Your Guide to Effective Business Continuity for Hospitality

Business Continuity for Hospitality often focuses on tangible assets like ensuring there’s enough backup power for critical systems or a plan to manage reservations during a network outage. But in the months to come and beyond, forward-thinking hotel management teams are looking outside their properties’ physical footprint and planning for a broader range of business disruptions. Today, maintaining business continuity for hospitality means considering natural disasters, political unrest, cyberattacks, and even global pandemics – events that can bring a business to a halt despite its best efforts to maintain operations on-site.

This shift in perspective has resulted in a more strategic and proactive approach to business continuity for hospitality. Rather than just reacting to crises, hotel companies are making a conscious effort to build resilience into every aspect of their operation – from their supply chains to their customer service channels.

The 5 Components of a Comprehensive Business Continuity Plan for Hospitality

Traditionally, businesses used a simple formula for basic business continuity: Identify your critical business functions, estimate the impact of a disruption to those functions, and create plans to either recover the business function as quickly as possible or work around the disruption entirely.

Today, those elements still ring true – but savvy business continuity professionals now think beyond this basic formula. This thinking leads organizations to take a more proactive and comprehensive approach that addresses the “what ifs” of disruptions. It also addresses the broader implications these disruptions can have on their brand, reputation, and long-term success.

Risk Assessment

A robust risk assessment digs into your operations to uncover vulnerabilities specific to your organization. Consider both internal and external threats.

For example, examine potential disruptions stemming from within your organization, such as equipment failure, cybersecurity breaches, or even employee error. Also, contemplate external forces like natural calamities, supply chain interruptions, or geopolitical instability. You can use historical weather data like that provided by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information as a good starting point for gauging weather-related risks to your property. Prioritize each risk based on likelihood and potential impact to inform the focus of your planning.

Business Impact Analysis

With your risk assessment complete, conduct a business impact analysis. This helps you understand what business functions or services would be most affected by these disruptions. Prioritize the most critical business functions to guide your recovery efforts.

The results will clarify what you must prioritize to minimize disruptions and losses.

Developing Your Business Continuity for Hospitality Strategy

Once you understand the critical risks to your hotel, determine which business functions require immediate attention during a disruption. Next, consider establishing strategies for business continuity across several key categories. A successful business continuity strategy often requires organizations to look beyond a traditional Business Continuity Plan (BCP). They should also consider related disciplines such as Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery, and Emergency Management.

Consider each discipline independently, then carefully knit together your strategies across each to give yourself maximum flexibility and agility in the face of business disruptions.

Business Continuity

Focus your Business Continuity Plan (BCP) on outlining clear procedures for maintaining business operations during an event. Your BCP should also include recovering from those disruptions as rapidly as possible. Detail step-by-step instructions for essential tasks, define roles and responsibilities of staff members, and establish communication protocols, including points of contact (POCs).

This includes POCs both internally among your employees, as well as externally with key partners or vendors. Also, consider alternative operating procedures (AOPs), should primary methods become unavailable, that allow for adjustments and variations in processes while upholding core functionalities.

Remember to prioritize essential services critical to your guest’s safety and satisfaction, such as securing alternative accommodations if evacuation becomes necessary. Ensure continued food service (this might look like offering pre-packaged meals in a prolonged power outage). Maintain basic amenities like clean water and sanitation facilities, and protect critical guest data and records.

Crisis Management

A strong Crisis Management plan allows hotel operators to manage the incident itself – separate from (but related to) business operations. These events often pose a threat to the reputation or even the viability of your hotel. These events require dedicated focus to minimize any legal ramifications or long-term harm to your organization.

Strategies can help to ensure your business continuity management plans integrate with crisis management. These strategies might include developing pre-drafted messaging to communicate quickly and accurately with stakeholders. This includes the media, social media audiences, guests, and staff through your standard channels.

As a failsafe, you can also leverage technology solutions, like FACT24. By thoughtfully integrating tools and planning across business continuity, incident response, and communications, you not only protect guests during times of uncertainty but also safeguard your brand reputation.

Disaster Recovery

Think of a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan as focusing on getting critical systems and technology back online quickly after an unforeseen event.

Detail the specific steps for recovering and restoring IT infrastructure, data, and applications crucial to core hotel operations like your Property Management System (PMS). Consider leveraging off-site backups, redundant systems, and cloud-based services to expedite the recovery process. Include processes and workflows to enable your team to manage bookings manually if your PMS or booking system is impacted by a disruptive event.

