DALLAS — At the depths of the COVID-19-induced downturn in 2020, the hotel industry was hemorrhaging jobs due to historically low demand levels. But at the same time, hotel companies were laying off and furloughing employees at an unprecedented clip, IT departments were tasked with major and time-sensitive projects to react to required operational changes.
Speaking during the "Industry CIO Panel" at HFTP's HITEC 2021, Scott Strickland, executive vice president and chief information officer for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, said his team shed 40% of its employees within two months of the onset of the pandemic.
"It was easily the worst part of my entire career," he said. "I've been in IT for 30 years, but those three months where we had to make adjustments to our organization ... was definitely the worst part of my entire professional career."
So what can IT departments do in this circumstance? Learn to be more efficient and better prioritize their work, panelists said.
Strickland said his company had to take a close look at everything it was working on and figure out what mattered the most.
"The first thing we did is we reprioritized," he said. "We paused. We spoke to the business and said, 'Guys, we're not going to be running all these projects.'"
In particular, that meant moving resources away from things like internal accounting projects to deploying contactless technology across Wyndham's portfolio of brands at a point when that tech was suddenly more relevant than ever.
Dan Kornick, chief information officer for Loews Hotels & Co, said his company went through the same process, in his case with an IT department down 30% from pre-pandemic levels.
"It made us focus on what was important," he said. "You have to take a step back and say, 'We're doing 100 different things, but do those things matter? Do they move the needle?' So I think by having that focus, we were able to be more efficient."
Michael Levie, chief operations officer for CitizenM Hotels, said over the course of the pandemic, his company actually grew its IT department, but still expected a higher level of efficiency.
"We're now implementing that more agile way of working throughout the organization to be more efficient," he said.
The industry broadly should take pride in that work, he said.
"It has been difficult, and obviously we were hit hard as an industry and as companies, but it has been very rewarding to me working to move forward," he said.
The Power of Partnerships
Mohammed Al Qassim, managing partner of The Manor by JA, said among the unsung heroes of the pandemic are the tech vendors who willingly shared in the financial burdens felt by hotel companies.
Some vendors "continued to do work and didn't stop even though we were not able to pay on time," he said. "This relationship and this partnership is something that we will take into the future."
Andrew Arthurs, chief information officer for Aimbridge Hospitality, said he's shifting how he refers to vendors who were empathetic through the depths of the downturn.
"During the pandemic, you've learned a lot about the difference between a vendor and a partner," he said. "We have many partners who really leaned in and shared the burden of a business that was crumbling and helped us financially and on the service level and connected with us as partners. On the vendor side, and I use that almost as a derogatory term, those are the ones who actually didn't care and didn't share in that downturn in the suffering that the business was going through."
Kornick said he was also amazed to see so many vendors who were competitors willing to work together in industry groups like Hospitality Technology Next Generation to help move the industry forward at a difficult time.
"You would have 10 different vendors that were competing in a lot of ways, but didn't care, all working in these work groups," he said.
Labor Challenges Remain
Much like other parts of the hotel industry, it is now extremely difficult to recruit and retain IT workers, panelists said.
Carol Beggs, director of technology for Chatham Bars Inn in Cape Cod, said part of the remedy for that is recognizing and developing talent everywhere you can find it.
"We definitely have to promote from within," she said. "We try and recognize talent, maybe from other departments. We steal regularly from each other. One of my best people is from the engineering department who had the talent [for IT]."
Arthurs said recruitment efforts for IT positions within the hotel industry need to be more holistic.
"From a compensation standpoint, we need to be very competitive," he said. "But we also need to provide other motivating factors for our team, so they can enjoy being a part of Aimbridge. In our case, it's a purpose. It's a sense of belonging. It's a sense of membership."
He said his company's new Plano, Texas, headquarters is a unique selling point used to illustrate the company's commitment to developing "a culture and a sense of community and belonging."
Kornick said one of his top lessons from the pandemic has been that leaders like him should be doing everything they can to reward the hard work of the employees that got them through the crisis.
"Personally, I want to focus more on my team," he said. "They've put in so much in the past few years that has just been phenomenal. I don't feel like I'm doing enough work, so how can I do more for them, whether it's a career path or development. That's going to be my focus because, at the end of the day, they got us through this."