Looking into the future with optimism

Tribe Hotels group Corporate General Manager Vikram Khettry during an interview with the Standard at the hotel in Village Market, Nairobi on August 26, 2020. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

“We started 2020 with a lot of promise. There were at least five presidential delegations that were to visit Kenya in the first quarter of 2020. The business was also looking quite strong, the demand was on the rise and even better than 2019, so it was to be a very positive year. 

When the (Covid-19 pandemic) effects started to have an impact on the hospitality sector in Kenya around March and we started getting cancellations, we had to make a choice. From last year we had begun renovations of all the rooms in Tribe hotel, which we were doing in phases, without shutting the hotel down. We decided to take Tribe Hotel completely into renovations completely and focus on operating one hotel, which is a Trademark.

We reduced our workforce by almost 75 per cent. These had to stay at home but they were paid a certain amount of money every month to survive. One of our colleagues created a mobile application, which is like a marketplace. As a hotel, we buy items in bulk so we get them at a better wholesale price than if you would at a shop. So we started selling essential items to our team members at a cost that is at times even 30 per cent cheaper than in the market. 

The workplace became home

There are many elements of the transaction, from suppliers to team members, to the guests who come into the facility. We had to come up with protocols. At that time, we decided that we would bring our team and accommodate them in the hotel. 

At that time, there was very little leisure or business travel happening. No traveller could come into or leave Nairobi. But there was a lot of influx of either citizens or residents who were abroad and had to be brought back into the country. There was a mandatory two-week quarantine for all of them so there was a need for accommodation to be provided by third parties like us in addition to the government. 

Keeping going

We had a group of 150 -180 individuals who came first and they stayed for two weeks. These guests had to stay within the confines of the room, so it could easily have been more like a prison experience. We started creating windows for them to come out of the rooms, spend an hour outside every day. We started surprising them by sending them things like chocolate cake or movie night – we even had a music performance from Ghetto Classic here.

The Ministry of Health also sent us support staff – doctors who were based out of the hotel – who were educating the team and the guests on what sort of protocols we need to follow and monitoring that everything was being done in the right way. We were able to adapt very quickly to the new situation. We were flexible and also the measures we took quickly helped us keep running the operations.

It’s not over yet

Right now, the entire world is trying to tackle the situation. There are two kinds of lessons to be learned. One is how to survive in this time. The second one would be, once the impact is over and we have surpassed the threat level, what travel behaviour the new norm will bring. We keep talking about the new norm but the ‘new norm’ keeps changing every month. My belief is that once a cure or vaccine is available, it will become much easier to handle the situation and maybe that will be the start of the recovery for the world.

For the travel industry, in the short term, we are waiting for the travellers’ confidence to go up. It is going to go up gradually because we are not talking about just one country like Kenya successfully suppressing the virus. We are talking about the whole world coming to terms with the situation and somehow winning the battle and that will take time. Personally, this is an experience I will never forget.  We will probably talk about it for the next 100 years.

It will get better

I believe that, in the next few months, when the new protocols will become part of our lives and we start behaving that way naturally, traveller confidence will go up. Business people will have to travel. I am a bit pessimistic about leisure travel from abroad because a lot of people either lost their jobs or have a reduced salary. 

I have a lot of faith in human capability. If we overcome this successfully by finding a cure or learning how to keep it from spreading, we will bounce back in less than a year’s time. That is how resilient humans are.

No one country can say that they can be successful in isolation. Every country depends on some other country’s resources for growth. So we will have to bounce back in a matter of time.