Emergency Management

While business continuity plans broadly consider a range of threats that might affect your organization, Emergency Management specifically tackles imminent threats. These threats are to the safety and security of your hotel staff and guests from emergencies like fires, natural disasters, medical emergencies, or even active shooter incidents.

These situations require immediate, decisive action. They also require an understanding by hotel staff of pre-defined roles and responsibilities before, during, and immediately after these incidents.

An Emergency Management program’s efficacy depends not just on comprehensive planning. It also depends on the ability to share vital, sometimes life-saving, information with staff. You can achieve this by investing in platforms capable of receiving real-time threat intelligence, which could range from a hurricane’s forecasted path to updates on regional civil unrest. Platforms like Sention, offer the capability for intelligence gathering. This empowers you with accurate, real-time insights and ensures swift response and mitigation strategies. Remember that ensuring safety procedures are current and practiced regularly by staff can dramatically reduce fear and anxiety during genuine emergencies. Consider conducting fire drills or tabletop exercises that include local first responders.

Testing & Maintenance

A comprehensive Business Continuity Plan is not something to file away in a drawer – it should evolve over time to account for both challenges and lessons learned through regularly testing your program. By actively engaging in periodic testing (simulations or mock drills) you uncover weaknesses in your plan. This also builds confidence among your staff in your organization’s ability to handle real-world scenarios.

This can be a significant advantage over competitors who only engage in planning on paper. Consider documenting those tests by clearly recording the date of each test or exercise conducted, the names of participants (or teams), a brief summary of the event’s objectives, and any areas that went well or areas where the team needs improvement.

Beyond testing, ensure that your plans remain relevant. Assign individuals to review the plan on an annual basis – or more often for quickly changing business environments – and make adjustments for changes in your business operations, new regulations, or industry best practices. This dedication to maintenance ensures that your plan for business continuity for hospitality actually works when you need it most.

FAQs about Business Continuity for Hospitality

What are the 5 components of a business continuity plan?

While a plan to deliver business continuity for hospitality businesses varies depending on an organization’s needs, there are five key components:

1. Conducting a thorough Risk Assessment to understand and document your organization’s specific vulnerabilities.
2. Business Impact Analysis.
3. Developing strategies to account for gaps.
4. Outlining step-by-step plans and procedures.
5. Regularly testing and evolving the plan.

What are the 3 main areas of business continuity management?

While successful plans to provide business continuity for hospitality consider several areas (Risk Management, Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Management, etc.), the three most common are:

1. Identifying potential risks to your operations (Risk Management).
2. Minimizing disruptions during those incidents (Business Continuity).
3. Implementing plans for recovery (Disaster Recovery.)

Each function within a well-developed program ensures both the short- and long-term success of a business, especially within the hospitality industry.

What are examples of business continuity?

While many things damage a hotel’s ability to maintain business continuity for hospitality, they tend to be grouped into two categories; human-caused or natural disasters. A human-caused business disruption can include events such as cybersecurity breaches, technology outages, or even more mundane disruptions such as plumbing or HVAC problems, labor shortages or strikes. Many disruptions fall under force majeure.

Conversely, natural disasters might involve earthquakes, floods, or even pandemics (like H1N1 in 2009) and can disrupt business operations for weeks, months, or in extreme situations even permanently.

What are the 6 pillars of business continuity?

There are several frameworks to build resilient programs, however the six most common areas addressed within the hospitality industry include:

1. Identifying and mitigating Risk.
2. Effectively Planning.
3. Proactively implementing sound Governance & Policies.
4. Having flexible and scalable Solutions.
5. Regularly Training your staff and building a Business Continuity Culture that prepares individuals for uncertain futures.
6. Thoroughly testing your plans.

Conclusion

Delivering world-class business continuity for hospitality operations requires hotels to adopt a more robust strategy that encompasses not only preventing disruptions but also effectively managing through crisis. By creating and continuously improving these plans for Business Continuity for Hospitality, you protect your brand, mitigate financial losses, and build a more resilient business capable of handling even the most unexpected challenges. Your guests (and your bottom line) will thank you.

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• Our proprietary Resiliency Diagnosis process is the perfect way to advance your business continuity program. Our thorough standards-based review culminates in a full report, maturity model scoring, and a clear set of recommendations for improvement.
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• Our Ultimate Guide to Business Continuity contains everything you need to know about Business Continuity while our Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management contains the same for Crisis Management.
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