Signal: New Hotel Hygiene

Each month, Weber Shandwick’s Trends in Two Minutes outlines trends impacting businesses throughout Asia Pacific. With Trend Spotlight, we share some of the individual trends highlighted. Today, exploring how the hotel sector has responded to rising concerns around cleanliness and travel with new technologies and cleaning standards.

Cleanliness, health, and hygiene have become increasingly vital concerns for consumers and brands over the past twelve months, regardless of sector or geography. However, even as recovery efforts and vaccine rollouts grow in scale worldwide, brands in the hotel sector are escalating their commitment to greater hygiene standards.

New technologies are playing a key role. A device like the electrostatic disinfectant sprayer allows hotel staff to disinfect a wider array of surfaces to a higher degree and with fewer expended resources. It’s increasingly becoming an essential tool in the industry. Elsewhere, brands are hoping nanotech can help eliminate surface viral transmission.

It’s an approach born partly of necessity. The extreme pressures endured by the global hotel industry during the pandemic have made innovation key to maintaining business growth and survival. In response, brands in the sector are leveraging the new consumer hygiene priorities to cultivate greater confidence and investment in hotels post-pandemic.

For brands and communicators in the sector, the challenge lies in successfully conveying the competitive advantage and technological sophistication of the strategy to consumers and stakeholders – ensuring consumers both understand and feel supported by the innovations and the heightened hygiene standards translate to higher brand value.

For those outside the sector, the trend serves as a valuable reminder of the strategic value of identifying and addressing key stakeholder concerns in sustaining business growth. In effectively connecting with the hygiene-first priorities of consumers, the hotel sector may have located a new generator of value even during challenging times.

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