Protecting Guests & Your Business With COI Tracking for Hospitality

You’re in the business of making guests happy. Unfortunately, even with the best facilities and services, accidents happen. If you don’t take the right precautions, these incidents can be costly. Every new relationship with a contractor or vendor opens up more possible risk exposures for your hospitality business. Knowing who you’re working with through regulatory, financial, and safety screenings can help set you up for success, but the highest level of effective risk management also requires effective contractual risk transfer and certificate of insurance (COI) tracking.

After being cooped up at home, guests are eager to return to their favorite hospitality businesses. However, business leaders must take great care to ensure that COI tracking doesn’t get pushed to the side in all the excitement.

Risks Demand COI Tracking for Hospitality

Every industry faces certain liability risks. Foreseeing all potential claims is impossible, but hospitality businesses should be particularly vigilant of issues related to cyber liability and safety. 

Cyber Risks

More and more, hospitality businesses are relying heavily on technology. Whenever a device is connected to the internet, the risk of cybersecurity incidents increases. 

Any internet-enabled device, whether it’s a mobile key or an in-room smart device, has the potential to be hacked. Even the emergency call system in your elevators could be a target for hackers. Any such incident could negatively impact the guest experience and your company’s reputation. 

However, while little disturbances can be problematic, a full-scale data breach could be far more devastating. According to the 2020 “Cost of a Data Breach Report” by IBM Security, the average cost of a data breach in the hospitality industry is $1.72 million. Hospitality businesses often have access to information that hackers want, including names, contact information, credit card numbers, and even passport numbers. Essentially, your data is a treasure trove for cybercriminals.

While some large-scale hospitality businesses keep everything in-house and are solely responsible for their cybersecurity postures, many operations rely on outside vendors and subcontractors for their cybersecurity, payment processing, and other relevant functions. This can open you up to a host of potential exposures, because if any of the third parties you work with experiences a cyberattack, your data may also be at risk. Requiring proper insurance coverage that includes cyber incidents and tracking COIs to ensure subcontractors and vendors remain compliant won’t prevent a breach from occurring, but it can be critical to helping your business recover. 

Health & Safety Risks

In the wake of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, hospitality businesses should be especially aware of lingering health and safety risks to guests and employees. Improper cleaning or prevention methods could lead to liability claims if an outbreak occurs. Therefore, any subcontractors or vendors whose work could impact the safety of your facility should carry adequate coverage, and you should keep thorough records to confirm continued compliance. 

Beyond the risk of a viral outbreak, other health and safety issues could also harm guests or staff. Bed bugs and other contaminants, poor maintenance, slip and fall accidents, serving too much alcohol, and countless other circumstances can lead to sickness or injuries that may result in a claim. Virtually any contractor or vendor you work with could directly or indirectly contribute, so you should maintain up-to-date COIs for all third parties that work for you. 

bcs: Your Trusted Partner in COI Tracking for Hospitality

With the hospitality industry experiencing a major boom, you might not have the time or staff available to collect, review, and correct COIs comprehensively. That’s why bcs’s full-service solution is here to help. It couples state-of-the-art software with expert compliance analysts to help you achieve top-notch, third-party liability risk mitigation. If you have the staff, time, bandwidth, and expertise to review documentation in-house, bcs also offers a self-service option that leverages our cloud-based software to simplify the COI tracking process and enable your staff to focus more squarely on guest satisfaction. 

Regardless of what level of service your business needs to thrive, you can trust bcs to help. Contact us today to learn more.