WEIGHING IN ON 2020

2020 has been a roller coaster year for the hospitality industry; with more downs than ups. Most hoteliers believe that business will now be measured in pre- and post-COVID terms. As this tumultuous year draws to an end, they reflect on the challenges thrown up by the pandemic, in what manner they endeavoured to overcome these on personal and professional levels, and how they hope to use those lessons to become more flexible and resilient in the future.

- VINITA BHATIA

Anshu Sarin, CEO, Keys Hotels

COVID-19 is a pandemic that has triggered a political reaction resulting in global closure of borders and various stages of lockdowns. This, in turn, prompted an economic collapse of unimaginable speed and scale leading to unpredictable market reaction.

The large unknown here is the emotional and behavioral change that this will engender in the short and long term. It makes great sense to separate things that one knows for sure and those one does not and then make some reasonable, educated, and probable decisions!

Very importantly, the pandemic made us introspect and answer two key questions, ‘What did COVID cause us to start doing that we should keep doing?’ and ‘What did COVID prevent us from doing that we should stop doing?’

Here are some learnings that we put to use by using a three-step approach, which has held us in good stead:

1) Organize your cash flow: This is simply because cash is pivotal and creates options. As they say, you can always ‘un-cut’ but not ‘un-spend’.

2) Plan: This was applicable to everything, especially resilience in strategy and operations. Every business metric was held up threadbare for a relook to allow new opportunities to emerge for optimization.

3) Act: Doing this precisely and decisively with an active review mechanism allowed us to tweak and surge as needed.

4) Communication: We informed the strategy and plan clearly to all stakeholders.

5) Reset: We have built dashboards and today that mind-set helps us run the business as if it resets to zero every day.