The COVID-19 pandemic hit the tourism industry harder than most, with domestic and international travel for both business and leisure halted almost overnight. Hotels more specifically also saw one of their largest revenue streams, corporate events and conferencing, cease almost entirely as organisations around the world shifted to remote work options. The culmination of these unforeseen disruptions caused an industry-wide average revenue decrease of 87%.
Challenge
In order to respond to rapidly changing occupancy rates, IHG required a new operational structure that could be fluid and scalable across their multiple brand levels, and deliver to guests, staff and owners. The structures needed to be designed and implemented at a grassroots hotel level, but remain in alignment with other projects addressing corporate management structures.
Process
Inastra facilitated the IHG project team, consisting of experts from across all business areas. We kept the team accountable for milestones we collectively set, and addressed existing biases and assumptions in order to mitigate the risk of jumping to conclusions before adequately exploring and defining the problem. To ensure effective development and implementation of the project solution we introduced a comprehensive stakeholder engagement and management plan. Establishing these strong foundations was essential to achieving the tight project timelines. We primed the team for rapid innovation by introducing a bespoke project framework with tools and methodologies to enable deeper understanding of the problem and rapidly test and iterate potential solutions.
Results
The agile structures have been rolled out to 52 hotels across 5 geographic regions within IHG’s Australasia portfolio. KPIs have been set to achieve a revenue increase per available room, so although occupancy is fluctuating in correspondence with local lockdown restrictions, each hotel is able to bring in more revenue per room compared to this time in 2019. So far, the hotels where this structure is being used are on track to successfully achieve these new project KPIs. The central element of the new structure is the combination of guest service teams into one Hotel Services Team that can fill a variety of roles and adapt to changing needs, which is a structural concept that is now being rolled out company-wide.