Hospitality Entertainment and Tourism Council

Hospitality Entertainment and Tourism Council

Mitchell R. Fenton, CPP Chairman

Alan W. Zajic, CPP, CSP

Vice Chairman

Kelly S. Klatt, CPP Vice-Chairman

Darrell Clifton, CPP

Secretary/Newsletter

Steven T. Baker, CPP, PSP, PCI Certification Liaison

H. Skip Brandt, CPP Programs Co-Chair

Jimmy Chin

Lodging Chair

Jay Claxton, CLSD Tourism, Timeshare, Rentals

Craig Clemens, CPP

Annual Seminar

Joseph Doa

Phillip Farina, CPP, CPP Subject Matter Expert

Tony Heroff, CPP

Sheldon Lightfoot, CPP

Paul Moxness, CPP

European Chair

Christopher T. Noll, CPP Subject Matter Expert

Alexandros Paraskevas, PhD

Robert C. Quigley, CPP

James C. Reynolds, CPP, CLSD

Web Group Coordinator

Chris Rogers

Andrea Shultz Programs Co-Chair

John Strauchs, CPP Magazine Articles

Tom Whitlatch, CPP, CHA, CLSD, CFE

Guidelines Liaison

April 2011

From the Chairman Greetings everyone! What a year it has been for the Hospitality, Entertainment and Tourism council..HEAT. Al Zajic, CPP is a hard show to follow and he has several plaques from ASIS International to prove it but I am going to do my best to carry the flag and move this council forward. Several changes that I have already made are adopting two Vice chair-men. Kelly Klatt, CPP and Al Zajic will share the position. Al being chairman emeritus will help guide the council in an advi-sory role. Kelly will replace me as chairman once my term is fin-ished. Having both of them in my corner along with the rest of you will definitely make my job that much easier.

The council has worked hard at putting together some of the best security practitioners and academics in the business and the positive response from ASIS International has shown that we are hitting the mark. I have come up with a short schedule of our future teleconference meeting dates which are: April 22nd, June 24th and August 26th . All at 11am Eastern standard time so please mark your schedules. I am excited about the prospects for this year and look forward to working with each of one of you.

Accolades for our Council Our chairman and vice-chairmen attended the annual ASIS leadership meeting in Washington, DC in January. At this conference, the objectives for ASIS International were introduced as well as some changes being made to the Council program. Awards were also presented to individu-als, councils and chapters. We were pleased to hear that our own Al Zajic, CPP was awarded Coun-cil Chair of the year. Of the thirty councils and their respective chairper-sons, ours was named as best for 2010. This is a great honor for Zajic and HEaT. Al said he was humbled by the award and had no idea he was even in the running. “This says something about our esteemed membership”, commented Al. “I was very fortunate to lead such an experienced and intelligent group of experts.” Congratula-tions to Al and to all of us. Mitch Fenton, CPP, our new chairman says, “I have some big shoes to fill. I am grateful that Al is still on our team as an advisor.”

Mitchell Fenton, CPP

Al Zajic, CPP

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New Council Guidelines Based on input received by Council Vice Presidents over the past few years, a new worksheet was developed to serve as a benchmark to measure activities of the volunteer members. It outlines what is expected of the council members and will be used to ensure the council members meet our goals each year. The expectations in this worksheet have been compiled from several existing council best practices. It is designed to create consistency across all councils as well as ensuring that council goals and the International Strategic Plan are in alignment. Each member will be given points based on their participation in such activities such as meeting attendance, workshop activities, newsletter articles, etc. This additional workload has created a new council position called “secretary”. Your esteemed newsletter editor, Darrell Clifton, CPP has been assigned to this task. The worksheet mentioned above is not to be submitted to ASIS, but will be used for the council Chair to evaluate and track his membership’s activities. A summary of this information is included in Mitch’s quarterly report to our Council Vice President. Mitch says he does not expect any problems for our members to fulfill the requirements mentioned in the worksheet. We have a very active group of experts that will be easy to track and report. The actual tracking will probably be the most difficult part. Contact Mitch Fenton or Darrell Clifton if you would like a list if activities or more information.

