Cayuga’s Innovation Contest during the COVID-19 Crisis

The word “crisis” in Chinese is composed of two characters—one representing danger, the other opportunity. A crisis presents a choice. This is particularly true today.

In late March of 2020 when we had to close all Cayuga Collection Hotels & Lodges in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama due to the worldwide travel ban and closing of airports which are our lifeline for tourism, it became clear to us that we would need to be creative, innovative and think way outside the box in order to survive.

According to a Harvard Business Review Article, “Crises present us with unique conditions that allow innovators to think and move more freely to create rapid, impactful change. These conditions provide us with the opportunity to do our best to help, and for our teams to do their most innovative work in the service of our organizations.”

So we decide that this was the best time to launch our second Cayuga Innovation Contest. The first one we had launched in 2017 with almost 100 entries and the overall winner of this contest was the implementation of a Community Guide School at one of our lodges. This has been a huge success and even expanded to become a guest experience.

We invited all the employees at the Cayuga Collection Hotels and Lodges to present their innovations and ideas related to:

Improving the guest experience
Becoming more sustainable
Generating new revenue streams
Increasing productivity and efficiency
Improving working conditions for our employees.
Increase the wellbeing of local communities

We were impressed by the projects that were proposed to us and it was very hard to select winners (there were small cash prizes attached to winning as an additional incentive). Below you find a selection of projects from the different hotels that are in process of being implemented over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for an update in 2021 on progress.