Hotel Management Under Increasing and More Intense Floods: A Focus on The Centurion Hotel, South Africa

Abstract

Hotel management is becoming more difficult in the face of increasing and repeated natural and human-induced disasters, particularly floods, cyclones and earthquakes. Hotel managers should come up with disaster risk reduction (DRR) and management plans that include early warning, search and rescue (evacuations) and relief and recovery. While there are numerous incidences of hotel infrastructure being razed to the ground, many hotels remain operational, but under the risk of repeat events. Through repeated direct observations, interviews and Geographical Information Systems, this chapter investigates the extent and potential causes of repeated flooding of The Centurion Hotel, South Africa. It further examines the DRR and management protocols put in place by the hotel and their effectiveness. The Centurion Hotel has been a victim of repeated flooding, with the most recent event in December 2019 being the worst, forcing it to close twice in 2020 affecting 84 employees. The flooding is aggravated by the heavily silted Centurion Lake and land use changes in the upper catchment of the Hennops River stretching across the three municipal jurisdictions of Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg and City of Tshwane metropoles. The results of this study further revealed that the hotel’s design originally took into account the possibility of flooding, although the flood lines have since shifted and high-impact floods have become more frequent. The hotel also put into place measures to counter the effects of flooding although these were overwhelmed by the 2019 floods. The hotel has a sound standard operating procedure for the evacuation of guests in the event of a disaster. Given that such extreme weather events will only increase in the future, we recommend that The Centurion Hotel continues adapting and building back better and smarter with lessons from each flood event, including carefully planning for possible seasonal operations in the future.