Selling sanitation

In a former world, the one that existed before the Covid-19 pandemic, travel brands didn’t want customers thinking very hard about issues related to cleaning and sanitization.

“We’ve always tried to keep our cleaning part of the business behind the scenes,” Tammy Routh, Marriott International’s senior vice president of global sales, said during a recent webcast. 

Not anymore.

These days, Marriott properties aren’t necessarily waiting until the wee hours of the morning to clean their lobbies. Instead, cleanings are often conducted midday. 

“We want to do that to build confidence,” Routh said. 

It might seem like a small operational shift, but this move by Marriott is in many ways representative of the travel industry writ large, where airlines and hotels especially have taken to branding their cleaning programs and entering into high-profile branding partnerships, while also making frequent and public announcements about cleaning procedure upgrades big and small. 

The Cleveland Clinic alone counts United, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) and Air Canada as new brand partners, with the hospital advising the companies on cleaning protocols. 

Delta now promotes the Mayo Clinic as a partner, while American has partnered with Vanderbilt University. 

The branding partnerships extend to well-known sanitizers. To name just a few, United has partnered with Clorox, and American is aligned with Purell; Hilton, Delta and Amtrak have forged partnerships with Lysol parent Reckitt Benckiser; and Wyndham, Marriott and Four Seasons are each aligned with the infection prevention solution provider EcoLab.

Travel companies, though, haven’t drawn the line at naming familiar brands as partners. They’ve also taken to branding their own health safety programs. Delta, for example, has Delta CareStandard. Alaska Airlines has Next-Level Care. Hilton has CleanStay. Accor uses the name Allsafe. Norwegian Cruise Line has Sail Safe. 

You get the picture. 

But are these branding alliances really making customers safer, or are they mostly just providing good marketing points for travel suppliers desperate to re-engage a weary and frightened public? 

Assertively, the companies involved in the alliances say they are indeed protecting travelers.

“I don’t think companies like United, IHG and Hyatt need the Cleveland Clinic brand to help them,” said Dr. James Merlino, the physician who is leading Cleveland Clinic’s health safety collaborations. “They are big brands on their own. I think everyone wants to do the right thing, and that’s why they are partnering with experts like our own organization.”

And does giving an airline’s or a hotel’s cleanliness and safety protocols a name make sense, even in these strange days of the Covid-19 pandemic? 

Analysts and travel companies also say yes to that question. 

Oscar Yuan, president of Strategy3, a consultancy owned by the market research firm Ipsos, said that it only makes sense for companies to give these programs names during a time in which they are aggressively promoting their cleaning enhancements and safety measures, such as mandatory masks and contactless check-in. 

“It’s good marketing,” he said. “If you want somebody to remember something, you want someone to trust you on something, you give it a name.” 

Phil Cordell, global head of new brand development for Hilton, said he thinks the hotel giant’s swift development of CleanStay early in the pandemic did indeed inspire confidence among guests. 

“Within our guest satisfaction surveys, we’ve seen a positive response to the introduction of recent programming, with approximately 70% of guests responding rating their CleanStay experience at least a 9 out of 10,” Cordell said. 

Yuan noted that airlines, in particular, give names to a lot of things. Branding their health safety programs is just the newest wrinkle. For example, United has even branded its sustainability efforts with the name Eco-Skies. 

“The only downside is consumers are bombarded with 1,000 different brands when they are flying,” Yuan said. 

Robert Kwortnik, associate professor of services marketing for Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, also sees value in giving names to a set of protocols. And in this day and age, that includes travel companies calling attention to health safety rules and procedures. 

“I can’t put a dollar amount on it,” Kwortnik said. “It has more to do with how it influences consumers’ choices and risk perception. Putting a name on something helps inform customers in a nice, succinct way.”

Partnering with well-known and well-respected products and organizations can serve a similar purpose.

For example, along with mandatory masks and seat blocking, airlines have implemented health safety enhancements, including electrostatic spraying of seats, reduced food service, new boarding procedures, the use of plexiglass dividers at check-in and Covid-19 testing of employees. 

But while most travelers won’t remember each of those initiatives, they’ll have an easier time remembering that an airline or a hotel is partnering with a product like Lysol, Kwortnik said. 

“When you get these types of brand relationships, these are things that people know,” he said. “It deepens their product knowledge and kind of fills in a space that may be less clear. Lysol or Cleveland Clinic — these are brands that already have a well-established reputation, and in a lot of cases the customer already has experience with the brand, so it fills in the information gap.”

