Risk management for hotels is the process of identifying, assessing and controlling risks to your staff and customers. This includes operational risks, safety, financial and technological risks.
Where other hospitality businesses might focus on a single environment like a restaurant, hotels need to ensure that every facility they offer is safe and compliant, including restaurants, bars, leisure facilities and customer accommodation.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic risk management has taken on even more importance, and its scope can include anything from hygiene to building maintenance. It is vital that your hotel’s risk management system is properly equipped to ensure workplace safety for customers and teams in all areas of the business.
Beyond accident prevention, a good risk assessment checklist also helps improve operational efficiency. It can even have a positive impact on employee engagement because teams feel confident in safety processes.
The key to a hotel risk assessment that both reduces potential dangers and engages staff is ease of use and consistency. A digital checklist is the perfect solution, because it will never go missing and can be filled out in exactly the same way whenever it is required.
The goal of risk management in any industry is to identify and monitor risks whilst proactively preventing them from happening.
There are actually a variety of checklists that you could create to help with your risk management process. Hotel managers can use checklists to:
The best starting place for most hotels is a risk assessment checklist. This checklist helps you or your employees to spot risks, note their severity, and recommend actions to mitigate their potential harm.
A risk assessment checklist will vary depending on the facilities in your hotel. You might want to create multiple checklists if you manage a large hotel with lots of separate facilities on offer. However, here are some ideas for things to check to get you started:
These ideas are just starting points; you will need to customise your risk assessment checklist (and other risk management checklists) to make sure you cover all of the risks in your hotel.
Trail’s templates will give you a good starting point for a digital checklist, but they are designed to be flexible. Don’t feel limited by what is on offer here or elsewhere – it’s vital that you don’t miss potential risks due to compromises or incomplete checklists.
The key with hotel risk management is to make health and safety part of your establishment’s DNA. Don’t wait until something goes wrong to address potential risks – use checklists to ensure that you and your staff are always ready to give customers and other employees the safest environment possible.
Check out some of our health & safety template checklists here.
While paper risk management checklists are certainly better than none at all, they take time and are hard to keep track of. Trail is a powerful hospitality and hotel management app that helps you manage the risks in your hotel in one easy-to-use platform:
Try Trail free for 14 days with the button below, or book a demo if you want to see the app in action.