The hoteliers: 36 general managers of the world's best hotels

The hoteliers in the book run properties that most travelers know by name: The Savoy and The Plaza, Four Seasons Hotel Firenze and Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi, Mandarin Oriental in New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taipei, The Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and Kuala Lumpur, Raffles in Paris and Dubai, Singita in the African bush, Qasr Al Sarab in the Abu Dhabi desert, Pera Palace in Istanbul and Belmond Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg. I interviewed each of them first for A Wealth of Insight: The World’s Best Luxury Hoteliers, where every one of them answered the same questions in their own words, and returned to those conversations for The Luxury of Attention.

What strikes me, reading the thirty six together, is how little of what they say concerns the building. Almost all of them began at the bottom, as stewards, porters, breakfast servers and front desk agents, and almost all of them describe the general manager’s job as a daily physical practice: walking the floor, eating in the staff restaurant, standing in the lobby in the evening, attending the morning lineup. Their answers on hiring converge on character over skill. Their answers on empowerment converge on trust, and on the private conversation that follows a wrong call. Their answers on the guest converge on anticipation, and on the restraint that keeps anticipation from becoming intrusion.

They differ most on the future. Some see technology as the next layer of service and some as the thing to be kept out of the moments that matter, and the book’s chapter on the digital discipline is built on that disagreement. Each profile below gives the role the person held when we spoke and the role they hold now, the idea they carry in the book, and a line or two in their own voice from the earlier book.