The partnerships can also bestow instant credibility, says Chetan Kapoor, who this past May established the Safe Travel Barometer under the umbrella of the analytics-focused travel industry consultancy Videc. Safe Travel Barometer bills itself as the world’s most comprehensive database of Covid-19 traveler health and safety protocols, having tracked more than 50 different protocols at more than 1,500 companies.

(Safe Travel has also done a safety ranking for airlines. Delta and Allegiant tied for the top spot among U.S. carriers.) 

Such credibility, Kapoor added, can be especially important for U.S. companies, since the U.S. government takes a more hands-off approach to safety mandates than many countries around the globe. 

“Who’s got more weight when it comes to talking about health hygiene or safety,” said Kapoor. “Definitely not an airline. But when you bring in the Mayo Clinic, people say, ‘Yes, they know about hygiene.’”

Still, cynics may wonder if such partnerships are actually making travelers safer. 

Mark Gendreau, an aviation health specialist who is the chief medical officer at the Tufts University School of Medicine, said he’s confident the hospitals involved in these partnerships wouldn’t let their brands be exploited. 

“The Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic are really strong medical institutions,” Gendreau said by way of example. “They’re not going to partner up with someone and not do something the right way. Their reputation is on the line with this.”

Cleveland Clinic’s Merlino backs up that view, saying that the companies it partners with don’t have a choice about whether to take the clinic’s advice. 

“If they don’t listen to our suggestions they aren’t our partners, because that’s the rule we have,” Merlino said.

He explained that he has been consistently impressed with how engaged the travel companies Cleveland works with are on their health safety programs, with active involvement extending all the way up to company CEOs. 

Cleveland Clinic advises on major policy decisions. For example, Merlino said, the clinic is in accord with United’s decision not to block middle seats. 

“Our opinion on seat blocking is, it’s hard to social distance in an airplane,” he said.

Instead, Merlino said the key is to deploy a layered approach of safety measures, including air filters, mandatory masks, enhanced cleaning and more. 

But the hospital company also advises companies on much less headline-worthy procedural issues, such as the specifics of properly executing on electrostatic surface spraying.

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic is regularly engaged with Delta, acting as the carrier’s medical advisor, said Kristen Shovlin, Delta’s vice president of sales operations and development. 

“We are continuing to adjust our business based upon the conversations we have with them,” Shovlin said. 

Every week, a Delta advisory council headed by chief customer experience officer Bill Lentsch meets with Mayo experts. Among other measures, Mayo helped design Delta’s employee Covid-19 testing program, Shovlin said. And recently, a group of Mayo physicians traveled from the clinic’s headquarters in Rochester, Minn., to Delta’s hub operation at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport to get a firsthand view of Delta’s in-flight service operation. 

The physicians then worked collaboratively with Delta staff on ways to reduce touchpoints. 

Mayo also encourages Delta to block middle seats, said Shovlin, signaling a difference between its approach and the approach of the Cleveland Clinic on the subject. 

Similarly, said Ramsey Hammad, Delta’s managing director of global cleanliness operations, Delta’s partnership with Lysol yields real safety enhancements. For example, the companies have consulted about ways to enhance protection against germs in aircraft lavatories, and Delta is currently testing multiple Lysol products for potential lavatory deployment.

Alaska, too, is partnering with a hand sanitizer. But the carrier’s alliance with Northern California-based natural products retailer EO has an extra marketing flourish: Every Alaska customer is offered an EO French lavender-scented sanitizing wipe during the first beverage service. 

EO CEO Tom Feegel said the arrangement is making Alaska flyers safer. The wipes, he said, are 99.9% effective against most germs. And hand-washing is a critical part of minimizing virus transmission. 

But Feegel said EO’s partnership with the Seattle-based airline also provides passengers, many of whom may be flying for the first time since the start of the pandemic, with peace of mind.

“Clean hands, healthy people is our mission,” Feegel said. 

“So what this does is it puts the EO-branded wipe into a context where it is extremely meaningful for a traveler who is already stressed out about getting on a plane and probably worried,” he added. “This gives them an added sense of comfort and commitment from Alaska and EO that we are doing everything we can to take this situation seriously.”

CORRECTION: This report was updated Oct. 26 to correct the name of Delta’s health safety program. It is Delta CareStandard, not Delta Clean.