Hotels must protect their owners’ investment and cash flows while protecting the team from the virus and ensuring that they are effectively prepared, supported and trained to work in a new environment as hospitality experts.

All management teams must establish an action plan to ensure the safe opening of the hotel and have sufficient resources available to ensure that the plan, once developed, can be implemented effectively and quickly.

The Hotel Reopening Plan is a workflow tool to be used in conjunction with guidance from local and national health authorities and other relevant stakeholders. It has been designed as a fluid working document that can and should be updated as circumstances change and adapted to the individual needs of the hotel as the macro environment changes and develops. The implementation of this action plan and the effectiveness of the implementation should be reviewed and revised frequently if necessary.

Hotel management techniques have to change. There will be a new normal, a ‘revised’ hotel etiquette in which hotel teams will adopt a new method and measure of operational practice and efficiency to protect their own health and the health of fellow team members and guests alike.

Communication between the old unit team, the hotel executive team, and hotel associates is now more critical than ever as we all navigate this new operation.