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| Hospitality Magazine column Making the news Is it the media’s role to make the news or report the news? A recent Campbell Live TV3 story focussed on hotel security with hidden cameras seeking to find out how difficult or easy it would be to access a guest’s room key by someone other than the legitimate occupier. The person trying to access the key knew the room number and the name of the person who had booked it, although that wasn’t clearly reported as part of the story. Consequently, the tenure of the story was that New Zealand hotel room security is lax. The key question is what was this story all about? Do we have a problem with hotel room security? Are people inappropriately accessing hotel rooms? Is there a major epidemic with theft from hotel rooms? The answer to all these questions is resounding no. There are something like 32 million guest nights bought and paid for in New Zealand every year and virtually no examples of malicious room access or theft. Indeed the major issue hoteliers have is belongings being left behind in rooms, rather than being stolen from rooms. Yes hoteliers have a responsibility to ensure that the security of someone’s room is protected, the extent to which security measures need to be in place also need to be balanced by the risk, and the compliance and inconvenience cost to guests. As a result of this programme all hoteliers will be reviewing their security arrangements, not because they have a problem but because this programme may well have encouraged some criminal elements that herein lies an opportunity. This story is about Campbell Live making the news, rather than reporting it. They have not reported on a problem, they have potentially created one. Ratings are clearly important but those rating wars should be won on the back of good reporting of the news with real stories, rather than making news for the sake of the ratings. Bruce H Robertson |
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