When I spoke with Tom Roelens, he was general manager of Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi in Hawaii. The book notes that he has since become Chief Operating Officer of Wynn Al Marjan Island in the United Arab Emirates.
Roelens speaks in the book to a conviction that sounds simple and that most operators get backwards. Luxury hospitality, he told me, is a people business. A property can have the most remarkable physical asset in a beautiful natural setting and an idyllic location, and none of it decides whether the guest comes back. The people and the service they provide decide that. The asset produces the conditions under which the team can produce loyalty, and the team produces the loyalty. He then described what that conviction looks like in practice at Lanaʻi, where every new employee goes through a series of onboarding and training programs, and where the induction is a two day affair in which recruits learn the goals and beliefs of the company, the culture of Hawaiʻi and the history of the resort. Two days, for positions that may pay an entry level wage, made on the conviction that the three hour orientation produces a different kind of team member.
“You can have the most amazing physical asset in a beautiful natural surrounding and in an idyllic location. But it all comes down to people and the service they provide.” Tom Roelens, then General Manager, Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi
In the book, Tom Roelens appears in Chapter 4, First the Team, and Chapter 13, The Long Game. In First the Team, his people business principle opens the hoteliers’ side of the chapter, and his two day induction at Lanaʻi is the example of onboarding treated as a serious, deliberate process rather than an HR formality. In The Long Game, I return to the same sentence from a different angle. For the operator late in a career, the people of the property, the team and the guests and the longstanding partners, are no longer the medium through which ambition is achieved. They are the substance of what the operator does every day.
“In Lanaʻi, it is a two-day affair to ensure that new recruits learn about the goals and beliefs of our company and familiarize themselves with the very unique culture of Hawaiʻi and the history of the resort itself.” Tom Roelens, then General Manager, Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi