Tag: hospitality

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.

INTRODUCTION

According to Statista, the number of worldwide social media users in 2017 reached 2.46 billion and is expected to grow to 2.77 billion this year. With this many social media users, mishaps can happen both intentionally and unintentionally. 

For example, early in 2018, Marriott Hotels fired an hourly employee after he liked a tweet, on behalf of Marriott International, during a night shift. The tweet was posted by a Tibetan separatist group that had praised Marriott for listing Tibet as a sovereign state in a customer survey.

What made matters worst was the employee didn’t know the “social graces” of dealing with this issue and didn’t think his job would be endangered by liking the tweet. However, for accidentally recognizing Tibet as a country, Marriott was ordered to suspend bookings for its 300 hotels in China for one week.

With the rapid-fire speed at which information can spread and without proper guidelines in place, your business is exposed to risks. Here is how to handle a social media crisis related to a rogue employee and rebuild your hotel’s reputation.