Hotel Security Excellence Project

By Leischen Stelter of SecurityDirectorNews.com 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—The July bombings of the Ritz-Carlton and Marriot hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia as well as the 2008 terrorist attacks on hotels in Mumbai, India, have highlighted the ongoing struggles that hotel security director’s face in fortifying their establishments. It is this recent global attention on hotel security that has driven a new initiative by global consultancy and research firm Frost & Sullivan to develop a rating system based on the security programs at hotels around the world. 

Frost & Sullivan, in partnership with SDS Group, an international counter-terrorism consultancy firm, have created a Security Excellence Program to conduct risk assessments on hotel security programs and provide recommendations for the hospitality industry. This program was developed “so hotels can essentially learn the security infrastructure necessary to take them from being a soft to a hard target,” said Dorman Followwill, partner and director with Frost & Sullivan. 

The assessment, which will be paid for by hotels, will be based on several categories pertaining to hotel security practices. Key issues include training and management of security staff, strength of emergency and contingency plans, assessment of security operations, perimeter and access control systems and the physical infrastructure of the hotel. A significant part of the evaluation concerns the training of staff. “We’re evaluating security managers and staff and what type of training they’ve had, particularly realistic training,” said Dr. John Wyatt, technical director, SDS Group. “It’s not just book training, but rather: Have they carried out realistic exercises to cope with any situation?” 

Conducting these assessments will provide benchmarking standards for hotels to compare the strength of their security program against other hotels, said Wyatt. It will also develop a set of ‘best practices’ in the hospitality sector and will allow an outlet for hotels to share security strategies. However, one of the most important elements of this assessment for security practitioners is having an outside party confirm the need for improved security measures, said Wyatt. “This will support and strengthen the position of security managers who may well have been trying to do things or introduce security elements that haven’t had the right priority with the hotel manager, but now here we have an independent organization coming in and saying the same thing, so this actually enhances the security manager’s position,” he said.  

The team just completed its first assessment in August of the Cumberland Hotel in London. Upon the completion of more assessments, Gile Downes, program manager for Frost & Sullivan, said that the organization will engage hotel security practitioners as to the best way to publish the results. “The delivery or availability of this information is an evolving issue,” he said. “This is a sensitive subject and we don’t want the hospitality industry to perceive this as a threat, but rather as a complement to their security program.” Frost & Sullivan will make the results available to a limited audience of corporations that have a large number of executive travelers as well as travel agencies who work with corporate travelers and others. 

In addition to offering recommendations, Frost & Sullivan will also conduct an ongoing series of three-day comprehensive training workshops for hotel security managers, their direct staff and other hotel employees in public-facing roles. Downes emphasized that hotels need to properly train and prepare all of their staff. “Hotels can never be certain who will be around during a crisis, so they all need to know how to respond effectively,” he said. “Hotels are fortifying themselves to avoid being subject to an attack and part of doing that is raising awareness about what type of resistance hotels need to put up and how to publicize it to become less attractive targets.” 

For more information on the Hotel Security Excellence Rating program, please visit www.hser.info or contact Gile Downes at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .