to our property, they are safe. All our endeavours are to provide this comfort to our guests,” says Ankur Bhatia, executive director of Bird Group that owns Roseate Hotels and Resorts. For most, safety and wellbeing of the guests has become the top priority. Maintaining the high standards of cleanliness and hygiene is now the new yardstick of luxury.
While the basic level of sanitisation in being kept at all the touch points in the public areas with a 24- hour window to deeply sanitise the rooms after guests have checked out, some hotels are following an alternate room occupancy policy. “At Roseate we will be following an alternate room occupancy policy on all guest floors maintaining social distancing,” says Bhatia.
Despite all efforts, and long existing relationships with most guests, getting them back too soon in the post-lockdown world is not going to be a cakewalk for the hotels. There are many promotional offers on the block. Hotel chains like Taj and Oberoi are offering a 20 per cent discount on the best available rate and complimentary upgrade till 30th September on their web booking. The reservations too are entirely flexible in most hotels and some of them even giving a booking window till end of the year.
From thorough sanitisation to routine body temperature readings of resident guests and team members, some hotels have taken the drive to a next level. For instance Soneva Jani, one of Maldives’ top rated super luxury resort, has deployed a full fledged medical team, assisting guests with testing to care, on a need basis. Every time a guest checks in, a COVID test is conducted. The guests are requested to remain in their villa until the test results are received and are negative. Besides checking temperature of each morning, on the fifth day of stay, Soneva would also ask guests to take one more real-time PCR test depending on the circumstances prevailing then. “To enhance our guest safety, Soneva have purchased the Life Cycler 96 testing machine from Roche, the samples will be sent to Male’ for testing at the ADK hospital,” says Sonu Shivdasani, Founder & CEO, Soneva.
“In case the COVID-19 test result is POSITIVE, the resort will ask the COVID positive guests, his/her family, friends and other travelling together to isolate in their villa. As an exclusive privilege, Soneva will immediately waive the daily room rate of the villa for the next 14 days and the only charges will be meals and other incidentals,” he adds.
From holistic wellness perspective, hotels are also focusing more on serving immunity booster menu. Hotels like Oberoi, Roseate have devised a whole new immunity and health booster dishes specially created by in house chefs. While Soneva Jani is serving the Ayurvedic elixirs at breakfast, the Andrographis Paniculata, (a known Ayurvedic immune booster) on a complimentary basis, hotels like Ritz Carlton in Pune have added exotic variation of immunity boosters like avocado toast with pistachio dukkah and mesclun greens (combination of baby spinach and baby lettuce) as breakfast menu besides serving immunity shots like Botanic (a mix of turmeric, lemongrass, carrot juice and ginger).
While there will be many disruptions, most of these will just be knee jerk reactions to the pandemic and will be forgotten as life gets normal. Only time will tell which of these disruptions will evolve to become game changing innovations for the hospitality sector. Till then, bon voyage.
