For most five-star hotels, December is a busy month, with year-end festivities and promotions. But December cheer hardly deterred Kamal Rana, chief of security at the Intercontinental Hotel, Nehru Place, from conducting a day-long building evacuation drill on the hotel premises involving all employees, even the HR personnel. “Earlier training was restricted to only security staff, now we have extended it to all employees,” says Rana. Next month, security training becomes more elaborate, with a fire and bomb drill. “We are seeking permission from authorities to have trained armed guards at the hotel entrance,” he adds. For this the hotel has sought help from Ultimate Tactical and Combat, a security agency in Delhi.

Security consultants in Delhi have seen business booming in the last month. Safety Circle, a training centre set up by the National Safety Council, USA, with a branch in Delhi are now conducting workshops for The Taj Hotel and Shangri La. The programme, called ‘Emergency Response Care’, involves practical lessons on basic life-saving skills like cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), how to deal with burns, fractures, heart attacks, poisoning and even fire. Training lasts eight hours and the course costs Rs 1,500 per person. Other hotels have settled on intensifying their existing security models. The Park on Parliament Street has begun weekly mock drills on fire safety and evacuation, reducing their response time to any crisis by five minutes. The Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, conducts fire drills once-a-month, which earlier, was done only once in three months. “We recently introduced bomb drills, involving all staff members and have assigned a group to handle each floor in a crisis. This was not done before,” says Anil Kumar, director, Sandalwood Mall Management, the agency that conducts safety workshops in Ambience Mall.