To Survive COVID-19 Hotels Must Be Willing to Take Risks, Innovate

Hotels are the most human of all businesses. Why? They cater to the basic needs of being a human (shelter, food) as well as our more advanced needs (a space to work, to play, to be pampered/refreshed). Unfortunately, hotels also face the same pitfalls as humans: fear of the unknown. We are seeing this play out on the world stage with the current coronavirus pandemic.

To overcome this hurdle, hotels need to do something that isn’t natural for them: take risks and innovate. 

Humans have a fairly good track record when it comes to taking risks and innovating. While we might be fairly fragile creatures, we do have a brain which lets us create tools to adapt, survive and thrive.  We started off with fire and the wheel, moved on to airplanes and HVAC, and now have smartphones and Amazon.

Now is an opportunity for hotels to innovate. Throw out the old rule book. Why? If there was a solution from the past in it for pandemics such as COVID-19, hotel executives would be using it right now. Unfortunately, no such solution exists. This crisis is like nothing experienced by hotels today. So let’s innovate.

But how?

Successful innovation rarely comes from within a large organization. Instead, new companies – startups – tend to be the ones that offer the most innovative ideas and technologies. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the most innovative companies of our time: Apple and Google.

These two companies are considered the epitome of innovation, but the truth is: the bigger they become, the less they innovate.  Instead, almost every great innovation you’ve seen come from these two companies in the past decade were actually created by startups they purchased.  For example: Android, Siri, and YouTube.  Apple and Google take daring ideas from startup innovators, work to improve and perfect those ideas, and release them to the public as their own creation. This formula has been incredibly successful for all the top innovator companies.  In fact, both Apple and Google, individually, are bigger than the top 10 hotel companies in the world combined.  So, they must be doing something right.

For hotels, then, this means going beyond sanitizer dispensers, high touch point cleaning and masks.

Instead, hotels should be taking the risk of trying something radically new, and bringing ground breaking new ideas from outside, into their hotels. 

There are incredible startups out there with game changing ideas for the hotel industry.

The hotels that dare to leap and work with these innovators, are the hotels that not only will survive this crisis, but will also come out the winners of the hotel industry.

One last piece of advice: The longer you wait, the more likely your competitors will grab that brilliant startup innovator. If you drag your feet and wait too long, you might not have a hotel to innovate for anymore.