Like everyone else, the hotel industry is gearing up for re-opening. Standard Operating Procedures have been totally rewritten. “The look and feel of a hotel is going to be very different when we reopen,” says Ajay Bakaya, Managing Director of Sarovar Hotels.

From now on, a guest checking in will, unfortunately, be interacting with men and women wearing masks and gloves, he points out. At many hotels the front office will wear an empty look as mobile check-ins happen, to reduce contact with humans.

With 61 of Sarovar’s 83 hotels closed currently, staff are being trained virtually in the new service protocols — from housekeeping to sanitisation, to how to keep F&B going when there will be the death of buffets!

The immediate future of customer service in the hotel industry is going to very different:: no more welcome drinks, tikas on the forehead, and garlanding. Room to manpower ratio will reduce drastically as only one-third of staff can be on premises.

But a new report from Hotelivate predicts that the long-term future of the industry will also be radically changed when it comes to service and talent management.

At the moment, most hotel companies are trying their best to preserve as many jobs as they can through a combination of deep salary cuts, new job roles. and so on.

But there is no denying that, going forward, the hotel industry, which creates 9 per cent of employment of India and one of the largest job creators in the country, is going to see a brutal reduction in jobs.

Survival strategies

Consulting firm Hotelivate has given a set of recommendations on how the industry should relook talent strategy post Covid-19, in its new report titled The Indian Hospitality Industry – A comprehensive Guide to Managing Covid-19.

For starters, it says room to manpower ratio has to be whittled ruthlessly. “Manpower costs are second highest cost in a hotel,” says Natwar Nagar, Managing Partner, Hotelivate. The company’s research shows that luxury hotels have 2.27 employees serving one room, mid market hotels have 1.32 employees per room while budget hotels have 0.82 employees per room.

“All these ratios were determined by the old school of hospitality and legacy ideas. But now every aspect of hospitality will undergo a change,” says Nagar.

Hotelivate has proposed paring down of manpower per room in luxury hotels to 1.10 in luxury hotels and 0.58 in non-luxury.

And how can hotels achieve this without job cuts in the short term? Hotelivate suggests fortnightly rotation of employees coming in to work. In the long term, however, there will have to be a complete rethink on staffing.

For its part, the consultancy is nudging hotels to think in terms of uberisation of key services in a hotel. For employees with years of experience, embracing the gig economy model and offering their services for short projects could be the future.

Even a general manager in a hotel could be a gig worker, argues Nagar, pointing out how an experienced GM could take a four-month assignment during summers at a hillside resort in a place like Shimla and offer his services in the winters to a beach resort in Goa. For standalone resort hotels, which have seasonal peaks and troughs, this could be a boon as it can help them pare costs.

What does Bakaya think? “We have read the report. At the moment, we are fully focused on preserving jobs, helping our people, re-opening. In terms of future models, we will take it a day at a time before we take a reality check on our long term people strategy,” he says.

Right now, that’s where hoteliers are at!