INTRODUCTION
Discrimination can come in the form of an employee to customer or employee to employee. It can be on the basis of gender, sexuality, age, occupation within the hotel or other characteristics.
With the goal of keeping your hotel’s reputation intact and to minimize backlash from the incident, here is how to handle a social media crisis related to discrimination.
RESPOND QUICKLY, TAKE RESPONSBILITY
Similar to all other forms of online hotel crises, respond as soon as possible to the accusation, within 24 hours is best. When responding, take responsibility and don’t make excuses, to avoid escalating the situation. For example, a customer at a Crowne Plaza accused the hotel of ethnic discrimination on TripAdvisor. Instead of responding within a day, the hotel waited nearly two weeks to reach out to the guest, and despite the hotel’s efforts at explaining the misunderstanding, the guest will likely never accept it.
That’s because logic usually won’t sway an angry guest’s emotions. Thus, a standard online response should include transparency, concern
For example: “Discrimination of any kind is not tolerated at our hotel, and I want to offer our sincerest apologies for your experience. We plan to investigate this situation further and will do our part to prevent it from happening again. Our goal is to provide a welcoming stay for all.” After you post your public comment, follow up in a private message on the social media platform on which the accusation originated.
RE-ESTABLISH INCLUSIVE ENVIRONMENT
Not all situations involve guests, as discrimination can happen within your hotel staff. If an employee takes their accusations to social media, first remove all scheduled posts (for that day), respond as soon as possible and report false information. A sample response could say something like, “We are aware of the comments an employee made on social media. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, we respectfully disagree with the comments made. Our goal is to provide a welcoming environment for all of our staff.”
Once the problem is handled, be sure to review what happened (as much as you legally can) with the staff so they learn what went wrong and retrain the staff on your code of conduct as necessary.
For example, after a Miami, Fla.,