Alma Resort Inks Deal to Upskill Staff With ‘Hospitality EduTech Platform’ Amid the New Normal

As hotels navigate the ups and downs of trying to retain staff during the pandemic, one hotel on Vietnam’s Cam Ranh peninsula has figured out a way to put staff to work at home before they return to in-person service.

This month, Alma has joined forces with Australian-founded company Typsy, a leading global digital hospitality training platform, to ‘up-skill’ hundreds of its hotel staff in the wake of Vietnam’s COVID-19 flare-up that forced the 30-hectare resort to temporarily close.

Offering what it describes as a “Netflix-style” library of hospitality training videos by industry experts, Typsy’s content is broken down into three key areas: courses, lessons and mentor sessions. Learners are encouraged to explore their interests and passions, build skills to help with internal promotion and career progression, and earn industry-recognised qualifications. Typsy works with one of the world’s leading hotel management schools, Swiss-based Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne (EHL), and counts global groups Hyatt, Radisson, Delaware North and Wyndham among its clients.

Alma’s managing director Herbert Laubichler-Pichler said the resort signed up with Typsy as part of its efforts to “do everything we possibly can” to retain and motivate staff, amid the pandemic’s devastating toll on the tourism industry.

“We have increasingly used digital means such as video calling to engage with and train our staff since the onset of COVID-19 and Typsy lifts such efforts to a new dimension by offering peer-to-peer learning in a contactless manner and developing a culture of up-skilling at our resort,” said Laubichler-Pichler. “This effort to invest in our staff signals we are serious about retaining and developing them, particularly while they’re not on the payroll due to a temporary hotel closure.”

​​”We have seen an uptake from businesses keen to continue offering professional development to staff to upskill and cross skill teams to ensure staff are well equipped and educated when hospitality operations return,” added Typsy’s founder and CEO Jonathan Plowright.

Fearing a drain of talent that has yet to be measured, Laubichler-Pichler urged hoteliers and other tourism service providers to try their best to hold on to staff for as long as possible through means such as training.

“The silver lining is that there’s been a proliferation of digital solutions to help combat the problems associated with COVID-19 in the ‘new normal’; an example of this has been our resort’s very own mobile app that we developed to offer contactless communication with guests and staff,” he said.