Across industries, many entrepreneurs and leaders will speak about their desire to have an impact on their respective fields. For many of us, it’s not just about bringing a great idea, product, or service to the market; rather, it’s about leveraging that idea to change the market for the better and to be a catalyst for meaningful growth and evolution. For Parminder Batra, the Founder and CEO of TraknProtect, this certainly rings true. With growing concerns relating to hospitality safety culture, Parminder made it her mission to shine a light on the lack of safety infrastructure and technology historically made available to protect everyone at a hotel -- the employees, the guests, and the unregistered guests, i.e., human trafficking victims. With these concerns in mind, Parminder founded TraknProtect, the award-winning safety button solution designed to help hotels advocate for guest and staff safety while meeting state and local legislation requirements. With the creation of TraknProtect, Parminder has created a safer, and more efficient hospitality environment for all stakeholders by leveraging innovative real-time IoT technology to advocate for the safety of hospitality clients and end-users. Her vision is simple but incredibly impactful: Be a leading global player in the broader IoT-based tracking solution-suite encompassing employee safety devices, asset, and inventory tracking, and just released, a post-COVID platform that provides cleanliness tracking and reporting tools. Under Parminder’s guidance, TraknProtect aims to make a difference one hotel, one hotel employee, one TraknProtect employee, one human trafficking victim at a time. Parminder’s passion for the hotel industry runs deep, and this equates to a person who truly wants the best for hotel employees and their hotel guests. Recently, I had an opportunity to sit down with Parminder to discuss her journey as a hospitality leader and her vision for enhanced hospitality safety in the pandemic era. Despite still feeling like the “new kid on the block,” Parminder shares that she is deeply passionate about working with hotels and hoteliers, especially in the pandemic landscape. “When COVID-19 hit, it was almost overnight that everything changed. We went from helping hotels comply with the 5-Star Promise, brand standards, state and city requirements, and union requirements to suddenly shifting gears. Hotels were in survival mode. They weren’t worried about deadlines, now they were worried about their employees, guests, and safety. They were worried about how they were going to survive this pandemic,” Parminder explains.
The primary concern for hoteliers, Parminder notes, was getting guests back in the post-pandemic world. “We did a great deal of research on what was important to the guest. During the summer of 2020, hotels and major brands were launching the cleanliness protocols, and media was awash with every brand having a requirement,” she shares. “But people still weren’t coming back. So what was holding people back?” As it turns out, it was communication. Through their research, Parminder discovered that people wanted to not just know that hotels and travel brands had the protocol -- they wanted to know what it was being actively adhered to and have that communicated to them. “Within TraknProtect, we had always offered inventory tracking and room tray tracking, but no one was doing room service anymore. Room tray tracking was really irrelevant and no longer a priority. So we took our inventory and room tray tracking technology, and instead of tracking one thing at a time, we put it all together to communicate what guests wanted to know.” With this in mind, Parminder leveraged TraknProtect technology to track when guest rooms were last cleaned and what cleaning practices were used while also providing guests with the opportunity to opt-out of daily housekeeping if they didn’t want anyone entering their room during their stay. “We wanted to give hoteliers the means of quickly and effectively being able to track and communicate what guests wanted to know, so that’s what we did by shifting our product line to help hotels in the pandemic environment,” shares Parminder. Of course, Parminder’s mission when founding TraknProtect was never solely focused on hotel staff and guests; it was also focused on victims of human trafficking. “Years ago, I was at a hotel in Vegas and received a call late at night, where someone wanted to call an outside line. It was late, I was tired, and I told them to dial nine and hung up before realizing that the person on the other line sounded very scared,” remembers Parminder. “Immediately, I knew this person was in trouble, and I had been so out of it that I had just hung up.” Parminder explains the lack of infrastructure this hotel had to protect the young woman who had called and how helpless she felt in her efforts to help her. “In that moment, I realized that the one way to get the power back was to get educated. As a safety company, we need to help solve this problem. It’s inspired us all to go beyond solving an employee safety issue, to instead look at the bigger picture of public safety and human trafficking eradication.” “By serving the hotel industry with our products and our mission, and by educating ourselves, we can become true advocates and, alongside our partners, become true eyes and ears for the industry. If we can create that ecosystem, the impact we can have is exponential,” says Parminder. To watch the full HITECtv interview, please click here.
To learn more about TrakNProtect’s suite of safety products for hospitality, visit traknprotect.com