Now that more adults in the US are getting vaccinated, should hotels require guests to prove COVID immunization? Here’s what to consider before deciding.

With just over 45% of adults in the U.S. partially or fully vaccinated and over 70% of adults planning to travel over the next few months, the topic on everyone’s mind, especially in the travel and hospitality industries, is vaccine passports. Internationally, there are now more than a dozen countries allowing travelers with proof of COVID vaccination to visit. But stateside, many feel a strong resistance to businesses requiring proof of COVID vaccination. Florida, Texas, Arizona, Montana, and Idaho are all discussing blocking a COVID immunization certification.

As discourse and legislation around vaccine passports continue to develop along with the continued need to demonstrate health and safety as priorities, hoteliers need to consider how requiring guests to show proof of the vaccine might affect their property and guest services. And if vaccine passports are required, what does that mean for operators?

To help navigate this unfamiliar territory, here’s a quick cost/benefit cheat sheet when it comes to COVID vaccine passports:

Here’s how they can help your property

The main points in favor of requiring some sort of vaccine passport are to make guests feel safe and to keep operations running smoothly. If guests and staff are vaccinated, it protects from potential outbreaks that will disrupt operations and require staff to stay home sick. If hoteliers do require proof of vaccination, they will be able to better mitigate liability and keep their staff and guests more safe from COVID.

A sense of COVID security will impact where and for how long guests choose to book, especially in bigger cities, where COVID safety has been more of a priority. As travelers look to visit destinations like New York and Los Angeles, hotels with stronger health and safety procedures are more likely to be favored.

Here’s how they might hurt your property

The counterarguments for hoteliers center around logistics and guest and staff compliance. First and foremost, requiring a vaccine passport for guests and staff is something of a logistical nightmare. How would you even do it? How would the information be stored? What if someone only has the first dose of a required two-dose vaccine? What about those who can’t get the vaccine for medical reasons—how would that information be verified? Few countries have been able to produce thorough, helpful guidance, leaving many operators on their own.

And while many guests will be glad for the security the passports provide, there will also be guests who don’t wish to disclose that information to anyone. Sure, if you institute a vaccine requirement, you might gain some extra bookings. Then again, you might also lose some. Hoteliers who decide to require vaccine passports will have to deal with the fallout of those who are actively opposed to having to show proof of immunization.

What should hoteliers do? 

The short answer is, there is no one right answer. But hoteliers around the world can learn from other industries to glean ideas on how best to tackle the vaccine passport issue. From gift cards to extra PTO to complimentary services, food, and beverages, companies are getting creative with incentives—and you can too. Incentivizing immunizations lets customers and staff make the final call, while still encouraging everyone towards a more COVID-safe environment. It’s a win-win.

For those who want a vaccine passport but worry about how guests will react to the physical documentation, mobile “passports” are a great option. Countries like Israel and Estonia are using QR code based systems to keep track of COVID immunizations. Mobile-based records have the benefit of keeping business owners informed in a way that feels less invasive while still remaining effective.

But when it comes down to it, operators in countries like the U.S. (where guidance has bounced between national mandates and management at the state and local level) don’t have a clear-cut path forward. Businesses are doing what they can and working with the information they have. And that’s okay for now. But now is not the time to grow complacent when it comes to COVID operations: keep an eye on things and prepare just in case things like vaccine passports go mainstream—whether that’s driven by the government or just private businesses. The reality is, this conversation might be drastically different in a few months. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that there’s no way to be sure what the future holds when it comes to COVID.

Hoteliers will ultimately have to make the best decision for their property. But while the conversation continues, the best thing you can do is 1) listen to the needs of staff and guests as summer travel returns and 2) stay informed about how the policy conversation is evolving in your country.

As the hospitality industry opens up more, now is the time to leverage contactless tech. Learn more about INTELITY’s mobile-first hospitality options.

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Summer vacation is back in a big way—here are three ways to capitalize on America’s travel plans.

As of this month, over 70% of Americans have plans to travel for the summer. After being cooped up for a year, travelers are ready to explore new places, see their friends and family, and spend their saved up vacation energy. The rise in vaccine availability has inspired travel optimism, providing hoteliers an opportunity to make their properties shine as summer hot spots.

But it’s not as simple as just having availability. Hoteliers need to make sure they’re ready for post-pandemic travel. Guests traveling this summer will have expectations influenced by a year stuck inside. So what exactly are the best ways to draw in the 2021 summer crowd? We have some ideas.

