Willemijn Geels, VP Development Europe, IHG Hotels & Resorts talks to Hospitality Insights ahead of IHIF 2022 where she speaks in the session The Evolution of Luxury, From Hotel to Residential on Wednesday 4 May.
Hospitality Insights: Beyond recovery, what do you view as the major changes in the hospitality sector in 2022?
Willemijn Geels: Already a prominent trend prior to the pandemic, the past two years have undoubtedly heightened the importance of mental and physical wellbeing. In 2022, with fewer restrictions in place, many people will seek to balance the effects of the past two years on their minds and bodies.
Many of the changes have happened within the luxury and lifestyle sector as consumers become eager to indulge in travel again, and perceptions about luxury hospitality have shifted, with 82% indicating personalised experiences as the most desirable luxury offering according to a Global Travel Trends Report from American Express.
For example, our Six Senses brand is renowned for its focus on wellness and sustainability; each hotel and resort is set in a location of incredible natural beauty, delivering an uncompromising level of service, with wellness integrated throughout the whole guest experience.
We have seen guests arrive at Six Senses resorts with a different set of intentions; they seek transformational experiences led by experts and services that allow them to deepen self-knowledge and awareness. They are looking to leave the narratives of daily lives, access new possibilities of being, and connect with like-minded individuals. With the brand’s wellness programming, guests can tap into retreats for a few days or a full week.
Acquisitions and new brand launches in the last few years have transformed IHG’s presence in the luxury & lifestyle space – so in addition to Six Senses, this includes the following brands: Regent, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Kimpton, Hotel Indigo and Vignette Collection.
In 2022, we expect luxury travellers to seek out longer stays due to pent-up demand, more flexibility in work routines and more people extending business trips to include leisure. This trend will see travellers preferring to take fewer, but longer, trips over many short ones in order to make the most of each destination.
There is also a growing desire for more profound experiences with high interaction with local people and places.
Overall, we expect that people will no longer take the ability to be able to travel across the world for granted and so will be making more of experiences whilst abroad.
Hospitality Insights: With people at the core of hospitality, how do you view the current shortages in talent and what does your company do to address them?
Geels: The pandemic has resulted in a labour shortage in a number of sectors around the world, and it is a significant challenge for an industry like ours, which is all about people.
It’s therefore imperative that we build an attractive proposition for potential candidates. To encourage people to apply, we need to position hospitality as a career rather than only somewhere you work. This means demonstrating the rich and fulfilling career our industry can bring and continuing to provide on-the-job training programmes, whilst supporting and developing talent from all backgrounds to enable people to achieve a fulfilling, successful and long career in hospitality.
We’ve also produced a range of more practical hiring resources for our hotels. From hotel recruitment days – we've had great success in these over recent months, getting our hotels in the UK&I estate involved as much as possible – to practical resources and guides. They include end-to-end recruitment guides - from job posting, to best practices and interview guides for all HODs/HR and to support the complete talent acquisition process from start to end. This gives our HODs and HMs the confidence to support hotels in the recruitment process.
We have also provided a marketing and job fairs guide to understand the differences between paid media and social media and how they affect candidate pools; determining what the best media channels are for openings and how to leverage them to reach the right candidates. IHG Hotels & Resorts also has several dedicated development programmes such as RISE – an initiative to support and mentor female aspiring general managers.
Hospitality Insights: How can the hospitality sector use technology to improve profitability, sustainability and the guest experience?
Geels: The pandemic has and will continue to boost digital experiences, making them the norm for many people regardless of demographic. Digital events, social media, and communication now play a much bigger role in the social lives of many and this of course has a knock-on effect in our markets.
Guests may remain concerned about exposure to the coronavirus and will therefore be open to new technologies such as self-check-ins and check-outs, touchless payments, app-based services, augmented or virtual reality.
For hospitality organisations, we can see this as an invitation to innovate and invest in digital technology, supported by our flexible rates, digital check-in, our Meet with Confidence programme, IHG Clean Promise and revamped loyalty offering.
Companies that adapt their offerings to reflect changing preferences and behaviours demonstrate their desire to listen, understand, and respond to their customers.
For owners, our offer is as much about our ability to create revenue advantages through data and technology, as it is about our scale and expertise. We understand this and we’re investing in the technology, tools and solutions that make the biggest difference to our guests, owners and teams.
IHG has been measuring and reporting environmental data via our online IHG Green Engage tool since 2009 – it includes solutions to enable them to reduce their environmental impact:
o IHG Green Engage system in all hotels – brand standard since 2015
o System recently upgraded to enable automated data collection.
o Frees up our hotels to take action and reduce consumption, instead of manual data entry.
o Gives us a more robust data set to work from.
Hospitality Insights: How are you developing, implementing and measuring ESG policies to ensure their effectiveness? What initiatives are you most proud of?
Geels: Our purpose at IHG Hotels & Resorts is to provide ‘True Hospitality for Good’. It shapes our culture, brings our brands to life and represents a commitment to make a difference every day to our people, guests and communities, to protect the world around us. With such ambitious growth plans, it's important to us that we continue to grow in the right way.
IHG is also proud to have launched Journey to Tomorrow in early 2021: a 10-year responsible business plan which has wide-ranging, ambitious commitments and ambitions to make a positive difference for our people, communities and the planet.
As a business, we are making great progress against our goals in areas such as carbon and energy by joining the UN’s Race to Zero and aligning with the most ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
And in local communities, we have expanded our IHG Academy programme with the IHG Skills Academy – a free global virtual learning platform that breaks down barriers to provide education and training
Internally, our corporate colleagues globally completed 10,000+ hours of conscious inclusion training, which includes helping us increase ethnically diverse representation in leadership roles.
Hospitality Insights: What are you looking forward to at IHIF?
Geels: I am really looking forward to connecting with our partners and industry colleagues in person, to have quality time together talking about our sector, the challenges but mostly the opportunities as I fundamentally believe that in the long-run, the hotel sector has a bright future ahead of us. I do look forward to dive deeper into the topics of this year’s IHIF theme, People, Planet, Profit. As a company but more so as an industry, we are taking strong commitments towards these three fundamental pillars; I believe there is already so much knowledge and insights available but also still so much to learn, discover and innovate. We can achieve this together!