When leaders in the hotel industry broadly committed in late 2018 to implementing safety alert buttons for property-level employees, technology leaders across the industry were left with the daunting task of turning that promise into a reality.
Now a two-and-a-half years into that effort, hoteliers have developed some best practices for selecting the best providers of safety button technology, according to experts speaking during a recent Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals webinar.
During the session titled "Process of Selecting the Right Safety Button Vendor," Bruce Retsky, senior manager of networks and desktops for IHG Hotels & Resorts, said his company began the process by vetting "25 to 30 different vendors" before approving six for use within its brands. He said the most important aspect of any safety button technology — which is primarily intended for use by housekeepers — is location accuracy.
"We're doing this for employee safety, so there could be nothing worse than having a situation in room 202 but yet the system signals that there's an incident going on room 217 or something of that nature," he said.
Retsky said the second most important factor behind accuracy was "ease of installation," especially for a large company such as IHG, which manages or franchises roughly 4,500 hotels in North America. Around the globe, North America has been the largest focus for most companies rolling out safety devices.
"So in order to get that many hotels a solution, it needs to be easy to deploy," he said.
Iris Junge, general manager of the Allegro Royal Sonesta in Chicago, which was a Kimpton Hotels property when first going through the device-selection process, said implementation was delayed at her property because the initial vendor selection ended up being more complicated that hoped, spurring the hotel to switch to a different vendor for the final installation.
The first vendor "was probably a more cost-effective solution, but once we got it on property, it was just not easy to install or easy to work with or easy to use," she said. "That's a big factor for me. You have housekeeping room attendants who are not tech-savvy and in some cases don't speak English. It needs to be a really simple button that you push with no syncing to other devices."
Junge said ease of use is "not just about the installation" but it has to continue to be simple "down the road."
She said she learned quickly that it's important for the technology to change scale effectively based on staffing levels, with her hotel going from 80 room attendants prior to the pandemic to 10 currently.
Dan Phillips, technical adviser for White Lodging, said it is important to look at the long-term implications of vendor selection, which means considering how likely it is the company selected to service the property will be in a good place five years down the road.
He added there are various companies operating in the space now that have differing motives for selling safety button technology.
"When we were talking to companies, there were companies I talked to where it was all about the dollar. There were companies that were more in line with grabbing market share by lowballing so they could sell other products later. There were companies taking a look at room buttons as an add-on to sell their primary products," Phillips said.
Because of that, he said it was important for White Lodging to find a company that was "passionate about the particular product and the need that it's fulfilling."
That made it necessary to find companies Phillips felt he could partner with long term rather than just buying a product.
Retksy agreed.
"There's such a big difference between a vendor and a partner, and it's so very important to choose the right partner," he said.
Retsky also highlighted the need to keep the costs of the devices relatively low because "this is a new expense to many hotels and something many have never even heard of."
"When they first heard about the pricing of it, there was some sticker shock," he said. "So I spent a lot of time talking to management companies and ownership groups talking about exactly what it does."
He said the cost factor has only grown more important over time as the industry continues to cope with historic drops in revenue over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.