3 Tips to Win Summer Vacation:

1. Communicate Better
   For many planning upcoming trips, this will be the first vacation they’ve taken since quarantine started. Potential guests will be looking for guidance on changes made over the last year, and once they book with you, they’ll want to feel in the loop leading up to their stay. Frequent emails, SMS, and in-app communication builds guest trust from the time they start booking to the time they arrive back home. Now is the time to streamline your communication systems so guests can stay up-to-date and know exactly how to reach out to staff with questions or needs.

2. Offer Contactless Service
   People who spent all year ordering from Instacart, Postmates, and Amazon aren’t giving up the ease of contactless. Guests will not just want, they’ll expect hotels to adapt the convenience of using their phone on trips like they use it at home—for everything. Before the summer rush starts, weed out potential pain points, places where guests will wish they could do things from their phones. While their vacation should be full of unique experiences and new memories, when they come back to your hotel, they should be able to relax as if they were at home: with everything they need available from the palm of their hand.

3. Prevent Staffing Shortages
   Seeing a sharp rise in demand that staff just can’t meet is every property’s nightmare. When guests arrive this summer, you need to make sure you and your staff are ready for them. The good news is, automated systems can prevent issues from falling through the cracks while offloading time-consuming tasks from your staff. With smart systems for ticketing, issue resolution, and guest feedback service needs can go to direct departments. Implementing automated priority tiers ensure the right things get done at the right time. Hoteliers need to simplify systems that previously relied on outdated technology or monopolized valuable time from employees. In preparation for summer guests, invest in automation to fill in the gaps, so service is never compromised.

Ride the First Post-Covid Travel Wave

These next few months of post-pandemic travel will be vital, setting the tone for future travel. Guests have spent an entire year waiting, planning, and dreaming about these vacations. Help them exceed their expectations by focusing on maximizing external communication and simplifying internal systems. Give you staff the tools they need to elevate your guests’ experience on every level. After the year we’ve had, we all deserve a perfect vacation.

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It’s a new world and a new way of operating—one where sustainability will play a huge role in hospitality success.

As many countries begin to get the pandemic under control, the climate crisis has returned to the forefront of discourse and planning for industry leaders and politicians. Back in February, UN Chief António Guterres, told the United Nations Environment Assembly 2021 will be a critical year for resetting the global relationship with nature; Guterres went on to say, “We must put protecting the planet at the center of all our plans and policies.” As leaders around the world work toward the type of “relationship reset” Guterres called for, many countries are enforcing new legislation and innovative companies are taking proactive steps to forge the way forward in environmental stewardship.

What does this mean for the hospitality industry? Now is the time for hoteliers to evaluate their internal systems, weed out areas of waste, and implement policies that will be better for their short- and long-term futures. Here’s how you can get started at your property:

1. Consider your demographic 

From Gen Z to Baby Boomers, the number of people looking for sustainable products is rising, with a recent study by Neilson showing over 50% of Baby Boomers over 75% percent of younger generations saying they are willing to pay more for greener options. In particular, big city and international consumers tend to be more climate conscious. This consciousness will only grow over time, pushing every industry to step up. Hoteliers should be looking for ways to show potential guests the practical ways in which their property is being a responsible environmental steward. Millennials and Gen Zers especially are looking for brands and companies leading the charge, the opportunity to build long-term loyalty with younger consumers has never been more primed.

And you’re in luck: the easiest and most effective way to show you care is by eliminating paper and plastic—which is better and more cost effective for your property anyways. Mobile hospitality tech can replace everything from printed compendiums to menus to room keys, and it’s never been more accessible to hoteliers. Plus, let’s be real, most people want everything on their phone anyway.

2. Transfer paper waste to digital space 

Guests want a more climate-friendly experience—but they’re also not looking to trade comfort or service quality for it, so it’s vital to give them peace of mind without causing any drop in service quality. You can’t just eliminate the compendium altogether or reduce how much you’re communicating with guests throughout their stay. The good news is that digital options provide a win-win scenario for properties—a greener alternative to paper and plastic that should actually increase service quality, rather than taking anything away from the guest experience.

Take dining for example: hotels with scratch kitchen and farm-to-table dining options have found particular success with using digital menus. Not only does a mobile option reduce waste, it cuts down on the unnecessary logistical work of printing new menus every time an item changes. The same goes for room keys, expensive pieces of plastic that have to constantly be replaced. By switching to mobile, old menu items can be replaced with new ones in seconds, and room keys stay in the hand of the guest—all without any waste.