Trending in Hotels Several of our members are on the “front lines” of the Hospitality industry, managing hotel security departments and par-ticipating in local chapter events. Joe Doa—Amway Hilton Collection

As we continue to see the devastating effect that an active shooter can have not only in terms of casualties and injures, but the morale of a community or nation, we have taken the initiative to en-sure the security staff of Amway Hotel Corporation are prepared for the worst. Anyone can walk into an open environment such as a hotel and create a chaotic situation in seconds. The openness of hotels creates a “soft target” atmosphere that has been witnessed in the Mumbai attacks of 2008. An active shooter is a challenging situation for hotels. Not only can any guest present an active shooter situation, but a disgruntled employee can do the same damage in an administrative office. This unknown variable presents a real danger to hotels and pushed us to focus on some rigorous training to provide to our security personnel. We had to ask ourselves, how do we prepare an un-armed hotel security staff for a violent situation that is usually over within minutes? As hotel security

leaders, we need our staff to be prepared to control a situation for those critical minutes before law en-forcement arrives. In January, we reached out to local law enforcement in Grand Rapids, MI, to assist our security staff

Joe Doa

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in active shooter response training. Leaders from the Grand Rapids SRT (Special Response Team) provided an in depth training seminar at the JW Marriott Grand Rapids. The seminar provided our security staff with essential information that all hotel security personnel can use if confronted with an active shooter. The seminar provided techniques such as evacuating the area as quickly as possible while avoiding putting yourself in danger, as well as common active shooter indicators to look for in a person’s demeanor. One of the most important pieces of information that our staff took away from the seminar were the questions that law enforcement will want to know when arriving on scene. While trying to con-trol the situation at hand, your staff has to be vigilant enough to know everything from casualties and injuries, to the weapon being used. All of this information can make a difference in the timeliness and effectiveness of the response. The key factor to take away from this training is that communication is critical. Utilizing a building public address system or implementing a mass text/email notification system will save lives. If you have an existing access control system in-stalled in your hotel, train your staff on how to use it to lock down the building immediately if an active shooter situation presents itself. Having an unarmed hotel security staff doesn’t mean you can’t limit a shooters ability to move freely. By limiting a shooter’s mobility, you can limit casualties/injuries and save lives. To better prepare for an active shooter situation, we are in the process of scheduling live situational exercises with the Grand Rapids SRT team for next month. We will be closing floors in one of our hotels from the public to conduct actual drills with law enforcement. These drills will not only prepare our security staff, but train the SRT team in the layout of the hotel. These drills will provide our security staff with the best possible interactive training we can provide. Building a close relationship with the local law enforcement agencies in the event of an active shooter situation will be critical in creating a sense of cohesion. All we can do as security leaders is provide our staff with the training and tools necessary to react as efficiently and effectively as possible when lives are at stake. Joe also is an active member of the West Michigan chapter which is hosting its annual Law Enforcement Appreciation event in the summer. His hotel may be the host venue for this important group. Philip Farina, CPP As more and more countries seem to be experiencing civil difficulties, mental terrorism alarms keep going off in the heads of travelers planning trips overseas. Philip farina, CPP who specializes in travel security is regularly consulted on such issues. In a recent article for American Express open forum, he offers several suggestions for tourists traveling to any foreign country. Checking the quality of hotel security, knowing local laws and languages, and having documents and insurance in order are just a few of Farina’s practical guidelines for keeping everyone safe. Farina also contributed to other personal safety and travel safety articles in Cosmopolitan, the Chicago Sun-Times and others during the past quarter.

Member Updates Jimmy Chin Jimmy Chin, our resident expert in New York, has been very busy preparing a Security conference for May 4th. Local and federal authorities will participate in this seminar on a variety of topics pertinent to the hospi-tality industry. Chin also was featured on a WABC news segment on fire safety in hotels.

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James Reynolds, CPP—Palmer House Hilton James Reynolds, CPP has been doing a great job maintaining our Linkedin website. We have had several lively discus-sions on a variety of topics. This is a positive and real-time way of communicating among members. Please make sure you are a member of Linkedin, you are a member of our group, and you adjust your account settings so you can receive updates on this group as often as you can. James is again collaborating our panel on soft targets for the Orlando Seminar this year. This was such a well-received presentation that we thought we would sponsor it again and hope for a larger room. Reynolds submitted a total of three presentations and we are awaiting results of their acceptance. Andrea Schultz—DHS Critical Infrastructure Liaison Our own DHS liaison, Andrea Schultz sought guidance from the council on the development of an Active Shooter train-ing program. This program has been released in a draft form and we were all very excited to check it out. This very infor-mative and practical look at how to respond (from and employee perspective) will be very valuable to businesses nation-wide as they prevent and respond to these all-too-common events.

Orlando Seminar Coming Soon The next Annual Seminar and Exhibits will be in Orlando Fl, September 19-22. The annual event is a little earlier this year and plans are well under way. Sub-missions for presentations have been submitted and are being reviewed. We are looking forward to hearing from at least three of our members if they will be pre-senting this year. Our council will be sponsoring those presentations as well as a pre-intensive seminar. The pre-intensive will be an expanded soft-target protection interactive group panel and should be very informative and well-attended. We will have more information on the event as well as our participation in it. Please notify Craig Clemons if you are attending, presenting, or otherwise in-volved in any way.

For newsletter questions, comments or inquiries:

Darrell Clifton, CPP

dclifton@circusreno.com