PUSHING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Gaming America sits down with Hard Rock VP of Global Social Responsibility

Paul Pellizzari to discuss how the operator tackles ESG issues, including its anti-human-trafficking efforts.

Can you tell us about your day-to-day role and the company’s overall approach to social responsibility?

I have a very exciting job where I get to serve all of our business verticals, which are cafes, hotels and casinos globally. I get to work with a great team here and I personally lead three operational programs. One is responsible gambling, which we call PlayersEdge; our environmental sustainability program Save the Planet; and our anti-human trafficking initiatives, which involve both operational programs and lots of public engagement.

We’re speaking about social governance, which includes things like diversity, equality and inclusion, as well. These concepts are becoming more and more important, and perhaps not in a cynical way. Companies are seeing that share prices are affected by this; investors are now more interested in these kinds of things. How does it impact Hard Rock’s overall strategies? How much of a part do you play in driving social responsibility and what are you working on?

It is an increasing part of who we are and what people are seeking. The important thing that’s going on now is that you have guests, the people we serve, our employees, the markets and development partners – they all want to know who we are. And you can’t fake it anymore, not that we ever did, but what we’re seeing is a lot of attention to greenwashing and woke-washing. That’s never been who we are, and you need to have proof points. So we’ve also invested heavily in diversity, equity and inclusion. In fact, my boss is our Chief Diversity Officer. I think the critical thing for this moment is not just doing the good things; it’s how you do them. That can measure impacts and outcomes and where you’re really integrating these philosophies into a guest's experience, plus the experience that our team members have. Those are really our areas of focus, whether it’s environmental sustainability or human trafficking or diversity, equity, inclusion or philanthropy.

In terms of your campaigns and the projects you’re working on, which ones are at the front of your mind and at the top of the list for Hard Rock right now?

They all are. But I think at this moment, given that we’re talking during Anti-Human Trafficking Awareness Month – and that’s a program that’s been introduced over the last couple of years – this is a critical priority for us. At the moment, this is an issue that’s going on globally, certainly here in the US. Everyone is more aware of it and I think it’s getting more attention, which is great for our industry. The important thing for us is to acknowledge that it’s an issue that hits the whole hospitality industry, particularly hotels and casinos. We have a role to play and we need to define that role; we need to partner with the right organizations to help protect our guests and safeguard them, and also to bring awareness to the issue and try to help prevent it. Those are some of the things that have been really top of mind and taking a lot of my time.

You mentioned that the hospitality industry is more widely affected by human trafficking and the American Gaming Association recently released a report on this. In terms of gambling companies and hotels, how much of an issue is this?

For hotels, casino operators and brands, it is a big issue. There’s always a chance that someone will try to use your property to apply this horrible trade; that’s just a reality. No company is exempt from it, but I’m glad you mentioned the American Gaming Association (AGA): I actually sit on the task force for anti-human trafficking with the AGA which is led by Alex Costello, who’s doing a great job.

The first thing we do is identify and acknowledge that any company is at risk. But then what can we do to help prevent mitigate this risk? Just this month (January), we’ve launched our Human Trafficking Awareness Month app in the US with a QR code sticker. One level of prevention we’re implementing is making two-by-two-inch stickers and stockpiling them at four of our hotels and casinos. This sticker is for potential victims who are on-site, so it shows that direct support for victims needs to be a bigger priority for the industry. We’re putting them in places like washrooms, elevator areas and parking garages. These are places where, if a victim was on the property and they were to see this, they’d be able to swipe their phone and they then can get help immediately from local law enforcement.

We’re piloting this at our New York hotel, our Cincinnati Casino, our Hollywood Guitar Hotel Casino in Florida, as well as in Madrid. Then, we're planning to roll this out across all of our hotel and casino properties. That’s one example of how we can provide direct support to victims who may be on our properties. You can see the element of discretion and urgency in the QR code. So that’s a specific example in terms of the industry and gambling companies.

Overall, what more can be done in this area to raise awareness? Which areas can you look to improve upon in 2023 and beyond?

We have to improve our ability to deal with it in operations – and that means engaging team members. So with training, we have a core half-hour training session that applies to all casino and hotel members. We reinforce that with videos throughout the year that are short – maybe 2-3 minutes long – but hit the main points. We want our team members to recognize potential signs that trafficking is occurring on the property so they know what to do.

If that’s the case, security will determine whether to call law enforcement, so there’s that awareness. Then there’s actually taking a very uncomfortable issue and letting our team members know we can do something about it.

So taking the discomfort out of it and turning that into action, that’s a key thing. We also can work on prevention. At Hard Rock, we had a very successful program in 2022 called the Social Identity Quest, which was an education module for high school students. We partnered with ECPAT-USA to create this education module that was adopted by high school teachers across the US. This program is trying to prevent online luring, as traffickers are increasingly trying to lure vulnerable youth online. It’s about how to keep yourself safe and we did it in a highly engaging way. We saw 1.2 million high school students in the US complete this curriculum. The program is between half an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how the teacher wants to teach it.

Through the program, we saw online safety literacy increase by 13%, so that kind of prevention effort is equally critical to try to mitigate the issue on our properties. It demonstrates the wide scope of the problem wherein a guest goes into a hotel and thinks – what’s at the top of their agenda? Is it the casino tables, how clean the rooms are? Issues like this are maybe not the first thing you think of, but it’s always a risk; a big, widereaching problem. Obviously, everyone in our industry invests heavily in guest experience. We want our guests to have a great time. We want them to feel good and one of the things we need to get right when we’re dealing with these issues is creating effective guest-facing communication. If they’re going to see communications from us, the tone has to be right but we still have to get the point across. As an industry, we need to have the maturity to say this is an issue and we’re doing something about it. That’s more important to me than the discomfort of not addressing it at all. We’re shining more of a light on that.