When I spoke with Alexander van Gastel, he was general manager of Pulitzer Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He appears in a single chapter of the book, and he is there because he described, from inside a property’s onboarding, the hotelier’s version of a practice the chefs in the same chapter describe from inside their kitchens.
Van Gastel speaks to where creative input comes from on the hotel side. The general managers and concierges who design the most distinctive guest experiences are the ones who have been the guest in the most rooms, who walk competing properties and read about hospitality cultures they did not grow up inside. At the Pulitzer, that principle was built into the first days of employment. One of the concierges, the person who holds the keys to the hidden corners of the city, takes every new employee on a storytelling tour through the neighborhoods of Amsterdam, ending at the Canal House Museum to learn the history of the UNESCO canal belt the hotel sits inside. The purpose, in van Gastel’s words, is to train and empower every member of the team to become a storyteller.
“One of our concierges, who holds the key to all the hidden gems and secrets of the city, takes all new employees on a storytelling tour through the neighborhoods of Amsterdam” Alexander van Gastel, then general manager, Pulitzer Amsterdam
He also speaks to how the concierge’s role has changed with the practice. There is too much information online for a guest to sort through, and so the concierge’s value has moved from access to judgment. The creative pipeline at the front of the house starts with sending the team out, into the city and into the museum two blocks away, so that the inputs they later offer a guest are inputs they have personally walked through.
“The concierge is now chief curator” Alexander van Gastel, then general manager, Pulitzer Amsterdam
In the book, Alexander van Gastel appears in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, where the storytelling tour is the hotelier’s counterpart to the chef’s practice of gathering inputs from outside the kitchen, and where his concierge as chief curator stands beside Jonnie Boer’s claim that creativity belongs to the whole operation rather than to a single department. The front of the house, in his account, is a creative function with structured inputs and not a transactional desk.