Eid Al-Fitr preparation: pandemic hospitality translation checklist
With only weeks left until Eid Al-Fitr, hotels, resorts, restaurants and cafes in some parts of the MENA region will be gearing up for their first major cash injection since the pandemic abruptly shut down the global hospitality sector over a year ago. Slowly and cautiously, the world is opening up for tourism once again.
As a world-renowned hub for luxury resorts and hotels, the UAE is where we spend most of our translation time in the hospitality sector. And, because we’ve been working with major hotels and resorts for over a decade now, we’d like to use our industry insight to shine a light on translation in hospitality and what you need to consider communicating to tourists over the 2021 Eid vacation period.
Safety, signage and rules
Capacity restrictions
In countries and cities where hotels and restaurants, and entertainment venues have been allowed to reopen, places are still operating with reduced capacity restrictions in place. In the pre-COVID normal world, you wouldn’t need to explain capacity restrictions explicitly. Still, because of the latest rulings, it is helpful to make sure you have any outdoor seating or reduced seating signposted in popular tourist languages.
Mask wearing
Wearing a mask indoors is still mandatory and enforced by laws and heavy fines in most locations. Hotels expecting an intake of Eid tourists can avoid uncomfortable conversations by preparing guests in advance, ensuring that a welcome email including all the safety measures is included in confirmed guest reservations.
Hygiene
Reminding guests and visitors to practice good personal hygiene is particularly important. In hotels and malls, that can look like extra signage in high-touch spots like inside elevators, on doors, and in public toilets.
Offline and online content for everyone
It’s not just guests and tourists who need content to support their vacations. The multilingual employees who work in the hospitality sector also rely on several internet and external documents and digital touchpoints to help them do their jobs confidently and interact with the visitors, guests and customers who engage them in conversation and ask them lots of questions!
At e-Arabization, our most frequently requested content for hospitality localization includes:
For employees
- Employee hiring and training material
- Instructions
- Safety procedures
- Contracts
For customers
- Brochures
- Social media
- Websites and apps
- Emails
- Instructions
- Signs
- Menus
- In-room directories
A tourist-friendly booking system
Safety procedures, instructions and marketing material are some of the most obvious candidates for a multilingual makeover. A less obvious but equally vital part of the hospitality translation checklist is the booking flow that potential tourists and guests use before getting on a plane or hopping in the car.
Suppose you’re asking your target audience to spend money on a big-ticket item, like a hotel stay or a plane ticket. In that case, you need to make sure that your potential customer understands everything there is to know about the purchase they are going to make. This includes translating room descriptions, room rates, reservation tools that don’t support Arabic language right-to-left experiences, and any numerical information that isn’t immediately clear to non-English speakers.
Special offers and property information
You don’t have to translate or localize all of your hospitality material, but a great vacation experience means considering all of the frequent touch-points your multilingual visitors, guests, and customers may encounter with your brand.
Our final suggestion for your hospitality translation checklist is to make sure any special Eid Al-Fitr offers or discounts are clearly expressed and communicated across your marketing material. To save time and deliver maximum impact, you can create an Eid specific campaign landing page that clearly outlines all of your limited time offers. You can recycle your template landing page for other festive celebrations. When marketed correctly, a structured, easy to read, multilingual campaign page can drastically increase sales, and who doesn’t want that?
We recommend focusing your energy on the most seasonally popular hotels, restaurants, and venues for a budget-friendly approach to translating property or destination information. Annual celebrations like Eid Al-Fitr are when businesses can put customer data to work and use data from footfall and bookings to decide which properties to translate first.
If you work in hospitality and you’re gearing up for a busy Eid Al-Fitr, then click here to check out our extensive hospitality industry experience. And, if you need help localizing or translating your customer and employee communication, drop us a message here.