Communication is key to success amid pandemic at Four Seasons Hotel Seoul

'Lead With Care' program helps customers stay safe, healthy

By Lee Hae-rin

Rainer Stampfer, the president of hotel operations for the Asia Pacific at Four Seasons / Courtesy of Four Seasons

COVID-19 has closed international borders and frozen the tourism industry since early 2020, but the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, the brand's first and only property in the country, is one of the few that are sailing downwind amid the pandemic, in terms of sales and customer satisfaction.

Rainer Stampfer, the president of hotel operations in the Asia Pacific region, said that he has confronted several pandemics before since joining the brand in 2001, but "nothing could have prepared us to a crisis of this extent."

He said that communication with customers as well as employees is the key to the success of the brand's Seoul branch, amid the ongoing pandemic.

"Through this time of crisis, communication ― or over-communication ― is absolutely critical," Stampfer said in an interview with The Korea Times at the Seoul property, Dec. 8. "We try to deliver value for our customers and convince our customers to choose us and spend time here. Seoul has been relatively strong (in terms of occupancy rates) and we appreciate the support."

According to Stampfer, "Lead With Care," the brand's customer communication program, is Four Seasons' major initiative that has enabled prompt and efficient connection with guests and the brand amid the pandemic.

The brand initiated digital communication in 2017 and developed it into Lead With Care, a tool to embed customer trust in health and safety in response to the pandemic, in 2020.

At the core of Lead With Care, is the brand's consulting agreement with epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins Medicine International, set in spring 2020. To ensure employee and guest safety, Four Seasons operates based on the panel's science-based guide for health and safety, which reflects each country's governmental measures and vaccine availabilities.

"In our end, we have developed a Lead With Care advisory panel that is a cross-functional team from all over the world. They work on understanding the local nuances (in dealing with local pandemic conditions), looking at what kinds of vaccines are available where, what government measures are in place, and how we should act and react to that," Stampfer said.

"Lead With Care goes with all different aspects of engaging with our employees and consumers, about doing the right thing at the right time. We want travelers to understand that Four Seasons has a strategic and wholesome approach to keep people safe."

A smartphone screen showing Lead With Care, Four Seasons' digital communication platform / Courtesy of Four Seasons

Based on such scientific knowledge, Four Seasons delivers its message of trust to customers via mobile chats and welcome letters. In over 100 languages, Four Seasons' guest service team, "Core," communicates with guests through a digital chat on its app and mobile messengers, including Whatsapp and KakaoTalk, with an average response time of 90 seconds.

Nonetheless, the brand is well aware of customers' needs for human contact in their luxury hotel experience and wishes for the time to resume existing services, Stampfer said.

"Our strength lies in engagement with our guests, in building relationships and providing Four Seasons service in person," he said. "Our focus (now that human contact is limited) is to respond truly quickly (either virtually or in-person) because time matters and people should expect prompt responses at Four Seasons' service."

At Four Seasons, the communication between management and its employees is as crucial as that of the hotel with its customers, Stampfer said.

While several businesses in the tourism industry have closed and laid off their employees, Four Seasons Hotel Seoul has maintained its personnel and actively communicated with them to protect employees' health, safety and well-being.

Stampfer said that the brand frequently holds online and town hall meetings to communicate with all employees so as to keep them updated with the latest situation of how the hotel is dealing with COVID-19.

"There's a large part about communication. When people cannot come to work, are sitting at home, wondering what's happening, we want to give them a clear understanding of what Four Seasons is doing, in what ways we find our ability to care for them and support them, and to give them an idea of what's ahead of us in the coming weeks," Stampfer said.

"It has been a very stressful period for our employees and there are concerns about their mental and physical health. We have established ways to connect with them by creating programs, offering sessions with therapists, call-ins to speak about their stress, to engage to an extent that an individual wants, about their overall well-being," he said.

Four Seasons Hotel Seoul / Courtesy of Four Seasons

Tourism industry outlook

The brand has recently opened a hotel in Bangkok and foresees launching new properties in Japan, China and Vietnam. Hoping to include Korea in its development pipeline in Asia, Four Seasons is looking for the right location and the right partner to work on an additional branch.

"We would love to operate a second or third hotel in Korea. It's such an important market and in Seoul we've been operating with such success," Stampfer said.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not over yet, nor will it ever be, according to some scientists. However, the brand views the future of the luxury hotel and tourism industry optimistically, according to Stampfer.

"We have seen that where people are able to travel and feel safe. They not only want to travel, but they want to be social, interact and enjoy themselves. Many of the habits go quickly to how it was before COVID-19," he said.

"Certainly (we are careful) with sensibilities around the fact that this is not over, but where we can travel, we've seen great demand. … That gives us at this stage an idea of how business is recovering in different parts of the world. While we are surely cautious, we do look more optimistically into the recovery over the coming year."