PRESIDENT INTERVIEW: Fairmont's Jennifer Fox

The classy Fairmont San Francisco

Exciting expansion
As you might expect, Fox says her number one priority is to “really learn and understand the company deeply”, but secondly, her focus will be looking at Fairmont’s development and growth strategy — which involves some significant new openings in 2012 alone.
Fairmont The Palm will be the highlight for the Middle East when it opens in Dubai in September (see pages 54-61) but there are also openings in Kiev, Ukraine; Baku, Azerbaijan; Jaipur, India; and Manila in the Philippines due this year.

“Then next year we have about six or seven new developments, so we’re very much taking an approach to look at developed markets as well as emerging markets,” expands Fox. “We already have a good footprint in North America so North America will have some growth for us but it won’t be to the extent we’ve got internationally. We’d like [to be in] Miami and we’d like a little bit more [presence] in California along the coast. We’ve got a lot of opportunity in Europe; we’d love to be in Rome, Milan and Paris and we’ve got a great new project in Moscow, which is the redevelopment of the Pekin Hotel.”

The Moscow Pekin hotel project will join Fairmont’s iconic hotel restorations, including The Savoy in London, The Peace Hotel in Shanghai and The Plaza Hotel New York.

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“We’re very good at respecting the history, culture and heritage of these hotels and then modernising them so they resonate with today’s consumer; it’s not a renovation at all, it’s absolutely restoring these hotels to their former glory,” says Fox.

These historic hotels have the benefit of bringing Fairmont’s service standards “alive” for new customers, who “will then look to Fairmont when they travel around the globe”, she continues.

What Fox hopes will ring true for guests is each Fairmont hotel’s relation to its surroundings, coupled with the company’s service culture.

“I think the brand is truly positioned on bringing part of the local environment into the hotel so we very much position ourselves as having authenticity about what we do, respecting whatever culture we’re in — when you go into a Fairmont, our goal is always to [make you] feel like you’re in the destination.

“When I joined the organisation — and I’ve always wondered how they did it — the service training programmes really impressed me,” Fox continues. “The Fairmont Selection Interview that all of our colleagues globally have to go through before we actually consider them for employment is step number one. And then, once we’ve hired our team, [we focus very much] on our cultural training as part of their orientation, because that’s a very big part of who we are and then you know, it’s making sure that we’re constantly developing our people, providing opportunities for them, and that’s how we focus on developing great service. There’s a real Fairmont culture in the hotels and that’s palpable when you’re in a hotel — you can just feel it,” she observes. So how will Fox monitor and manage this culture and consistency of product?

“We do a tremendous amount of work around really understanding our guest service levels through guest service indices, we work with J.D. Power, they run our guest-satisfaction survey so we get our reports on a monthly basis so I can monitor the brand and then we can monitor the individual hotels,” explains Fox.

“We also do a mystery shopper-type programme where we have an independent third party go out to the hotels and write a report, so coupled with those two things together we get a very good picture of where the brand sits.”
Successful partnerships with owners will play a major role in achieving future goals, adds Fox.

“We work closely with ownership on asset management of the hotels on product quality…because that’s key — making sure the hotels continually stay relevant to the customer, that we continue to innovate and we continue to deliver the right kind of quality in terms of our product offering — that’s a big part of how we maintain our quality standards,” explains Fox.

She takes great pride in establishing strong relationships with owners and visits to Fairmont’s core regional offices in Dubai, Shanghai, San Francisco as well as head quarters Toronto have been centred on meeting these critical partners.
“One of my highest priorities is to deliver value to our owning companies and that is something that is very near and dear to my heart because I take a real sense of responsibility in terms of delivering premium revenues to our owners and the right type of profit, so it’s very much one of my own core values in how I believe this should be done,” asserts Fox.

“So I’m certainly focused on the business side and how we make our hotels the most profitable for our owners. And to me that’s down to a few things; one of them is building a strong brand; in difficult times people tend to gravitate toward staying with a brand because they trust a brand more than they would just an independent hotel, so brand is critically important. It’s about strengthening the brand and ensuring that our brand delivers on behalf of the owner because that’s the number one thing that they’re going to want from us.”

The second factor, Fox continues, relies on her teams’ performance at hotel level. “Then it’s our management capability; how well our general managers manage their hotels on our behalf, how we drive the right kind of revenues into their hotels — profitable revenues — and that’s through our sales and marketing efforts in our corporate office and through the individual hotel sales and marketing efforts and it’s also about bench marking, looking at our profit margins, ensuring that we’re delivering the right kind of profit margins in the hotels — that’s how I think about driving profitability at the hotel level,” she explains.

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