You run a luxury hotel by selecting and protecting a team, building a culture out of small daily choices, walking the floor, rehearsing for each guest's arrival and defending the standard against every temptation to let it slide. The general managers I interviewed describe the same work in the same order, whatever the brand.
Ask a general manager of a great hotel what they actually do and the answer rarely sounds like a job description. It sounds like a set of habits. Over 36 interviews with luxury hoteliers, from The Plaza in New York to The Savoy in London to Singita in southern Africa, the same habits came up so consistently that I stopped being surprised by them. The brand standards differ. The owners differ. The work does not.
The first habit is the team. Every general manager I spoke with said some version of the same thing: the real work is selecting people for character and then protecting them, from difficult guests, from impatient owners, from exhaustion and from the general manager’s own bad days. Pinar Kartal Timer, then general manager of Pera Palace Hotel, Jumeirah in Istanbul, interviewed every single hire into the hotel regardless of position, because twenty minutes in a room told her the one thing no resume could. Philip Barnes, then general manager of The Savoy, explained what she was looking for.
“We’re trying to look after guests in the best possible way, and the one thing we can’t teach is the right attitude. If they have the presence, manners and wherewithal, we can teach them pretty much anything else.” Philip Barnes, then General Manager, The Savoy, London
The second habit is presence. The general manager walks the lobby at quarter to seven and catches what the department heads are too close to see. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, told me that a general manager who picks up an empty coffee cup on his way through the lobby has performed the whole of leadership in a single gesture. The team watches. Within a year, the gesture is simply how things are done in that building. That is what culture is in a hotel: a thousand small choices, repeated until nobody remembers them as choices.
The third habit is rehearsal. A luxury hotel is a decentralized network of hundreds of people across rooms, restaurants, lobbies and back of house, running around the clock with no single inspection point. The only way to hold a standard across that network is to prepare for each arrival in advance: the returning guest’s preferences, the anniversary nobody mentioned, the allergy on file from a stay three years ago. The guest never hears about the preparation. The preparation is the product.
The fourth habit is economic, and it is the one owners least want to hear. Kai Speth, then general manager of The Reverie Saigon, was blunt about it.
“A true luxury offering cannot be achieved if cost cutting is the norm. Success can only come from investing in people, new product offerings and new service ideas.” Kai Speth, then General Manager, The Reverie Saigon
The best general managers I know treat the training budget and the staffing ratio as the same line item, because to the guest they are. A hotel that trims the team to protect the margin will, within a year or two, be explaining to its owner why the reviews changed.
The final habit is recognition. On a great general manager’s best days, the guest feels known, by name and by the preference they never had to state. Everything above exists to make that possible, and the guest will never see the machinery behind it.
Chapter 3, Leading by Example, follows the floor walk; Chapter 4, First the Team, follows hiring and culture; and Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, follows the rehearsal for arrival in detail.