With additional Indians keen to discover the tantalizing prospect of traveling and enjoying a leisurely keep, the green shoots of travel and hospitality appear to be an emerging trend. “The pandemic has severely impacted the hospitality sector across the world but Indian hospitality segment is robust with the domestic marketing being a key sauce with many innovative implementations and will recover gradually,” Kerrie Hannaford, Vice President Commercial – Accor India & South Asia, told The TheSpuzz Online’s Swapna Raghu Sanand, in this candid interaction. She additional added that technologies is getting embraced by Indian hotels and guests are also preferring contactless services.
The second half of the year, in unique, has witnessed the triumph of pending household vacations, travel with close friends and workcations as soon as the lockdown restrictions had been eased across the nation. Highlighting the value of strict security and hygiene protocols, Kerrie Hannaford mentioned, “In India, we have also been working closely with our sanitation partners ‘Diversey’ along with local medical and government authorities to ensure even more regular cleaning protocols to protect the safety and well-being of our guests and staff. We have implemented stringent and comprehensive outlines of measures that all hotels must follow including frequent cleaning of public spaces, regular sanitation of high-touch points such as elevator buttons and public sitting areas and enhanced cleaning processes for rooms.”
What is your outlook for India’s hospitality segment for 2021 as compared to the rest of Asia?
The ongoing trend of leisure travel will retain prospering in India specifically for weekend getaways, staycations, drivecations and celebrating specific occasions. People want to step out of their home to just relive the joys of travelling and loosen up. The overdue pent-up demand to travel has additional resulted in a rise in the quantity of bookings from the leisure segment specifically the household travellers.
What are some green shoots of recovery in terms of bookings and enhanced demand?
On the MICE travel front, we anticipate that significant scale weddings, tiny and mid-sized conferences, solution launches, education applications and sporting events (domestic leagues) will resume more than the subsequent couple of quarters. In reality, at quite a few of Accor’s properties, we have witnessed a rise in demand for curated weddings and maintaining this trend in thoughts, we have lately launched ‘Vivaah by Novotel’. This aims at enhancing the modern virtual wedding practical experience in the new now.
Moreover, organisations choose venues that can offer excellent meals and beverage services, and are technologically nicely-equipped, so that the meeting can be streamed reside to all their group members or shoppers across the globe.
Long pending household vacations, travel with close friends, workcations have been a important supply for the revenues. There have been lots of sold out dates specifically for the leisure areas and with the upcoming vacation season, bookings and enquiries are searching encouraging.
What distinct tactics are you employing for making certain implementation of sanitation and hygiene employing the ALLSAFE initiative that you have rolled out? Are there distinct security compartments you can elaborate on?
At Accor, we have usually had stringent measures of hygiene and cleanliness, and now, in this new standard, we are taking extra precautions to offer a protected atmosphere to our guests. During pandemic, contemplating security and hygiene of our guests and personnel a top rated priority, we have launched ALLSAFE, our new cleanliness and prevention label, in association with Bureau Veritas.
We have created the ALLSAFE label certification, our 16 guiding principles and commitments, maintaining cleanliness and security at the helm of our policies. The ALLSAFE label consists of more than 35 actionable recommendations and 200 SOP’s – the security, safety and comfort of our guests and personnel is at the extremely heart of who we are. The ALLSAFE label offered assurance that these requirements are met by our hotels in anticipation of the reopening of our hotels across regions. Every hotel has an ALLSAFE Officer to make sure all protocols are followed.
Let’s speak about the newest campaign ‘For the love of travel, for the Love of now’ and what is the driving passion that guides this campaign?
Our current campaign ‘For the Love of Travel, For the Love of Now’ aims to rediscover our guests’ really like for travel. Towards the starting of September we believed that the final quarter would be the fantastic time to reignite really like for travel and this is the method we followed even though curating our campaigns and provides with security and hygiene as prerequisites. This 3-month campaign from October to December consists of quite a few fascinating provides for guests to delight in planet-class experiential hospitality across Accor’s 52 properties in 23 cities in India and South Asia.
Can you elaborate on the ‘Missed Celebrations’ present and what it entails for travellers?
In the final couple of months, we have initiated quite a few campaigns to bring back guests to our hotels and ‘Missed Celebrations’ present is 1 of them. This present is a component of our umbrella campaign ‘For the Love of Travel, For the Love of Now’. It encourages guests to celebrate all missed occasions and milestones for the duration of the lockdown such as birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, and so forth. Through this present we encourage our guests to celebrate life and all its achievements to the fullest. We want our guests to delight in, savour and relish an array of cuisines and celebrate the specific occasions with their loved ones and close friends.
Through this present, guests can earn vouchers equal to 30% of their devote even though celebrating any occasion at restaurants and bars at any Accor house in India and Sri Lanka. Accor Plus members delight in an extra 10% discount. The present is valid from 1st October to 31st December 2020 and vouchers can be redeemed till 31 March 2021.