Hotel Security

Suppose for a moment that you owned and operated a hotel in a costal city, possibly even somewhere near a harbor or a marina. Suppose a boatload of heavily-armed idiots washes up on your beachfront and attacks your hotel, apparently just because some rather more charismatic idiot has told them that Americans are bad, killing innocent people without warning is good, and God wants them to do this. What, exactly, are you going to do about it?

That seems to be the question on a lot of people’s minds following the attacks in Mumbai, at least according to articles being reported on USA Today Online. Police in New York City are running training exercises based on a similar scenario, while people in Miami are worried because not only is the entire city accessible by water, they already have dozens (scores? Hundreds? Thousands? No on really knows) of unauthorized boats coming ashore every week. If you can smuggle a large bale of South American agricultural products into this country whenever you want to, then getting a few people and a few hundred pounds of weapons and explosives ashore doesn’t sound all that difficult. Nor can you expect the Coast Guard to completely seal off a coast as large as ours, even with help from the Navy…

Taken at face value, of course, it’s a silly question: there is no way you can equip your hotel with bomb-proof walls, bullet-resistant windows, bunkers for your guests to sleep in, or platoons of armed guard roaming the grounds looking for invading terrorists, nor should you try to do so. Matters of national security are best left to the government agencies charged with those matters, and no private citizen or business owner is going to be able to take those matters into their own hands. The degree to which this remains a serious question is, to what extent will your customers EXPECT you to protect them from armed threats? And if you don’t, how will this affect your business?

Banks have employed armed security guards for decades, not because these worthies (often retired police officers) are expected to engage and defeat groups of armed bank robbers, but rather because they provide a reassuring presence for the law-abiding customers – and because there is always a chance that a lone bank robber will fail to notice the bank guard in time, of course. If people become concerned enough about violent crime it may become financially prudent for hotels to re-introduce the position of Hotel Detective onto their staff, as well as beefing up security measures like locked doors and closed-circuit cameras…

None of which will do the bottom line any good, of course – especially during a time of economic downturn, when most people are already curtailing all non-essential travel. But if the choice is implementing such security measures or losing business (potentially all of your business) to competitors that have, we might very well start seeing increased security as a standard feature in high-class hotels. One could easily imagine these security measures becoming a selling point (featured in the advertising, perhaps?) as hotels compete to become your safest holiday option.

Which brings me back to my original point: you might regard the attacks on Mumbai to be unfathomable goings-on from the other side of the world. You might believe that just because you don’t live in India (or Miami) your business will never have to deal with boatloads of sea-borne murderous idiots. You might even be completely correct in these beliefs. But if your customers do not share in your optimism, then these attacks may impact your business, too, even if you run a Holiday Inn somewhere in the middle of Kansas…