With recent events over in Europe, most recently with the attacks in Manchester and London, once again the question of how to keep hospitality venues safe has been raised.
As a bigger issue, the general feeling is that we don’t want to give in to the fear and stop going out and enjoying ourselves. But at the same time, we have to be smart about how to keep our patrons and staff safe.
With bigger venues, many security measures are already in place and are most certainly being ramped up, such as bag checks, limits to what can be taken into Arenas, turnstiles to slow a number of people entering, and so on.
There is even talk about getting airport style whole body scanners at large venues.
But what about smaller venues, like restaurants and cafes? How do we keep guests and staff safe in cases of emergencies?
We're not sure what the answer is. Introducing strict security measures at restaurants would probably affect the experience for diners. After the recent attacks at London Bridge, one restaurant owner spoke about how his staff handled the situation by leading them to safety and working as a group to deter the attackers.
The owner explained that fairly recently they had received some training from police, as a result of bomb scares around the city. This training obviously worked to keep their staff calm and stop any of their patrons from being hurt. From other reports, many other restaurants also handled the situation in similar ways, so presumably, they had received the same training.
While the attack was awful, it’s clear that the way these venues handled the situation helped to keep the casualties down. It’s great that London police provided that training. It may not be a guarantee of safety, but equipping venue staff with such skills can only be a good thing.