Your hotel has a crisis plan. It probably won’t save your general manager’s career.<\/p>\n
Here’s the problem: most hotel crisis plans are built around one assumption. When something goes wrong, escalate to the brand. ‘Marriott will handle it.’ ‘Hilton has a process. Let corporate take the lead.’<\/p>\n
But while your GM is waiting for guidance from brand headquarters, five different audiences are already staring directly at him. His own staff, wondering what to do. Local regulators, asking what happened. Emergency responders, needing information now. Guests and media, looking for someone in charge. And the brand itself, watching how he handles it.<\/p>\n
None of them are going to wait for corporate to call back.<\/p>\n
The crisis plan says ‘contact Hilton.’ But the front desk employee, the local news reporter, the fire marshal standing in the lobby? They’re not asking for Hilton’s statement. They’re asking your GM what’s going on right now. If he doesn’t have an answer, he doesn’t look like a leader. He looks like someone waiting for permission.<\/p>\n
The brand will survive. The big chains have survived worse. The question is whether your GM will still be running that property six months from now, and whether the team around him still trusts him to make decisions under pressure.<\/p>\n
Crisis communications training for hotel general managers \u2014 real training, not a memo \u2014 is one of the most underinvested categories in the hospitality industry. The brand provides the playbook. Nobody provides the practice. And when the fire marshal is in the lobby at 2am, the playbook is the last thing your GM is going to reach for.<\/p>\n
Train the person, not just the plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your hotel has a crisis plan. It probably won’t save your general manager’s career. Here’s the problem: most hotel crisis plans are built around one assumption. When something goes wrong, escalate to the brand. ‘Marriott will handle it.’ ‘Hilton has a process. Let corporate take the lead.’ But while your GM is waiting for guidance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}