Hotel groups need to build crisis management into the core of their business because disruption is now constant, Neal Jones, Marriott International’s president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), told the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) Global Summit in Malta this week.
Jones oversees about 1,450 hotels in 83 countries, including 175 in the Middle East employing 35,000 people. His region has faced airspace closures, mass flight cancellations and attacks on airports this year. He told delegates that every market in EMEA faces a crisis at least once a year, ranging from minor incidents to major emergencies. WTTC’s own research shows destinations always recover from crises, though the speed of recovery varies.
“Resilience just doesn’t happen during a crisis. Resilience is actually built prior to the crisis, and within the crisis you’re just exercising the resilience,” Jones said. “It’s really the new normal. It’s a business competency that needs to be ingrained within the organisation.”
He said many companies were not yet ready. “Some organisations, I think, are still somewhat on the back foot when it comes to managing through a crisis,” he said. Industry leaders should not underestimate the time they need to spend preparing their organisations, he added.
Jones said his first day as EMEA president coincided with the start of the conflict in the Middle East. He took a call at about 7am from a colleague telling him there was a war in the region, as airspace began to close. Marriott set up its crisis committee by lunchtime, cancelled his planned trip to the region and spent most of the following week managing the response.
“The first focus point for me was taking care of our associates and making sure that we were doing everything we could to help them manage through this process,” he said.
Jones said the hardest part was establishing the facts in real time. “There was the news, there was social media. There was a lot of misinformation,” he said. Hotels in the region were running at 95% occupancy, and drone debris was falling on cities including Dubai. “Guests were really, really frightened. Our associates were petrified, but they needed to provide the comfort to our guests,” he said.
Governments asked Marriott to help house hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded at airports, while guests due to leave could not depart. Jones said the many hours his teams had spent rehearsing crisis plans prepared them most for that period. Marriott’s senior leadership ran a simulation of a cyber attack only last week, he said.
He gave a second example. A third-party property management system serving about 660 of Marriott’s hotels in Europe failed for five days, forcing them onto manual processes. “The hotels knew exactly what to do,” Jones said, though check-in and check-out took longer. “Ultimately a crisis will impact people somewhere along the chain. It could be a technology issue, but it will ultimately filter down to people.”
Jones said Marriott’s founding philosophy, that a company that takes care of its associates will see them take care of guests, had been reinforced by the past year. “It’s given us even more confidence that we are even more resilient for whatever crisis may come. And there will be more, unfortunately. It is the new norm,” he said, citing geopolitical issues, natural disasters and incidents within individual hotels.
He said travel itself was resilient. “The fact that everybody wants to travel and experience now more than ever is a very, very good thing,” he said.
Marriott International is the world’s largest hotel group by rooms, with more than 30 brands. It will mark its 100th anniversary next year.