“Because we’re the Four Seasons, people see this as the celebrity place to be, especially during the (Toronto International) film festival. It certainly adds to the security undertaking, more so from a crowd control perspective and with additional individuals in the lobby,” says Brian Campbell, director of security, fire and safety with the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto.

During the film festival each September, locals know the Lobby Bar and the valet parking area at the hotel are hot spots to find the stars. The paparazzi know it too.

“We have measures set up both inside and outside the hotel, but you still have the curiosity seekers or the autograph hounds that come in and around the property. But during the film festival, while it is a bit of a nuisance, it is also part of the lure of the film festival — you understand it, expect it and go with it.”

Increasingly, guests of the Four Seasons, and indeed every luxury hotel, expect the amenities that come with staying in higher-priced accommodation also extend to additional measures of security and safety. At the same time, hotels don’t want to appear to their guests as being a fortress or a place that might be dangerous. More and more, hotels around the world are implementing new strategies and tools to improve their ability to know who is in their facility and that they are safe when they stay there. Check-in at many U.S. hotels now requires photo ID, such as a passport, and card access now controls not only hotel room access, but also lobby-level washrooms. Those measures are increasingly in place to address problems of hotel room invasions.

“New York City has different issues than we would, but you can’t sit back and say we’ll never be there,” says Campbell. “If there is something you can facilitate now, be it running of wires, or whatever, to be ready for the next technology, then you do it. The industry has gone to card locks, so we’re better able to establish time frames in which those locks are operational ”“ and we’ve gotten away from hard keys.”

According to Jim Stover, chair of the ASIS Lodging Security Council, a hotel will only be considered a significant target for terrorism if it is a landmark property such as the Waldorf in New York City or an American property overseas.

Stover was vice-president in charge of safety and security for Bristol Hotels and Resorts with 125 properties in North America including four in Canada. Now he works with Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management as part of the hospitality and loss prevention team and is based in Houston, Texas.

“In North America, I think the biggest concern would be a property located next to a primary target such as the World Trade Centre which took out the Marriott and the Hilton when it went down,” says Stover.

When it comes to new technologies for the hotel industry, Stover says colour digital cameras are being used more frequently in remote access control points such as entrances to parking lots and garages. At the Four Seasons, a new digital camera system keeps tabs on key areas such as the lobby and all street-level entry ways.

But Campbell is not sold on cameras as a deterrent. The conundrum for hotels becomes one of privacy versus security. When a large hotel in Toronto’s downtown core experienced a murder in September 2006, questions were raised about the hotel’s surveillance system because the incident was not caught on video, making it difficult for police to determine exactly what transpired.

Having footage may have helped the Toronto Police Service in its investigation, but Campbell points out that surveillance won’t always help stop an incident from happening. His view is that it’s a crutch to say a tragedy born of a private nature between two or three individuals that happened to take place in a hotel could have been prevented by a camera.

 “I think the individual in that case couldn’t have cared if there were 15 cameras rolling. To suggest there should be more cameras, I think that’s just a knee-jerk reaction.”

While some hotels have put video cameras in hallways, some experts say hallway video surveillance is a nightmare to maintain and largely impractical.

“In a large hotel, if you have 150 camera feeds, you can’t watch them all,” says Chris McGoey, CPP, a security consultant and expert on hotel security based in Los Angeles, Calif. “But you can select certain cameras and watch things like elevator banks, which some hotels are doing.”

Casino hotels are considered to be “over-the-top” when it comes to security because they want high-visibility — uniformed security, cameras everywhere, card access and more frequent patrols. Casinos also pay more for security personnel and hire more specifically for the industry.

“But that’s about having the budget to do those things — they’ve got the money to fund that,” says McGoey. “Luxury hotels go the other way; because of their price points, they have a way of self-screening to control crime at those properties.”

The greatest barrier to hotel security departments, says McGoey, is the expense. If hotel managers are not seeing regular violent criminal activity, for the most part, the budget for security is not increasing, he says.

“They certainly aren’t spending when it comes to preventing thefts from rooms and vehicles. But as they start having incidents involving guests, they are concerned about the reputation of the hotel. You definitely don’t want to be labeled as the place the homicide occurred.”

Managing risk in a new era
Campbell arrived at the Four Seasons in 1986 after starting his career at Toronto’s Carlton Hotel, upon graduation from Seneca College. At the Four Seasons, he has one assistant and six in-house security officers patrolling the 380-room hotel, which also has meeting rooms, a ballroom, two restaurants and two lounges.

While the Four Seasons chain does not have a corporate security director, “a lot of direction comes from home office and increasingly so,” especially on issues of crisis and risk management. While studying hotel fires on the other side of the world used to be required reading for hotel security directors like Campbell, as other threats have evolved, the focus has been directed to more current concerns such as how to manage a bomb threat or terror alert.

“It used to be you would study what went wrong with a hotel fire and what could we do differently here, but I think the same thing applies now for terrorism. You read in the press how domestic terrorism is on the increase so you have to be aware of that and whether you are considered a soft target. How can you do things differently and still present the same product people expect when they stay here?”


Training is the best defence
Campbell says that, while CCTV is part of his defensive strategy, his most valuable investment is staff awareness and training.

“Gone are the days of having just one department to secure the property. I think, now, one of the biggest aspects of the security department is to maintain training of all staff and bring them all in line as to what’s expected. Obviously we’re not hiring crime fighters to work the front desk, but you can increase their awareness so they recognize something or somebody who is suspicious. Then you have 500 sets of eyes working security in the building instead of just a dozen,” he says.

Campbell’s philosophy is rare in the industry, says McGoey, noting that training and reporting are sorely lacking in most hotel organizations.

“I see a great void in training across the board at the general manager level. I’m astounded at what they don’t know, what they haven’t been taught and how something that should be a priority isn’t a higher priority for them,” he says. “When I ask to see training materials, sometimes I see materials that are so outdated.”

Hotel general managers, says McGoey, are evaluated on profits, occupancy rates and other benchmarks — security is not typically part of their evaluation package.

“It needs to be mixed into part of their management evaluation,” he says. “They’ve erred too far on the side of being customer friendly.”

In fact, training and making sure all the staff are educated in the different facets of security and life safety remains Campbell’s biggest challenge. Getting staff trained to handle the unknown has to be a regular focus. If there is a bomb threat or other crisis, staff must move in unison to the plan that has been developed.

“A hotel is a city within a city — you have varying degrees of challenges, but I guess that’s part of the lure of the job; the challenge of the job. Once in a while, something comes along that you’ve trained for and it’s always interesting to see the results.”