The new Covid-19 curriculum

The English have always loved complaining about their cousins across the sea – and if you’d been a traveller in Europe through the nineteenth century, you’d probably have had a point. For much of the Victorian age, after all, many continental inns and hotels really were squalid, as Anglo-Saxon Protestants rarely failed to point out. “You enter a dark dungeon-like doorway encumbered with filth of every sort,” grumbled one Englishman of a Sicilian hostel in the 1870s, and he was hardly alone in doing so.

From these shabby beginnings, hotel hospitality across much of the world has transformed into the very model of cleanliness. In large part, this is a matter of training. Hoteliers in the time of Napoleon III may have claimed ignorance about the importance of proper housekeeping, but their modern successors have no such excuse.

If nothing else, this is reflected in the statistics. According to one 2016 CBRE Hotels study, for instance, the most generous hotels spend over $300 on training for every room in the property. Naturally, all this is echoed in the parallel world of hospitality academies. Elite institutions in Switzerland or the English countryside are as glamorous as ever, while interest in the Indian School of Hospitality doubled in 2019. The irony here is that as important as training has become to modern hotels, teachers may soon have to throw out their programmes and start again, or at least give them a thorough makeover in order to stay relevant. With coronavirus upending everything from customer interaction to cleaning protocols, hotel trainers face colossal challenges if they want to adapt to the post-pandemic age.

And with the industry fighting to cope in uncertain times, and customers frightened about catching the disease, getting training wrong risks dipping hotel balance sheets even further into the red. Not that the situation is hopeless. By exploiting new technology, and working thoughtfully with guests and governments, there’s no reason training academies can’t equip aspiring hoteliers with the skills to prosper in these unprecedented times.

Cleaning house

To understand the fundamental role of training – especially hygiene training – to hotels the world over, one could do worse than chat to Professor Bruce Tracey. With nearly three decades of hospitality experience behind him, he’s worked with Marriott, Hilton and practically every other major hotel chain one could think of. When Tracey speaks, in other words, it’s worth listening – and what he says couldn’t be clearer. “Hospitality training is sine qua non,” explains Tracey, a professor of management at Cornell University. “It’s right at the top of mind.” It’s a point echoed elsewhere. Even before the pandemic, says Olivier Roux, chief business development officer and senior managing director at Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) Advisory Service, “training has been essential to the industry”.

This devotion to cleanliness can be understood in a few ways. At the sharp end, it begins with regulation. If you’ve ever stayed at a hotel across much of the world, chances are it’s governed by reams of regulations. Far from the Faulty Towers cliche, for instance, all UK hotels are legally expected to develop strict rules dictating everything from cleanliness and maintenance schedules to what temperature the breakfast sausages must be served at. Things are just as tough across the Atlantic, with the Cleaning Accountability Framework only one of many regulations keeping hoteliers honest. Unsurprising, then, that Roux notes that “most hotels or outsourcing companies” arrange regular training sessions for staff, even industry veterans with an intricate feel for every nook and cranny of a hotel need to go back to school every now and again.

Self-interest helps drive hygiene too. Even before the pandemic, hotels that didn’t offer clean service were likely to suffer, and no longer just in selfrighteous diary entries. After unhappy guests discovered mould in not just one but two rooms at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, the property received unflattering write-ups in the US press. When patrons in Minneapolis found their minibars stuffed with dirty towels and their floors sprinkled with cigarette ash, regulators intervened. Social media has only served to exacerbate the problem as one bad review or unappealing photo can be recycled through Twitter, Facebook or other platforms on the worldwide web, potentially damaging a hotels’ reputation in the process. Now there’s even greater pressure on hoteliers to keep a tight ship. As Tracey puts it, the pandemic has sparked a lot of uncertainty – but also ‘opportunity’ for hotels and academies that prove they take coronavirus seriously.

