Guest Experience Lessons You can Learn from Atlanta’s Recent Water Shortage

A major city in the southeastern United States recently found itself dealing with a water shortage because of old infrastructure. Your hotel guests need water to shower, and to clean perhaps, and to cook or whatever else they have in mind. Your hotel business needs water to wash and clean among the many other demands of the hospitality business. So, what should you be doing prior to an emergency? What should you be doing once your locale identifies a water issue?

Make sure you’re communicating with guests. The vast majority of Americans enjoy perpetual access to water, and when that access is gone, you need to be first to let them know why. If it’s an issue in your building, say so.

If it’s an issue with city or county water facilities, you should say so. That clarification may help guests make a quicker decision about how they might respond by finding themselves water if they choose. Try not to leave guests in the dark at all and be prepared for folks to ask for refunds. How much you honor those is up to you, but ideally there is already a policy in the books. Guests may only care about inconvenience, not necessarily where it came from.

Talk to your city or county representatives about a timeline, which you can pass along to the other interested parties. If you can figure out who represents the part of a city or county that you’re in, you can reach out to see how long it might take to have water again. Make no mistake – your guests will be unhappy, and you will hear from them quickly.

If you can swing it, you will want to let them know that you are already in communication with city/county leaders and that you will be in touch with more information as you receive it. Information can be hard to come by in situations like these, but what you can do is what you should do.

Be persistent in your attempts to quell the fears of guests, since both your guests and your staff will appreciate and remember how you responded during a minor crisis. There’s no way to plan for everything, but the way you respond once you figure out what you need to do is the part that folks will recall for quite a while. If you are decisive, others can rest assured that someone is attempting to work on their behalf to find a solution, and as a miffed guest, that might be all they need to stay patient, at least in the very short term.

Where can you find water? Use your resources and call around if need be. In the scenario mentioned earlier, citizens in Atlanta found themselves unable to drink water from the tap. It’s a huge hassle. That doesn’t mean the same issues were there in Marietta or East Point, however.

Though those places may also have an aging infrastructure, their facilities are working now and should be your first thought when you’re considering where to get water in the short term while crews work on how to restore water in the city your hotel is in. You should be looking for immediate relief for your guests and might come by getting water from a neighboring city or county.

Go out as far as you need to find the water that guests will ask for, and your business will need. A little drive is a small price to pay relative to the return you’ll get if guests realize you have gone out of your way to make an annoying situation a bit easier on them. We don’t necessarily realize how much water we use until we don’t have access to it, and the sooner you can help in some way, the better.