The Indian hotel industry is indeed well known for its high standards of service, due to traditional belief of ‘Atithi devo bhava’. The hotels these days not only provide a luxury experience to its guests, but have also become business centers for corporates who use it for conducting business meetings, conferences and entertainment. Viewed as a “soft target” due to open access nature, hotel security can present significant challenges to the hotel management in order to strike a delicate balance between devising strong security measures to inspire guest’s confidence and at the same to ensure that their stay is pleasurable.
A terror attack at a hotel property has the potential to attract both National and International media, as one saw during the 26/11 Mumbai blasts in two iconic hotels. The guerrilla warfare style of the Mumbai attacks has not only highlighting the existing security gaps in the system but has significantly transformed security at Indian hotels. It changed the way the hotel security viewed its threat perceptions and its preparation to such threats. The government of India, post these attacks established security standards for the various star ratings of Indian hotels.
As a lesson learnt the hard way, the hotel industry has now devised stringent security measures towards the safety of its guests and investments have been made towards upgrading the existing security systems in the hotel. Hotels now proactively advertise their security programs that are integral to the hotel operations, such as use of advanced security based technologies, security trained hotel staff, emergency response plans etc to their valued guests along with advertising about its fine dining restaurants, guest services, luxurious rooms with value added services and cutting-edge technology.
Technology in-turn opened new doors towards hotel security which are now trending from providing not just basic peripheral guarding but also offer international quality access control systems with bollards, under vehicle scanning systems, cctvs, biometric access control systems for staff, surveillance and digital facial-recognition cameras at every floor, that are monitored by well trained guards in control rooms both on and off site. Drawing on the extensive knowledge and understanding of the hotel industry’s evolving security needs and through customer feedback, the world’s largest security solutions group, G4S, in India provides specialized secure solutions using technology along with carefully selected, well trained manpower for the hospitality industry
The recent economic slowdown has had an impact on the hospitality industry as in other sectors. Businesses have started revisiting their plans, cutting down both on business class travel and hotel budgets for their staff from high end properties to budget hotels. Indian hospitality Industry which witnessed a boom due rise in domestic tourism is losing business to less expensive hotels with equally good service in South East Asia. Even the budget announced for the year 2013-14 has been a disappointment for the hospitality industry as there have been no compensations for the industry, this year. With no reduction in service taxes, decline in profitability, low room occupancy, high competition & high labor cost, some luxury chains and properties are quickly cut down their security budgets.
Though large players in the hospitality sector are still taking security seriously; the same cannot be said for the entire industry. Smaller hotel chains which have limited budget and cannot afford the professionally managed security services, settle for less expensive security personnel, from agencies who may not have verified or well trained workforce. Such hotels are opting for manual guarding of premises over use of technologically superior equipments to keep costs under control.
Further, untrained guards from small towns and villages are being hired at lower salaries as compared to the well trained and efficient guards. The implication of this trend on the overall security scenario of hospitality industry can be tremendous.
There have been cases reported by the media on women’s safety issues in the national capital and other cities of India. The current sentiment, especially amongst women travelers is not expected to improve if the hotel security staff hired from small security business operators are not verified or trained well before being deployed at such sensitive sites. Paradoxically, on one hand we claim to provide international hospitality standards and on the other we try to give basic requirement of security a miss.
Given the current global scenario, security budget should be given prime importance especially in an industry like hospitality which after the airports is the second touch point of international visitors. The hospitality industry and the government need to work together with reputed private security solution providers such as G4S to provide security services of international standards at locations considered to be ‘soft targets’ from security point of view.
By Mel Brooks, CEO, G4S India
