John Parkinson has been through a dozen hurricanes. But today, “it’s a regular day for us in south Florida,” says Parkinson, Hilton’s area general manager for West Palm Beach/Fort Lauderdale and GM of the Hilton West Palm Beach.
Not so for communities digging out from Hurricane Michael, the first Category 4 hurricane on record to make landfall in the state’s Panhandle. Michael caused storm surges, knocked out power to more than 1 million customers and triggered flash floods and fatalities in multiple states.
As of Friday morning, nine Hilton properties were in Michael’s path; one is closed for damage and is being assessed, and a handful lacked power. Another is expected to reopen today. HOTELS talked to Parkinson about how hotel GMs manage in a hurricane, from maintaining morale to an unexpected benefit of inviting first responders in for coffee.
HOTELS: How do you manage your people in in a situation like this?
John Parkinson: Your number one priority is the safety of your team members and your guests. That’s paramount. You also have to realize that you’re still a hotel. You still have to offer a level of hospitality. What we try to do at our hotel is keep people very calm. These hurricanes – they take a long time to develop and they take a long time to get there. So what tends to happen is that a lot of our guests are sitting in their rooms or sitting in the lobby watching the TVs, and the storms could take two and a half or three days to get to where they are.
We make sure we create an atmosphere where people can stay busy. When Irma came through, it was over a weekend, so we had TVs, but not every TV had the Weather Channel on. We had football playing. In some of our ballroom space we put Playstations, Xbox, Wii, so that kids could go in there… From a hotel staff (perspective), we make sure that we are very calm, cool and collected, and we’re not making our customers feel nervous or uncomfortable.
H: What’s it like in the aftermath?
JP: I always tell people that going through a hurricane or any situation like this, believe it or not, in a very strange way, brings the team closer. We all check in a few days earlier, with our families, we then work somewhat around the clock, we go in shifts, so maybe someone who typically works the morning shift might be working the overnight shift because that’s what we need.
The team really pulls together, and they understand that we’re here for one common cause, which is to keep everybody safe. Once the storm ends, the skies open up, it’s beautiful outside, it’s sunny, we step outside. As a team, we’re all pretty tired, because we’d worked pretty hard the last couple days.
For lack of a better word, it’s almost a team-building experience going through these large storms. Would we rather not have them? Absolutely… but the team usually leaves these experiences a lot closer than when they started them.
H: How do you maintain morale?
JP: We start meeting early. We live in south Florida, so we have hurricane plans well-built years in advance… What really also happens is that team members see us and how much effort we put into their safety and their families’ safety. It always warms my heart to walk into the break room during one of these situations and you see someone eating dinner with their family and our executive chef down there making food. We’re not just making sandwiches – our executive chef makes great food for our team members. The team members see the effort that we’ve put into their safety and their care, and they’re more than willing to jump in and do whatever it takes to make sure to take care of our customers.
Most importantly, it all comes down to communication. I believe when people have a clear understanding of what’s going to happen and they have a level of acceptance that, OK, this could happen, then there are fewer surprises and typically they react much, much better.
H: How do you manage the inevitable tension in a situation like this?
JP: What we do, and what I always advise other hotels to do, is offer your hotel to the first responders. Offer them food, coffee. Around the clock at our hotel, we had meeting space carved off where we offered it to police officers, fire departments, the linemen working out there, ambulances – anybody that was a first responder that was physically out there working throughout the hurricane, we opened up our hotel.
They could come in around the clock and walk into this room where we had hot food, a place for them to relax, couches and chairs. They could lie down and get some shut-eye, so when we did have (an incident), we called the fire department – they were on their way to the hotel to get some coffee already, so they were there within two minutes of our call.
If you can imagine if all these hotels opened their doors to these first responders, they would have this network around these cities where they could be in and out of these hotels constantly, and the customers, guests, team members, when they see the fire department come in, they feel a level of comfort that they’re being watched and being taken care of… The first responders absolutely love it, they’re so appreciative of it, and they’re usually around the hotel almost always, which is very convenient.
H: With 2017’s storms, are you doing anything differently this year to prepare?
JP: In the last year we instituted every single day, twice a day, conference calls where every single hotel that is possibly in the path (of a hurricane) – so for example for Irma, every hotel from Puerto Rico to the Carolinas – were on these calls, at 8 o’clock in the morning and 4 o’clock in the afternoon, because that’s typically when the paths were projected… We’d do these calls typically four or five days before the hurricane lands.
It gave us all the opportunity to give a quick assessment of what we were doing, and if anyone was doing something that maybe was unique or new, or something that maybe someone else could try as a best practice, on the call, we could implement that there. We were also getting live updates from the hotels that were impacted. The best ideas you get are from the field.
H: As a GM, how do you simultaneously maintain moral and take care of yourself?
JP: I think that being visible is really critical. As a GM, or whatever your position is on the executive team of the hotel, you put your emails away, you put your reports away, and you step into the operation. And when you do that, the adrenaline takes over and you make sure you’re visible.
The guests are much calmer when we’re around. For example, when the storm is 24 hours away, there’s no reason to close your bar. Leave it open, so you can go in there and relax. So I’ll go in the bar, and I’ll start making some cocktails or something with the guests at the bar, talking to them. And when they hear that you’ve been through 10 or 12 of these personally, they then have a level of calmness.
As far as your personal care, you’ve got to make sure you run in waves. We have a director of operations at the hotel, so I would go get some rest and he would be on call, and when he was getting some rest I would be on call. You make sure that you give everyone ample rest.
Typically enough team members come into the hotel to stay to get away from the storm that you really have enough people to help you manage the hotel. We get the best <customer reviews> after these storms because we’re so visible in the operations and the customers appreciate it so much.
I think the best way to do it is to put everything away. I’m going to go spend the next 48 hours inside my operation talking to people, calming them down, and just be part of the little community inside the hotel. That’s the best practice. And making sure you get some rest – making sure you’re able to go upstairs and relax and shut your eyes for a few hours, and get up and do it all over again.