Marriott International President and CEO Anthony Capuano has revealed that human trafficking is a serious issue in the global hotel industry.
He was speaking in an exclusive interview with US media on Monday, “Human trafficking is a scourge on humanity, and unfortunately, a lot of it happens using hotels as an environment.”
Mr. Anthony Capuano added that Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit and profit from individuals. It can take the form of forced labor, sexual exploitation, drug smuggling, or even debt bondage.
“We developed an intense training program for our associates,” he noted in responce to what Marriott was doing to tackle the vice.
Initially introduced in 2016, the hotel chain’s human trafficking awareness program trains employees on how to identify potential signs of human trafficking, monitor situations, and act or report on them while providing aid to victims.
The program aims to have all on-property staff fulfill these training requirements by 2025 across the hotel chain’s 8,200 locations in 138 countries worldwide.
Over a million Marriott associates have already completed over 570,000 hours of this specialized risk prevention training. Additionally, over 800,000 workers at rival hotel chains such as Hilton (HLT) and Hyatt Hotels (H) have also participated in the training program, according to Capuano.
“We’ve got lots of work to do,” the CEO stated. “But I can give you dozens of instances where our smart, focused associates have used what they learned in that training and actually thwarted human trafficking activity in progress.”
Activist organizations such as the Polaris Project estimated that there were at least 27.6 million people trafficked against their will in 2021. Alarmingly, incidents of human trafficking rose by 12% between 2016 and 2021, the report found.
