Merriam‑Webster  Definition of WINDOW. an opening especially in the wall of a building for admission of light and air that is usually ....

Growing up hotels were exotic destinations. We were a big family and a summer vacation was packing tents on the roof of the car and heading off to  a series of provincial campgrounds. No A/C in the car so windows were open as we motored down the highway. Tent flaps let in the night breeze. Fresh air is always a fond memory of the luxury of childhood holidays.

Growing older and life became more urbane and more urban. Staying in hotels became part of life and before long a career. Hotels usually had retrofitted air conditioning units stuck under old casement windows. If a guest preferred the city night noises to the battleship drone of the A/C they could always open their window. 

Fast forward. Most new hotels have windows that never contemplated being opened. If windows ever did open they are today often screwed shut in the name of safety. So now we have a sealed box of a room that is dependent upon a complex system of air exchange.

So let’s take a look at this engineered system. Makeup air, conditioned or not, is dumped into the hallways and finds its way under the guest room door and out a bathroom vent to create a flow of air. The wall unit that is found in the guest room only has one job - to heat or cool the air, stagnant or not that is in the room. 

With this in mind walk the property with your Chief Engineer and test the bathroom vents with a ply of kleenex and see if there is a draw. Go up on the roof and check the vent exhaust fans. Put your hand on them to see if they vibrate and that the motors are working. Once during a transition I found 70% of the roof exhaust vent fans were broken and one of the make up air units wasn’t feeding 10 floors. The result was a building filled with stale air, a literal malaise. The poor air becomes a subliminal background problem that  affects the good health and mood of your guests and your staff.

Do yourself, your guests, and your staff a favor and check to see how well your air circulation is working.

[email protected]
Linkedin

Most budgets find little room for a seamstress. When you see a concierge who looks like they were suited on Saville Row you know that hotel has a seamstress.

A great hotel needs to have a great seamstress and a great valet. Then the staff are always well turned out in their uniforms, the managers look crisply tailored and guest emergencies become memorable moments of service. 

When the CEO of your top client loses a suit button 20 minutes before his televised board meeting, when your Vice President of Ops splits his pants  on the first day of a property audit, when a new doormen needs his overcoat let out on a frigid morning, you really need someone on property who can sew. Luckily I have been blessed with some great tailors and seamstresses, men and women who learned their craft in far away places like Hong Kong, or Latvia, or Odessa or Rio de Janeiro. They brought their skill along with their work ethic and found a home in the hotel business. In this disposable world we live in sewing is becoming a lost art. I do not know if hotel schools spend a day on the subject.

I remember hosting a Leading Hotel of The World conference with 200 General Managers, and their spouses. They came from the most luxurious hotels around the world descending upon the property with overweight luggage filled with evening dresses and tuxedos. For this challenge we planned ahead. The Executive Housekeeper from a sister property came a few days prior to support our seamstress and set up a complete in-house valet and tailoring station. On the day of arrival, right on cue, there were gowns that needed a hem, dress shirts that had to be laundered, suits to be pressed. Turn around time had to be almost instantaneous there was no option to tell a guest that we could get it ‘expressed’ and it would be back in 24 hours. Like Cinderella the black tie ball had a clock ticking and you did not want any of your guests feeling like a pumpkin.

Every day is not a world wide conference but everyday there is some one in your hotel who needs a stitch. Check your manning guide.

[email protected]
Linkedin

One is never sure if Corporate Executives dream up ‘brand standards’ because consistency is the key to their brand differentiation and promise, or if they just don’t trust front line employees.  The word empowerment is bandied about by every hotel management company out there but many don’t trust the waiter to drop the breakfast check at the appropriate time. Where is the bar? How low is the common denominator?

Next time you are having a leisurely breakfast at a corporate transient upper/upscale, don’t blame the otherwise charming and competent waiter for dropping the check the minute your eggs appear, it is the sacred ‘standard’ that has come down from the mountain, he has no room for a judgement call.

Having your name bellowed across the lobby three times before you are checked in is another rigid concept that is often imposed from above. One time I had Bill Gates arriving late in the evening. Even though he had been pre-keyed I thought it appropriate to greet him. Forget using his name, forget brand standards for VIP’s. He jumped out of a black SUV with a driver/bodyguard who looked like he had been trained by some agency in Langley or Tel Aviv. As I approached the ninja sidekick gave me a killer stare that froze me in my tracks. I backed off and smiled as they went straight to the elevator. In the morning my staff had a call that Mr Gates would be leaving at a particular time and requested ‘no goodbyes’. 

