Imagine you run a hotel with a bar. Someone grabs one too many drinks and then gets into an accident. Is your liability policy going to cover it? What do you have in place to mitigate the risk of fires? Or how about a data breach that exposes customer payment information?
More importantly, how do you manage all of these risks—and more—simultaneously without exhausting your budget? With an integrated risk management (IRM) system designed for the hospitality sector, answering these and other sticky questions is relatively easy. Here’s how an IRM for hospitality can help you identify, address, and reduce risk.
Enhanced Risk Identification
You can’t combat what you can’t see, so the ability of an IRM for hospitality to surface a comprehensive spectrum of risks is one of its most powerful tools. Even if you were to model your risk identification methodology after similar businesses, it would be easy to overlook potentially pivotal events. This is where risk management tools for hospitality can play an important role.
For example, suppose your IRM gives you the ability to incorporate photos and videos as part of the risk auditing process. As your risk experts examine each location’s video, they may spot issues that could present problems, such as:
- Doors to indoor pools that aren’t secured with keycard access
- Potentially slippery floors, such as those made of smooth tile or polished concrete
- A lack of surveillance cameras in hallways or stairwells that could catch employees stealing goods
Instead of having to make site visits to each and every facility, you can leverage your IRM tools to identify issues that increase your exposure to risk.
Streamlined and Automated Risk Mitigation
They say one person can’t be everywhere at once, but they’re wrong. With hospitality risk management tools, you get a view of every department, location, and system that could be impacted by an incident.
For example, suppose there’s a foodborne illness outbreak in the U.S. Scientists have pinpointed ground zero as a co-op of farms in the Midwest. With an IRM, you can map out the supply chain each hotel restaurant uses, identifying which distributors send ingredients to each location.
In a matter of moments, you can see which locations are most likely to be exposed to this illness, reach out to them, start an inventory audit, and begin testing food samples. Also, because your system can communicate with each location, you can reach out to all of them via a single email with details about the illness, the ingredients it may impact, and the level of danger for each establishment.
Faster, Easier Renewals
Because so many hospitality companies have several locations, the renewal process can be a hungry time vacuum. Each location has different risks, and these change every year, which often complicates renewals.
But with a hospitality risk management tool, you have a portal for collecting risk data as the year goes on. When it comes time to start the renewal process, you already have the information you need at your fingertips.
For instance, suppose one location expands its facility, adding more seating to an existing restaurant. While increasing your general liability may be a foregone conclusion, this expansion could have a ripple effect on other risks, as well:
- More customers mean more data stored at the location, as well as an expanded network. These could impact your cyber liability plan.
- More patrons may necessitate taking another look at your liquor liability policy.
- With an increase in customers comes a boost in employees as well. So you may have to revisit your workers’ comp.
It can be hard to keep these and other considerations in mind, especially if you have many facilities. But your IRM can automatically trigger alerts regarding each risk, estimate how much you may have to spend, and streamline the process of gathering risk info for each insurer.
Mobile Tools to Enhance Connectivity and Efficiency
When you arm team members with mobile risk management tools, your data collection and processing system gets far more efficient. You no longer have to schedule long strings of expensive, time-consuming site visits to verify the quality of your data. You can train each team member that deals with risk on the same system and ensure they enter risk data whenever necessary.
This is especially helpful in the hospitality industry when it comes to conforming to compliance and regulatory requirements. For example, you can have someone at each location enter data pertaining to:
- Guest safety
- Data security
- Employee safety
- Employee performance
You can then use this information to accurately assess the risk profile of each facility. If, for example, a hotel’s firewall has been down for several days on multiple occasions, you can both immediately address the issue and, if there’s no immediate solution in place, take other measures to secure your data. For example, you could have customer data transferred to a secure, in-house server that’s not connected to the internet.
Use Ventiv’s Comprehensive IRM to Manage Hospitality Risk
Ventiv’s IRM gives you an integrated solution that empowers you to manage incidents, claims, and assets all with a single solution. You can also use Ventiv to automate your renewal process. In this way, you shave off precious hours whenever it’s time to work on renewals, freeing up staff to focus on other value-adding tasks.
And because Ventiv gives you a central repository to collect, analyze, and manage risk data, you don’t have to worry about whether one or two locations are slipping out of your purview.
Chat with an expert to see how Ventiv’s IRM Solution is right for your organization.
