A “total nightmare for hotels” is how the founder and chief executive of Saira Hospitality Harsha L’Acqua describes the last couple of years for the hospitality sector, particularly in London, where she has just set up a unique training school to help solve this – and several other – issues.
“The pandemic exposed a unique situation here – everyone was suddenly reopening or launching hotels in London at the same time, but with one limited talent pool,” she says. Add in Brexit, which had also already seen a lot of people leave the sector, and it’s obvious to see how hotels have been struggling to operate, especially luxury ones which require high staff and service levels.
Saira Hospitality is a non-profit organisation that partners with lifestyle and luxury hotels to launch pop-up hospitality schools for locals – free for the students, they can build a career based on theoretical training and practical training with hospitality experts and experiences gained within hotel work places.
From turnover to customer service, emotional and cultural intelligence to loyalty programmes, the students are taken on a full journey that helps them understand the industry and see the role they can play within the wider hospitality circle, whatever their eventual role upon graduation might be. Saira believes offering a more engaging approach like this inspires more loyalty and interest in a career, rather than just a job.
To find students, the Saira team goes into local communities and finds those gems who are looking for an inspiring career, but just didn’t know what their options could be. There is a visiting programme of experts, who come and share their knowledge with the students too.
All content is bespoke for the curriculum of each pop-up and Saira can also integrate the brand’s values or standard operating procedures into the programme. In doing so, Saira creates dedicated, engaged workforces, improves community diplomacy and significantly reduces staff turnover for hotels, while providing life-changing employment opportunities for those who need it most.
Enterprising mind
L’Acqua’s philosophy seems a logical and laudable one: hotel operators seek increased staff retention, community diplomacy and well-placed talent, while local communities need knowledge and skills to help people build successful careers in hospitality.
Entrepreneurs usually identify a sector gap or a need then fill it successfully, with a degree of risk and confidence in starting from scratch. L’Acqua has all those things in her spirit, but mixed with a large dose of philanthropy, so instead of running her idea as a full commercial concern she founded Saira Hospitality as a non-profit. “We’re not just another hospitality training school,” she says.
It is part funded by donations, but the key driver is hotels paying to cover the cost of the pop-up training schools, which have so far appeared in Mexico, LA, BVIs and Namibia, to name a few. London, however, is the first permanent school, opened in May in a place with plenty of hotels crying out for staff, and plenty of people crying out for opportunity: Saira could not have landed here at a better time.
At a time of unprecedented demand for talent colliding with a recruitment crisis, her ideas are slotting into hoteliers’ psyches even more than they were pre-pandemic and in the UK’s case, pre-Brexit. The double hit of those things, coupled with the rush to reopen – or launch new – hotels across London, also meshes into a need, and often a CSR drive, to offer jobs to people who really need them.
Hotel brands in London to have signed up include Iconic Luxury Hotels, Nobu Hotel Portman Square, The Hoxton, Inhabit, Town Hall, Pan Pacific Hotels Group, CitizenM, Hilton Hotels & Resorts and Edyn.
And to identify people who really needed or wanted to join a fulfilling programme of training and employment, Saira worked with organisations such as the Department for Work and Pensions and Jobcentres; Key4Life, a rehabilitation programme working with young men aged 18-25 in or at risk of going to prison; St Mungo’s, a homeless charity; and Breaking Barriers, which offers training and support for refugees in London to stable and fulfilling jobs.
Feeling inspired
L’Acqua had one of her first flashes of inspiration for Saira while interning for Aman in Sri Lanka, thinking how she could help local people with no experience of hospitality get productive employment in the sector.
At the same time, she could see how this would help hotels ease the pressure to staff up quickly, allow them to effectively draw on a valuable local resource and avoid having to bring in staff from all over the world, who while experienced, would potentially be taking jobs from local people.
When talking about getting out and about travelling again, I mention my recent cruises, and the conversation collides nicely with one of the drivers for her concept taking off: people she met when on another kind of cruise, part of the Summit Series, an entrepreneur-fest with a ship carrying some of the wealthiest, philanthropic and disrupting business minds in the world.
Her father’s own philanthropic work with Mother Teresa has also inspired her. As has the work of Sala Bai in Cambodia, which fights poverty and human trafficking through social and professional training of young underprivileged Cambodians, and the mission of EGBOK’s founder, Ben Justus, which also supports underserved young adults in Cambodia into education, training and employment opportunities in hospitality.
“You have to show you believe in people,” is how she summarises this kind of work. “The way we do it is to show people the whole ladder, and get them to ask ‘who am I in this whole system’, giving them the life skills, training, resources and support to see how they see themselves in five years, not just five weeks.”
When she was taking the MMH graduate program at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, her idea for Saira Hospitality won first place for the college’s business plan competition in 2014, and the rest is history.
Having developed a unique six-week curriculum based on learnings from her studies and practical observations and working experiences with other brands such as Six Senses – one she says she still admires enormously for its focus on sustainability, wellness and community – the aim is to wholly engage students in the circle of hospitality.
She takes a personal role in “training the trainers”, those who bring the students into the world of Saira Hospitality and the wider world of hotel work. “Our trainers take on quite a unique role – yes, it’s in a classroom setting, but they are not teachers, it’s a different kind of relationship between them and those we take onto the course – we create a culture of equals in the classroom.”
Giving London as an example, she says these students include older people – “they add something special to the groups and often help others along” – single mums (some of whom then tell their adult children to also come join the programme), homeless people and even former prisoners.
The school started with around 65 students taking the course, and she hopes to start working on another London location soon, as well as looking to New York as another place to open a school, as well as continuing to assess requests for pop-up schools elsewhere.
Hotel hopes
Saira Hospitality has created such training pop-ups for some of the world’s biggest hotel brands, such as Virgin Limited Edition, Four Seasons, Autograph Collection, Bunkhouse, The Standard and Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, as well as smaller brands such as Habitas in Namibia.
After Hurricanes Irma and Maria left hundreds without electricity, homes and employment in the British Virgin Islands in 2017, Saira Hospitality partnered with some of those large brands and Bitter End Yacht Club to launch two pop-up hotel schools on Virgin Gorda and Tortola, receiving more than 225 applications to the programme, accepting 95 students to fill six classes, which were hosted by local trainers.
Her very first project was for Bunkhouse Hotels in Todos Santos, a town on the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. The Tres Santos development and Hotel San Cristobal faced challenges from politicians, local fisherman groups and the expatriate community after a series of misunderstandings around the use of land. To build relationships with the local community, the development undertook numerous initiatives including a nine-week pop-up hotel school, with free education offered to 42 locals, 40 of which continue to work in hospitality.
Once the school has ended and graduates are placed, they’re not just left them behind – there is a check-in system in place to see how they are getting on, with the graduates able to discuss any issues they are having. “We create a community for them,” she says. And also for the hotels, because as she says in the case of London, the school has already fostered an air of community among those who would usually be competitors.
“Not only are they reducing the cost and risk of training up new people, they’re also sharing in this new concept,” adds L’Acqua. “The hospitality sector has lost half its workforce. But we seek out the people that hotels don’t normally hire – hotels see our model makes sense.”