It goes without saying that all this – laws of the land, laws of demand, the pandemic – has led to a remarkably rich and robust ecosystem of training for hotel staff. That’s true everywhere from universities to hospitality academies, to hotels themselves. To take one example, Marriott boasts comprehensive training schemes tailored to everyone from university students to army veterans. Four Seasons, for its part, has a ‘buddy system’ that lets prospective staff learn from more experienced colleagues. That might sound like overkill, but in a world where it costs $5,000 to train each new hotel staff member, it ultimately makes more economic sense to grab staff early and give them a career for life – in your hotels.

Make it personal

If people want to understand what hospitality training might look like in the years and decades ahead, they might want to check the websites of big hotel operators. Click around for a few minutes and they’ll soon find references to a string of new hygiene protocols. At Radisson, for example, staff are now expected to work through a ‘20-step cleaning and safety protocol’ as they clean rooms and restaurants. That’s shadowed by work at hospitality academies.

In Western Australia, students will now learn how to ‘report personal health issues’ around coronavirus, as well as ‘reduce cross-contamination’. It may be on the other side of the planet, but you can hear similar language in the UK. “We’ve added a lot of Covid-19- related material for our students,” notes Professor Iis Tussyadiah, an expert in hospitality training at the University of Surrey. In practice, much of this is obvious. In a world of social distancing and lockdowns, one where six feet are suddenly the whole nine yards, hospitality teachers have plenty to work through. That covers everything from educating students about face masks to disinfecting door handles. Typical here is the work of the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute, which among other things is now educating students about bacteria-busting cleaning fluids and where, exactly, to clean dirty towels and linens. Beyond the basics, though, it’s clear that the fundamentals will have to change too. In particular, says Tussyadiah, that means teaching staff more interpersonal skills, asking “How do we ensure that customers comply with restrictions? How do we deal with those who [refuse] to wear masks or social distance?”

Beyond curriculums themselves, how staff are trained will change too. It’s obviously impossible to learn bed-making or toilet-cleaning without actually doing it. But much, suggests Tracey, could be studied remotely. Between edX, Coursera and other online platforms, hoteliers can easily mix-and-match to find training that suits their needs. At the extreme end, adds Tracey, virtual reality technology might even allow workers to go through the motions of keeping a hotel clean from a flat miles away. “It’ll all be much more dynamic, much more fluid.” Certainly, hotel academies are taking all this to heart – HotelSchool in the Netherlands and Roux’s EHL are just two of the institutions to put most of their teaching online.

Among other things, of course, this allows a wider range of people to get training. And given the state of the hospitality industry, it may also allow students to ultimately take their hygiene training further afield. Even when the industry bounces back, in other words, Tussyadiah argues that hospitality training may remain more open-ended. “Some employees have now lost their employment, but if they receive health and safety training, I think it could be useful for their next opportunity.” That’s true outside the realm of hospitality. Put it this way: becoming an expert handle cleaner is likely to serve just as well in a school or a hospital as it is in a hotel.

Doing the robot

How might coronavirus impact hospitality training over the longer term? As so often, technology looks set to have an outsized role, and not just when it comes to remote learning. Now that staff are expected to socially distance from guests, after all, why not swap out housekeepers for their robot cousins? Rather than wiping down a surface and hoping for the best, how about investing in ultraviolet disinfection technology? Roux, for his part, is convinced new technology “can and will” be used, though he cautions against expecting too much change immediately. “It generally comes at a cost that hotels are not willing or cannot engage in at the moment,” he says, adding that “staff employed at the cleaning level may be unfamiliar with these new technologies.”

That reference to staff themselves is important. With so much frantic attention being devoted to keeping rooms and lounges clean for guests, one risks forgetting about the workers who keep them happy. With ‘wellness’ an endlessly circulated buzzword in hotels, perhaps it’s time staff were granted more opportunities to focus on their own well-being. It’s for that reason that Tussyadiah suggests more training may be devoted to the “mental health and well-being” of tired employees.

“There are already training initiatives to make sure that staff are coming back to work safely and providing them with a safe working environment.” Just as well – as the lifeblood of any hotel, it seems only fair that staff get a little something back given they’re now expected to put themselves into harm’s way like never before.