So what is the moral? If you are a billionaire and stay in a luxury hotel you do not have to suffer through the brand standards imposed by someone miles away from any front desk. I appreciate when someone uses my name but please don’t keep count and don’t worry I will let you know when I need the check - my guest and I are not finished yet.

[email protected]
Linkedin

When I was  a rookie AGM in a New York hotel I would wake up at 4:45 am, be on the subway by 5:15 am and at the hotel before 6:00 am.  My morning ritual was to share a pot of coffee in the back office with the night manager. 

Aside from hearing the happenings of the night one was treated to a little hotel history 101. The night manager was a raconteur of some of the legends of his days in some of the great old hotels of New York. Tales of movie stars and would be presidents, gangsters and home run kings. eccentric owners and some crazy general managers. His stories embodied the romance of what is great about being in our business. Another account, another laugh, a knowing philosophical quip. as he wrapped up his shift and I started mine.

In the better hotels the Night Manager -  wore black tie - Smoking. Guests in their formal wear returning from the Opera or a charity ball were right at home in a soft lit lobby, with the background noise of a live pianist wafting through from the bar, and the gracious manner and greeting of “The Manager of the Night “. 

Now the night manager, is called the night auditor. Somewhere along the way a consultant decided we could get rid of the night auditor but then another consultant decided we could eliminate the more expensive title of night manager and have the night auditor do all of the work! 

No matter his title, he is still the person whom most of the staff never meets!  He is the welcomer of late night road warriors and lost travelers, the bookkeeper who closes the house, and the one who breaks the bad news about the overbooks to the poor walks on a snowy night.

Do yourself a favor and next time you have insomnia go hang with the night guy!

[email protected]
Linkedin

Transitions - Best and Highest Use

The economics of real estate demand that an asset should operate at its best and highest use. Striving for this sometimes elusive goal can be the driving force behind a transition.

One used to think about hotels as iconic local landmark institutions, it was unthinkable that they would ever close or change names. Nowadays hotels, which have become commodities, change brands because with the investment of a PIP one can maybe drive a higher Revpar, or perhaps a more favorable management contract. Amazingly some suburban office parks have 20 year old hotels working on their third or fourth incarnation. 

A downturn in the economy, a new highway interchange, a super mall, or metro stop in the wrong place, and suddenly one whole wing of a property becomes a dormitory for a rich local university. What of a condominium tower where the original apartment units values are inextricably tied to the halo of a hotel brand that is about to disappear. In one transition a local newspaper publisher asked me about rumors that the adjoining apartments would lose 15% of their value the day we transitioned the historic hotel. I told him not to worry that in their home country the incoming brand managed palaces for royalty. 

Sometimes it can just be about the dirt and the air. When the land value and the vertical development rights become more valuable than the existing hotel then the compelling equation is to tear it down. I was the last General Manager of such a situation. We were operating a 500 room luxury hotel with great margins and cash flow.  A half billion dollars later it was shuttered and torn down and became the world’s most expensive vacant lot. Today it has just topped off higher than the Empire State Building and is selling some of the most expensive apartments anywhere.

Some asset managers miss their window of opportunity as earlier hands have already been in the cookie jar and an encumbering oversized mortgage or onerous management agreement leave them on the shore watching the tide come in unable to make a play but for some the timing is right and they catch the perfect wave and ride it!


[email protected]
Linkedin

Don’t forget that the hotel business is at the end of the day all about bricks and mortar.  When transitioning a property with all of the action of operations and personnel make sure you get behind the scenes and get a quick handle on how the building really works or doesn’t.

Start on the roof and work your way to the basement. You will get to see systems that are patched or broken or atrophied and abandoned. Usually every issue has a back story and the best keeper of those stories will be a shift engineer. This is what I call the forensics of the building, the witness marks of prior problems. It will tell you the talent level of the property team and also the asset philosophy and expertise of the owners and management companies past and present.

Once in an overcrowded hotel basement that dated back to the 1920’s I could see where every time a new system or new wires were run no one removed the old. You ended up with generations of redundant pipes and wires. In one situation, ten years earlier, the hotel had converted to city steam and had bypassed the old boiler system and fuel bunker.  You could tell that the tax credits that were used for the crossover did not have an allowance for the removal of the old. Fast forward to the present a whole section of the basement had a rusted out boiler system that was going to cost a new owner major money to cut up and remove.

