BUSINESS MONDAY: Digital push

WHILE the digital revolution in at least one leading Caribbean business enterprise did not start with COVID-19, the pandemic has more or less accelerated the process.

So said Adam Stewart, Group Executive Chairman of Sandals Resorts International, as he outlined corporate changes which Sandals undertook to deal with the impact of COVID.

He said that COVID was the great accelerator in that it forced the Sandals Resort International to do what officials of that company knew they had to undertake.

“In my own business, I had to find over 500 reservations agents working in contact centres from the beginning of COVID to them working at home, in the space of 10 days,” he told a recent Central Bank of Barbados discussion on the private sector.

In addition, the Sandals Resorts International had to remove check-ins at the hotels as well as all the menus at the 193 restaurants across the hotel chain.

“We had to use digitisation by going to the market to educate the consumer about what was happening in the Caribbean, from airlift to statistics, and all the other bits of information,” recalled Stewart.

“So the digital revolution did not begin with COVID-19, but that pandemic accelerated it, and many businesses asked to work from home were still struggling,” he said, while explaining for instance that they were doing manual book-keeping entries.

Stewart said that Sandals Resorts International employs 15,000 persons across eight Caribbean countries.

As such, the company is a people’s business in that it makes people feel good, Stewart remarked.

However, he revealed that Sandals requires that over 95 per cent of the personnel on staff must be either at the Resort or in an office doing some form of processing, which cannot be done from home.

His own personal opinion is that the productivity level tends to decline through Zoom, which although a good tool along with digitisation, allows one “to get in, get out and have a meeting”.

“But when it comes to innovation and creativity, and what happens next, nothing beats indoor meetings. Getting back into the office was like a breath of fresh air,” the Sandals Resorts International chairman added.