Risk & Insurance

The Hospitality Industry Is Unique. Relation’s Benefits Programs Follow Suit.

The Hospitality Industry Is Unique. Relation’s Benefits Programs Follow Suit.

The Client

Our client is a hospitality investment and management organization. Their full spectrum of services includes hotel investment into properties and debt, property and asset management, and development and renovation management services. They currently own and operate more than 50 hotels across the United States.

The Challenge

Implications from the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA), such as the cost for hourly employees, common ownership, pay or play, non-discrimination issues and manual eligibility, was expected to raise our client’s costs dramatically–penalties for non-compliance alone would have quadrupled their benefits cost. In addition, they were bogged down by the day-to-day administrative work of dealing with multiple carriers and COBRA management, and concerned about key ACA timelines on the horizon. They needed support with overall plan administration and strategic guidance around cost control and compliance.

The Solution and Result

We brought our compliance team of experts together to create a strategy and design a plan that enabled them to meet their ACA requirements in a highly cost-effective way. First, we undertook an assessment of their entire benefits program by running their plans through our ACA modeling tool. We then conducted an analysis to recommend strategic changes to their program to ensure they were able to meet the new requirements. We also implemented our unique benefits administration web-based tool that helped streamline their overall HR functions, including billing and eliminated errors from their system.

As a result of our partnership, we were able to help them create a customized benefits program for employees that keeps them compliant, reduces administrative inefficiencies, and keep costs under control.