[email protected]
Linkedin

A hotel is a complex enterprise with hundreds of employees, thousands of processes, and  a million moving parts. Transitioning such a detailed entity from owner to owner or brand to brand is something that needs to happen all at once -’at the stroke of midnight’, or whenever the bankers and brokers have decided. As the General Manager your job is to quickly get your arms around it all, have an acute helicopter view and to move it all forward with great rapidity towards a pre-determined pro forma destination.

Like a crime scene the best window of reality is the first 48 hours. The clues you discover are invaluable, those precious first impressions are often right and leave an indelible mark. Burned out light bulbs, room service trays in the hallways, outdated promo pieces in the elevator tell you a whole lot about different departments but more so of the overall morale of the property. You also get to see who are the everyday heros who shine through even in the midst of dynamic change.  You have to be aware that many of the staff feel abandoned by the outgoing flag. They have worn this corporate identity and wowed many customers in the name of the ‘brand’. Now some of them feel like foster children being sent back to the orphanage. Your job is to give them a fair sense of purpose and security so that they can focus on the job at hand and deliver the hospitality promise to your guests.

In a few short days the staff have an invisible GPS tag on you, a boss radar. They know you are coming before you turn a corner and suddenly what you see is a show for the boss. All the reason more to take advantage of those first few days.  Be on the loading dock at 5:00 am and find out who is dropping what produce on your dock and who if anyone on your side is checking it in. Then check with the night auditor to find out what happened after midnight,  then a coffee in the employee cafe with the incoming morning team to see who starts their day with a smile, and whose kid is sick.

Remember it is a two way arrangement, as you are judging the staff they are judging you. You will be remembered for your modesty, your manners, or your arrogance, long remembered will be your commitments of those first few days.

[email protected]

Linkedin 

I have been involved in numerous transitions, from flag to flag, owner to owner sometimes both. Regardless of differing rules of engagement there are some issues that hold true across most if not all deals. For all of the confidentiality surrounding a transition, human nature is human nature, word leaks out and:

1. All of the damage is done long before transition day!

Months into the transition when you are wondering what happened to some key accounts or why a big group did not repeat, you look back and realize that the run up to the transition was at the height of RFP season. Guess what wasn’t renewed on your behalf. How many thumb drives went home with copies of all of your sales files?

2.  Talent is precious.
Sometimes the talent is gone faster than you realize. Either the outgoing management has moved them quickly or they are a superstar and have taken the opportunity to find a new and better position. This is where your reputation as an employer comes into play. You can not reach across the divide, you are embargoed from talking with them. Your actions are what resonates in the marketplace. Talent wants to work for a ‘true employer of choice’! Be careful that months after the transition you are not the ‘farm team’ for the marketplace. As fast as you are re-building the competition is having a field day recruiting at your expense. It is imperative to get on board and quickly and sincerely win the hearts and minds of the employees.

3. Mediocrity is toxic.

Contracts often allow you to terminate some managers at transition but at a severance price. Do your diligence, it is often cheaper to be rid of mediocrity than find  months later that they are populating your new asset. Mystery shop the property well in advance. Take note of the smiling clerk as well as the sour faced hostess. Take a look at Tripadvisor, they often have the names of good and bad employees. Be careful mediocrity is infectious and eventually fatal.

4. Its all about distribution.

The day after the transition do you have a perfectly functioning website? Can anyone find it? Are all the booking channels wide open? Did you invest enough in internet marketing for this transition? If your IT and Distribution team do not win this one you will lose real dollars and a lot of bragging rights. What can you offer a guest who is loyal to the property but now there is a new recognition program? If you lost the guest history to the old brand then stand with the doorman for a few days and meet your regulars. The best keeper of guest history is your staff not a database.

5. Did the seller understand bricks and mortar or just 'branding?
Deferred Maintenance. Did the outgoing owner or manager defer crucial maintenance for the prior 12 or 18 months trying to chase a cap rate? Did the property team understand the nuts and bolts of the building or just the attributes of the brand. Was the engineering team a brand on-the-job career path or were they dedicated facilities managers with intimate knowledge of how your building works.  A broken boiler or HVAC meltdown knows no brand and takes no prisoners!

Transitions are becoming a way of life. They are all different, some more difficult than others but all require a tremendous amount of pre-planning and the ability to quickly deal with the unexpected and most of all to understand human nature!



[email protected]
Linkedin