Employee Tracking & Hotel Management During Natural Disasters

Situation

The client, based in Texas, has stores located in a region intermittently impacted by hurricanes. They realized they didn’t have a good plan in place for locating or assisting displaced employees, and they wanted a more defined and cost-effective lodging solution for the teams doing store assessment and cleanup after a storm.

Solution

Fox worked with the client to create a detailed emergency event plan based on duty of care and cost savings.

Pre-Planning

Fox manages lodging contract negotiation prior to each hurricane season, administers contracts and ensures that agreements meet FEMA hotel requirements.

Execution

Up to two weeks prior to a storm, the client holds internal calls to discuss threat level and potential store closings. Because a storm’s path may change, the decision to activate the emergency plan isn’t made until one or two days prior to landfall. Upon activation, Fox sends a program manager to the client’s headquarters to be on-site for the execution of the following:

• Daily hotel check-in calls to verify room occupancy. Fox releases rooms not in use to capture cost savings.
• Daily or as-needed duty of care reports on the location of the client’s displaced employees and store assessment team members.

Post-Event

Fox provides post-event hotel reporting and reconciliation of each property, and coordinates payments. We then hold a review with the client within 30 days of the close of the emergency event to debrief on program execution and identify opportunities for enhancement.

Discoveries

Fox’s solution boosts the client’s duty of care initiatives for tracking displaced employees and store assessment team members. The proactive planning that tracked the hurricane’s path helped secure the necessary hotel rooms in advance of the limited room availability after the hurricane’s impact. Additional cost savings are realized through monitoring and releasing unused rooms.

After the plan’s activation for the hurricane, the results included:

• Fox placed hundreds of the client’s employees who were in need of a hotel. Employees had both been displaced from their homes and others were part of the client’s store recovery teams.
• Fox managed hundreds of individual reservations. Approximately half were canceled after the hurricane’s path shifted and new reservations were required elsewhere.
• The client saved hundreds of thousands of dollars from Fox’s proactive management of unused room nights and penalties that were not charged.