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Innkeepers Prepare for Full Openings

Lodging facilities advised to schedule 24-hour gaps in rooms between guests

The lodging industry was one of the business sectors deemed “essential” and allowed to remain open under Wisconsin’s Safer at Home order. Yet the industry relies upon people being able to move around – a condition that has not formally existed since March 19.

“The industry was frankly decimated,” said Trisha Pugal, interim CEO of the Wisconsin Hotel and Lodging Association, a member organization that represents some 600 lodging properties of all sizes. “We were one of the first ones to be hit heavy by the pandemic.”

Pugal said 40 percent to 45 percent of lodging facilities across the state are closed at this time because there’s not enough business to rationalize staying open when roughly 90 percent of all travel, Pugal said, is considered nonessential.

The state estimates that 18,000 direct hotel-related jobs have been lost since the start of the pandemic. Last year, the sector supported more than 35,000 jobs to bring in 27 percent of the $3.7 billion in total travel expenditures in Wisconsin, according to information the Wisconsin Department of Tourism released last week.

Those facilities that have continued operations for essential business travelers, such as health-care personnel and first responders, have learned to operate in a completely different way, Pugal said.

“Most of them have very low occupancy, and they’re adapting to the needs of the essential business travelers,” she said.

Westwood Shores in Sturgeon Bay hosted a few essential workers in April who had “zero interaction and service from us unless they had an emergency,” said Greg Stillman, who owns Foremost Management Services with his wife, Denise. The resulting occupancy rate for the month of April for the property, which had not closed for a single day in 24 years, was 4.5 percent.

Greg Stillman said they’re planning to take reservations on May 29 for their four properties: Westwood Shores, as well as Newport Resort in Egg Harbor, the Inn at Little Sister Hill in Sister Bay and Parkwood Lodge in Fish Creek.

That doesn’t mean that people – once allowed to move around – will feel comfortable doing so.

“Those who are afraid will stay home,” Denise Stillman said. “It will hurt us in the long run. All business will be significantly less this year. And it kind of should be.”

The Stillmans are projecting occupancy at 60 percent for their season. “It’s an educated guess,” Greg Stillman said. “You’re looking at advance reservations, which are significantly different from prior years. So it’s slowed down to a trickle.”

Meanwhile, the Stillmans and their peers are looking at all facets of their operations, from installing Plexiglas, to sanitizing keys, to figuring out how to safely move guests through check-in and checkout, to selecting linens and decorative items that will be removed from the rooms.

As they go about that planning, innkeepers – along with those working in 14 other business sectors – received some assistance from the state on May 8 in the form of specific operational guidelines.

For the lodging industry, those recommendations included instructions for maintaining employees’ health and hygiene, using face masks and social distancing, cleaning and sanitizing public areas and guest rooms, and handling food and beverages, including eliminating minibars in rooms, all buffets, self-service operations and seating for intended food consumption. 

Additionally, innkeepers were advised to schedule gaps in the use of rooms for at least 24 hours, a recommendation that stood out to many, Stillman said. The impact of that guideline would be most harsh on smaller properties, but it would challenge any facility that used online reservations.

“From an operational standpoint, there’s no easy way to do that, particularly if people are booking reservations [online] at one time,” Stillman said.

Pugal said it’s important to remember that the state’s industry-specific guidelines are not binding.

“It’s guidance, not a mandate,” she said. “It’s hard to do a one-size-fits-all. The guidance is to make sure that the properties are doing the most they can and adapting their particular type of property. It’s healthy to have it out there, and I think it’s wise that it’s guidance and not a mandate.” 

Other operations pertaining to some hotels, such as pools, are addressed in the guidance for the entertainment/amusement sector. For hotels and motels, pool capacity must be reduced to half of the normal maximum patron load to allow for six feet of space in the pool and on the deck at all times. 

Stillman said, “We’re still trying to figure out what makes sense to operate those safely – especially the indoor pools.”

That’s one of the questions that remains for Rory Madsen, general manager of Gordon Lodge in Baileys Harbor.

“It’s hard to socially distance in a pool,” Madsen said. 

Other questions remain among innkeepers as well, including how the new guidelines will integrate with expectations from the Door County Public Health Department. 

But one overriding issue hangs above it all: In a service-oriented industry such as lodging, how does a property such as Gordon Lodge, for example, manage relationships among its guests on its 133-acre property? 

“Our product is people,” Madsen said. “And what happens when those people don’t have the same ideas about social distancing or mask wearing? There are guests who will take it very seriously and will want their privacy and space, and we’re going to have guests that don’t feel that way. How do we manage the relationship between those guests? What happens when you have that friction?”

Ultimately, he and his staff are up to the challenge. Hardwired to take care of Door County tourists, that’s what they intend to do. 

“All of us in the hospitality industry, we can’t wait to take care of those people,” Madsen said.