Innovation Post-Covid in Hospitality

Innovation post-Covid in hospitality… On a ‘crisp’ winter’s morning on the Peninsula I had the pleasure of meeting with Greg O’Donoghue of Green Olive at Red Hill.

Although it was an extremely chilly morning, the estate looked idyllic in the early sunshine, and the farm shop full of beautifully packaged produce was very enticing.

Greg and Sue O’Donoghue’s story of leaving corporate twenty years ago to move to the Peninsula and plant an olive grove is a wild ride! As we chatted about the business, the most interesting thing was the story of constant reinvention and ‘having a go’ at new things over the past two decades, but also Covid-driven innovation.

With 300 days of closure like most hospitality businesses through Covid, Green Olive adopted innovation by way of technology, apps and looking at what they’d always done a bit differently. How to automate? How to reduce the need for staff (that weren’t there)? How to maintain the customer experience with far less people on their team?

They took inspiration from Disney and Virtual Disney to not only enhance their customer experience, but to achieve that with less staff.

The full story will be in my book. But when we look outside of our own businesses and industry, there are always lessons and ideas to be learned and adapted.

It’s worth making a list of what parts of your business or what activities in particular could be done more efficiently with an app. I love apps to make life simpler, and especially if they come with analytics and reporting features. Ask your team to do this exercise; ask some of your peers; ask people in your networks what they use. Add this into your strategic planning process as technology is a big driver of upscaling.