Caring
Supporting our people & partners
It’s important to us that we help improve the wellbeing of our colleagues and continue to develop our relationship with our charity partners.
Charity
Travelodge is proud to support our charity partners the British Heart Foundation and Pennies in raising funds for vital life-saving research.
Human Trafficking & Child Abuse
Here at Travelodge, we will maintain 100% of our colleagues undergo important child trafficking and human rights training in 2023.
Health & Safety
Our number one priority is the safety and security of our customers and colleagues, and we consider this in all our business decisions.
The safety and security of our customers and colleagues is our top priority so there’s lots of training for our hotel teams with a nominated Safety Champion in every district.
All our hotels have routine inspections from local authority Environmental Health Officers, Fire Safety Officers and various other enforcement agencies. We also have regular unannounced safety audits and the results from all of these are reviewed so that we can make improvements and reduce risks to our customers and team.
In 2022, our hotel health and safety audit pass rate was 98%, this was the third successive year achieving a pass rate above 97%.
Case Study: Safety During Planned Power Outages
When the UK Government announced that they may need to introduce planned power outages for up to 3 hours a night during the winter months, we designed a programme of processes, control measures and tests to keep our customers and colleagues safe and allow our hotels to continue to be occupied during potentially prolonged periods without power.
The programme was developed by a cross-functional team covering all aspects of fire safety, health & safety, food safety, building operation & maintenance, hotel activity and customer comfort & provision. This involved mapping our hotel estate to the government’s national power outage plan, conducting health and safety risk assessment across the estate and the deployment of supplementary lighting solutions in the form of industrial glow sticks to protect against the risk of emergency lighting failure.
Wellbeing
The physical, emotional, financial and work wellbeing of our colleagues is very important to us, and our specially curated platform Better Me provides resources to all colleagues to support our four key areas of everyday life and wellbeing.
- Financial – Understanding their benefits including pensions, and the recent introduction of our salary finance scheme
- Emotional – Support for colleagues’ mental health including our Employee Assistance Programme
- Physical – Discounted gym membership and ways to support physical health
- Work – How to progress their careers with Travelodge, including CV & interview tips and joining the ASPIRE Programme; ASPIRE is our Internal Career Development Programme from entry-level Team Member through to Senior Operations Management
In 2022, we launched ‘Better Me Moments’ – creating a moment in time where an individual or as a team, you do something to focus on one of the 4 pillars. Examples of Better Me Moments include team step challenges and mindfulness sessions.
During 2022 we also ran several internal campaigns focusing on different aspects of wellbeing including Mental Health Awareness Month, Men’s Health Awareness Month, World Menopause Day, Travelodge Health MOT and National Pensions Awareness Week.
Our Employee Assistance Programme, open to everyone, is an online and 24-hour telephone helpline for colleagues and family members giving them access to legal assistance on finance issues and counselling sessions to support mental health.
Charity
We have partnered with the British Heart Foundation since 2017 and plan to continue the relationship during 2024.
In November last year, at the BHF Heart Heroes Awards, we were recognised, as one of three companies, for extraordinary work in the development and promotion of the BHF’s new CPR training tool, RevivR.
And in 2022, through our partnership, we helped train over 1000 people, both our customers and colleagues, to complete this life-saving skill through RevivR.
We also continued to work with Pennies during 2022, giving customers the opportunity to add a few pennies to their hotel room bookings for charity and so far, customers have raised over £1 million pounds in support of BHF by using the digital charity box.
Human Trafficking & Child Abuse
The use of hotels for child trafficking and associated criminal activity is a recognised issue throughout the hotel industry. Here at Travelodge, we will maintain 100% of our colleagues undergo important child trafficking and human rights training in 2024.
Police and children’s charities tell us that criminal groups often move vulnerable children to locations outside of their local area to minimise the child’s ability to access help. This is why all of our hotel teams are regularly trained to national guidelines that are supported by the NSPCC and approved by the National Working Group on child sexual exploitation, South Yorkshire Police and the MET Police.
Data Security & Customer Privacy
We understand the importance we all put behind the use and storage of our personal data, which is why we’re committed to always keeping it safe and secure.
It’s Travelodge policy to manage and store the personal information of both its colleagues and customers in compliance with all relevant Data Protection Legislation in the jurisdictions in which it operates. All our colleagues receive training on data security and privacy as we know that this is the single most effective way to keep our data safe and maintain our phishing susceptibility rate of less than 10% across the business.
We have recently transitioned our Information Security audit framework from the CIS framework to the globally recognised National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework.
The NIST control framework will be externally audited by a specialist agency to provide wider assurance and consistency.
These moves reflect the progress we have made in previous years and will enable our security and compliance programmes to stay aligned with industry best practices.
Case Study: Phishing Awareness Training
We operate a continuous colleague testing and awareness programme with colleagues tested multiple times per year. During 2022 we continued to exceed our KPI for phishing awareness even though we had many new colleagues join us in the summer.
We have also raised the complexity of the simulation testing to ensure colleagues have experience of how a sophisticated phishing attempt would appear.
How others see us
As part of our ongoing due diligence and assurance activities we benchmark our external asset security posture against our industry and more broadly using independent third-party services. We are currently in the top 20% of organisations with 100 or more hotels.