Courtesy of Relay
Some states and cities are requiring hotels to equip their employees with panic buttons.
Conversation around panic buttons has been renewed as the pandemic has changed hotel workers jobs.
Radisson Hotel Group is bringing panic buttons made by Relay to all of its managed hotels in the US.
The past year of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought discussions of worker safety to the fore and revived talks around what businesses should be required to do to keep their staff safe.
In the hospitality world, a growing number of US states and municipalities are now requiring hotels to equip workers with panic buttons, doubling down on industry efforts that began a few years ago. If a worker believes they re in danger, he or she can press the device and summon help to their location.
But in the meantime, the business world has largely adapted to a remote or hybrid workplace, calling into question the future of corporate travel. Business travel is the form of travel that people miss the least and is not going to come back like before, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wrote in the company s annual travel report, released on January 28. Still, connecting in real life still matters, and much of the void left by the old business travel will be replaced by new business travel.
To Chesky, this new form of business travel involves remote workers that dispersed far and wide during the pandemic traveling to hubs to spend time with their co-workers, often staying longer than just a few nights.