3. Create a smarter footprint 

Finally, hoteliers should be looking at their electrical use. In the same way paper should be replaced with more capable tech, guest comfort should be central to changes in electricity usage. Lighting, AC, and heat are vital for the comfort of guests– they are also some of the biggest culprits in irresponsible energy consumption.

This is why smart thermostats and in-room tablets are on the rise. Hoteliers are able to put intention behind every bit of energy usage by giving the guess more hands-on control. Lighting is only used when guests are present. Instead of pumping out excess heat or air to an unoccupied room, thermostats shift to only use power when needed. With presets and intuitive UI, you can ensure nothing is wasted.

Save the planet (and your money) 

Prior to the pandemic, sustainability was a hot button issue in every industry, hospitality included. That got sidelined as focus pivoted to COVID safety (rightfully so!), but that conversation is quickly coming back to the forefront. And frankly, it’s never going away. Hoteliers can either hop on board now and make changes, or play catch up in a few years when consumers won’t be so forgiving.

By cutting down the amount of wasted paper and energy, hoteliers will be able to contribute more positivity to sustainability efforts while cutting costs internally. Guests get a better experience with more control in the palm of their hands. The trends speak for themselves: waste is out, efficiency is in.

Want to see how mobile technology can help your property go green and improve the guest experience? Request a demo of the INTELITY platform now.

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Examining five bold predictions from April 2020 in light of accelerating vaccine rollouts and the start of a transition back to normal one year later.

Last year, in the thick of global shutdowns, we gathered five bold predictions from hospitality industry leaders at companies like Marriott and Trivago and painted a picture of what the future of hospitality could look like after COVID. Today, all 50 states in the US have opened vaccine availability to all adults. The UK has promised that all adults will be offered the vaccine by July 1. As a result, the transition back to normal has already begun—and we now have a pretty clear idea of what the post-pandemic world will look like.

With that in mind, we’re doing a quick fact check to see what experts got right and what’s changed over the course of the most unpredictable year imaginable.

Predictions That Hit the Bullseye

1. Safety as the next competitive advantage.
   Obvious, but true nonetheless. This is the only thing we’ve been certain about since the start of the pandemic—while everyone has handled the pandemic differently, even the most adventurous travelers have made compromises, allowances, and sacrifices to prioritize safety this year. That will continue to color the decisions they make in the new normal as well.

2. Flexibility and transparency will entice people back to travel.
   An early move by airlines, hotels, and short-term rentals, flexible booking and cancellation policies—as well as renewed dedication to clear, frequent communication around guidelines and pandemic protocols—have been the life support of travel in the past year, giving cautious consumers the peace of mind they needed to book travel amidst all of the chaos.In fact, it worked so well that in late August, major airlines announced they were dropping change fees forever. Meanwhile, most major hotel groups have simply kept pushing back the end dates of these flexible policies and it seems unlikely that they’ll last forever. Nonetheless, it’s impossible to overestimate the good they’ve done already and how they’ll continue to contribute during the transition period.

3. Investing in innovation is the only way to truly prepare for the future.
   When it comes to long-term benefits, this is the clearest winner. Hotels that had already invested in technology like mobile apps, mobile check-in, and mobile key had a huge advantage during the pandemic—and saw both incredible mid-pandemic results as well as early recovery. Following their lead, there’s been a massive wave of hospitality tech adoption this past year and mobile technology in particular is now becoming a standard across the industry.That’s of course all being driven by guest demand, as 90% now report they prefer that the hotel they stay at has a mobile app offering the ability to completely manage a stay without having to interact with a person.

Projections That Missed the Mark  

4. Safety will be a top driver of technological innovation, especially in IoT.
   IoT has been the next big thing in hospitality for some time. Adoption of everyday IoT devices like FitBits and Google Nests has dramatically increased over the last few years and with it, so have expectations that adoption in the commercial world would rise as well. To be fair, Amazon has had an offering for hospitality for several years. Google introduced one in August as well.And yet, IoT wasn’t the breakthrough technology of the COVID pandemic. Voice assistants saw a minor increase in popularity, but buzz around IoT sensors fizzled quickly—and there wasn’t any significant innovation in what the technology offers hotels either. That’s not to say IoT has nothing to offer hospitality: it clearly does. But mass adoption is still a long way off.

