Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
You’ll come across hundreds of thousands of guests during your time in hospitality, and they’ll bring all types of health issues into your hotel. Those include both physical and mental health issues, which can bleed over into the way they interact with your building(s) while they are there.
Inevitably, a hotel guest will die while they are at your facility.
As jarring as that event can be, it’s important that you and your staff know how to respond to quickly and appropriately keep the relevant parties informed and well taken care of.
Whether young or old, you want to make a point to be forthright in how you respond, and how your staff does.
Death is no joke. You or someone on staff will undoubtedly end up having to deal with the death of a hotel guest, and you’ll want to know the general concerns about the process therein.
First is the police issue.
Where death is concerned, you will, at some point, have to deal with police and/or other first responders if and when anyone dies.
That means that you’ll end up calling the police if someone kills a person at your hotel, but also if someone simply has a heart attack on your property. Many different scenarios can be the case when someone dies.
What you do know is that you want to make the lives of police and families easier, especially given the gravity of the situation.
Hotel operations expert William Frye, a professor at Niagara University, writes that it is imperative only to share the information about the death of a guest with the parties that must know.
It’s especially important, he added, that no employee be left alone at the scene or with the deceased to preserve the scene for law enforcement officials to take over from there.
Hotels provide solace for people who have decided they no longer want to live and continue in this world. It’s a complicated decision, and one that they usually make, having agonized over their lives for whatever reason.
Research referenced in a 2006 article found that local residents were more likely to have taken their lives in a hotel than their out-of-town counterparts.
By choosing to do whatever they are going to do in a hotel, they preserve their own power over the situation, and they — at least in their minds — minimize the trauma on their family and other loved ones.
Unfortunately, many homeless people choose hotels as places to take their own lives. They do so ostensibly to lessen the impact of trauma they would otherwise foist upon their family members who might otherwise find them in their home or some other place of comfort and familiarity.
Lodging Magazine cites experts who say guests paying in cash who seem to be moving rather quickly may warrant further questioning from staff about their plans. Checking in without luggage can also be a red flag, they say.
In any case, hotels can make certain alterations to lessen the risk of these activities. One such solution is limiting a window’s width so that no one can jump out.
The public and disturbing nature of suicide gives hotels a unique sort of risk in this way, and that’s something professional personnel at your property must be aware of.
Researchers in a 2019 article even posited that some who overdose in a hotel room do so with the express intent of not being found before their death. Staff should be attuned to the atypical nature of these guests and make a point to alert a manager or other relevant authorities if need be.
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