You become a luxury hotelier by taking a first job on the floor of a hotel, usually in a role nobody competes for, and staying in the work long enough to learn every department from the inside before anyone hands you a property. The thirty six general managers I interviewed started as breakfast servers, stewards, porters, trainees and front desk agents, and most of them say those years decided everything that followed.
The word hotelier covers more than the general manager. It takes in the people who run hotels, own them, develop them and lead the companies that operate them. But every hotelier I have interviewed for my books began the same way, and the beginning is the part this question is really asking about.
The first job
Aaron Kaupp, now Regional Vice President and Managing Director for Raffles in Dubai, the Seychelles and Bahrain, was about twenty and serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Switzerland when he understood what he wanted to do with his life.
“My first job in the industry was serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel, and I knew right then that I wanted this to be my career.” Aaron Kaupp, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)
Krister Svensson, then general manager of The St. Regis Bangkok, began lower still, and says the start was the point.
“I learned early on that starting from the bottom was incredibly important to understanding roles you would otherwise be oblivious to later on.” Krister Svensson, then General Manager, The St. Regis Bangkok
The pattern holds across the thirty six. Stewarding, the front desk, food and beverage, housekeeping, a hotel school’s training placement: the first job was almost never the one the person wanted, and almost always the one that taught them how a hotel actually works. The general managers who later ran The Savoy, The Plaza, Mandarin Oriental and Four Seasons properties describe those early years in detail and with some affection, because the floor is where they learned to read a guest, respect a colleague and hold a standard with their own hands.
Learning every department
A luxury hotel is a decentralized operation: rooms, restaurants, bars, spa, events, engineering, sales, finance and several hundred people across a twenty four hour cycle. The hoteliers in the book spent years moving through those departments before anyone gave them a property, and several say that the moves they resisted at the time were the ones that made them. Luc Delafosse, then managing director of Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, put the education plainly.
“To this day, I can say that I learned most of what I know on the job and through interactions with general managers, owners, investors, and other colleagues that I keenly observed and listened to.” Luc Delafosse, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)
Hotel school helps, and several of the people in the book attended one, in Lausanne, Glion or Les Roches. The question on whether you need a degree takes that up directly. What the degree cannot supply is the decade on the floor, and none of the general managers I interviewed skipped it.
The mentor
Nearly every hotelier in the book names the general manager who shaped them. Svensson describes an early mentor who showed him the inner workings of a property and taught him that leadership is about respecting and appreciating each colleague every day. Taljinder Singh of the Taj remembers a general manager who treated people with fairness, sincerity and empathy, and says that is the quality he took. The apprenticeship chapter of The Luxury of Attention is built on these relationships, and the practical advice that follows from them is simple: choose the property for the person who runs it, and stay long enough to be taught.
What the role asks for now
Torsten van Dullemen, then general manager of The Landmark Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, told me that a general manager today who does not understand the legal side, the pace of technology, digital marketing, public affairs and how to work with owners and shareholders cannot run a hotel successfully. The hotelier of this decade is also an operator of a business with owners, asset managers and a brand to answer to, and the people in the book describe learning that side later and on the job, after the floor had taught them the rest.
The path, then, has three parts in a fixed order: a first job on the floor, years in the departments under people worth learning from, and then the business. The question on how to become a hotel general manager sets out the timing in more detail, and the collection of the thirty six hoteliers in the book gives each person’s path from their first job to the property they ran when we spoke.