Online Tutoring on Physical and Cyber Threats in the Hotel Industry

Introduction

For any hotel, it is necessary to ensure the safety of its guests as any harm to any guest may impact the reputation and earnings of the hotel. One such safety breach happened at Hyatt Hotel in New Delhi, where the son of a political leader brandished a weapon against another guest of the hotel. This incident happened in 2018, and the hotel staff had to interfere to ensure the safety of the guest (Express News Service, 2018). While it is usually considered that security threats in a hotel are physical in nature, however, in recent times the hotel industry is facing a lot of cyber threats as well: Earlier this year, the personal data of 5.2 million guests of Marriot Hotel Chain (worldwide) was stolen through one its franchisee hotel (Zitter, 2020).  Thus, due to the ever-increasing physical and cyber threats, there is a need to examine three aspects of security at hotels: steps taken or being taken by hotels to minimize security breaches and maximize the safety of guests, some recent developments (design, physical, and development), that are contributing towards improving safety and security for guests, and how hotels are improving the ethical conduct towards hotel guests.

 

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Steps taken to maximize the safety of guests and minimize security breaches

Chauhan et al (2018) argued that a pre-cursor to ensure guest safety is to establish coordination between departments including front office, security, and hospitality. This coordination is necessary at every stage of security management. There are several stages in security management: identifying the security risk, developing a plan to mitigate the risk, executing the plan to mitigate the risk, and monitoring the progress of risk mitigation.

The first step towards security management is the identification of risk.  As argued by Chauhan et al. (2018), a physical threat in the context of a hotel is usually confined to an unauthorized or illegal activity conducted in the hotel premises only. Chauhan et al (2018) identified some major physical risks for the hotel industry: fire threat, weapon threat, theft emergency, accident emergency, illness and epidemic, and misconduct by a guest.

 

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However as identified by HT (2017), for a cyber threat in a hotel, there can be several risky points: One key area that is a risky node is the ‘point-of-sale’ systems as these systems contain information like guest name and credit card details. Since these systems are constantly in use and are not updated or patched (as frequently as needed), so they are at constant risk of being hacked. Another source of cyber threat in any hotel is that personal details of the guests are stored at different locations: facilities, restaurants, and billings, thereby providing widespread access to any unauthorized party to steal the data. This problem multi-folds in case of franchise based hotel chains as they share data with each other to provide customers with a better experience. However, this also means that by hacking at one franchisee, a hacker can access information about global guests as well. A popular tactic used by hackers is ‘phishing’ where the hackers get access to valuable login credentials and other details of the guest. Another popular tactic is ‘ransomware’ where instead of stealing the data, hackers encrypt the data, thereby making it unusable for hotel, until the hotel agrees to pay a ransom. Orfei and Facchini (2016) argued that while the focus of risk management is usually on large hotel chains, however more than half of the cyber-attacks happen against the small hotels as they lack any basic security system to protect themselves against any cyber risk.

The second step toward maximizing the security is planning, therefore there is a need to develop a ‘toolbelt’ of security measures. PwC (2016) identified that while several local and national regulations must be followed by any hotel. However, every hotel should aspire to adopt the best practices in the industry, some of them are discussed next.

 

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