5. Physical spaces will morph so guests can both stay together and be apart.
   A year is a long time, but not quite long enough to entirely break down our way of life. As early as last fall, vaccines became real to consumers during their Phase III trials—meaning we never expected our pandemic conditions to last forever, or even multiple years. In fact, countries chronically underestimated the time it would take to return to normal rather than the other way around. As a result, few properties made permanent changes to their layout and spaces, opting instead to temporarily institute distancing guidelines and capacity limits in common spaces.The vision of radical change NeueHouse CEO Josh Wyatt had last March—of hotels changing the way they operate permanently by dedicating spaces to both isolation and congregation—remains just that: a vision rather than reality.

The conclusion we came to last year based on these expert predictions was this: the future of hospitality is in safety, flexibility, and innovation—especially since the pandemic didn’t bring about trends so much as seismic industry shifts that will last long past this year. All in all, those three elements are still key to success as hotels transition out of the pandemic period and transition back to normal operations.

Interested in learning more about how to streamline your transition into the new normal and give guests the mobile technology they’re looking for? Request a demo of the INTELITY platform.

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Smaller staff are dealing with real challenges as occupancy rates rise. Here’s how to give hotel staff the tech they need to make it work.

Across travel industries, there seems to be agreement that a return to travel is on the horizon. But the questions still hanging in their air is: When?

Right now the answer depends on who you ask. CNN Travel reports domestic travel will likely see a big uptick this summer as “Staycations” continue to become more popular; as for long-haul travel, they report “optimistically” things will be back to normal later in 2021 or early in 2022. But this optimism is not held by everyone: Singapore-based director at Alton Aviation Consultancy, Joshua Ng predicts global travel will continue to be reduced until 2023 or even 2024.

For many hoteliers, this uncertain timeline makes it difficult to prepare. How long should reduced staffing continue? When should full services and staffing be put back into place? Will extra staff be needed when short and long-haul travel rebound?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a rollout plan that’s one-size-fits-all. Every hotelier will have to craft a timeline that makes sense for their properties. In the interim, it is vital that priority is given to making sure staff is not overwhelmed and service is not compromised. In order to avoid high turnover and guest frustration, tech can lighten the load on hotel staff and fill in gaps in the meantime.

Whether reduced or full, here are three ways to make sure your staff is prepared for the full return of travel.

1. Alleviate Front Desk Friction

Guests will be expecting mobile options, but they also want the ability to speak to a real person always available. To keep front desks freed up for guests, hoteliers should be offering mobile options for services that do not require a staff member. When check-in, dining requests, and concierge services can all be done on their personal device, guests don’t have to worry about standing in a long line or waiting on hold.

Mobile options allow for check-in efficiency and accessibility of services for guests without requiring full staff. Maximizing front desk systems before the travel rebound, can ensure the transition to more guests and full staffing is smooth.

2. Resolve Day-to-day Operational Issues

As hoteliers look to the future of post-COVID travel, they must look to the past. What common pain points will show up again once travel rebounds? Consider the ways ticketing and service requests have been handled previous to the pandemic travel lull.

Streamlining work orders and service requests from start to finish through mobile technology will give reduced or full staff simplified systems with clear task management. Managers should be able to keep tabs on work orders without having to track people down. And staff should be able to access their to-dos on the go. Mitigating past pain points now will set staff up for success when occupancy increases.

3. Streamline Staff Communication

Regardless of staffing size, operational efficiency hinges on effective communication. How are front desk, dining, and maintenance staff able to stay on the same page? Where are wires getting crossed?

Hoteliers should take this time before things return to “normal,” to streamline communication between staff and management as well as staff and guests. If hoteliers wait to add mobile systems to their internal communication, they risk wasting time and staff on easily avoidable service requests and work order issues. They also risk losing valuable opportunities when guests want face-to-face assistance or need service recovery. Now is the time to provide hotel staff with the tools needed so they can give guests an enjoyable, personable experience. From the time guests arrive to the time they leave, ensure your staff is available to assist guests while being entirely in sync with other departments.

Give Hotel Staff the Tech They Need to Succeed

Whether it’s 2021, 2024, or somewhere in between, the only thing standing in the way of staff being ready for a travel rebound, is effective, streamlined systems. Hoteliers have the opportunity to set up internal communications and external services to alleviate, resolve, and streamline the staff experience. Creating an environment for success on the staff side allows for guests to get the best service and attention. Now is the time to set up staff for success by filling in the gaps with tech.

Equip your staff with everything they need to handle everything that comes with the new normal. Request a demo of the INTELITY platform now.

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