Viceroy vision
Walshe’s vision is for Viceroy to be confident and courageous in its delivery of authentic hotels. This is essential to ensure its success as an operator of fairly individual properties in one portfolio, says Walshe, comparing the 500-room Viceroy Yas Abu Dhabi to the boutique Viceroy Maldives as an example.
“I like to say that we’re the only hotel company I know that is building its future based on an oxymoron and that is consistent individuality. You might think that one suffocates the other but I believe that there’s a balance we can strike,” asserts Walshe.
“We’ve got the confidence to compete but we’ve got the courage to populate our portfolio with very different types of products.”
| Advertisement |
The goal is for guests to be more concerned about the location they are staying in than the Viceroy name.
“Viceroy comes third or fourth on the list, I don’t care, because what we’re in the business of doing is creating an emotional connection for our guest to the location that they’re in —to create the opportunity for them to generate life long memories, but memories of them not of us,” he says.
Achieving this goes back to getting the afore-mentioned talent in place first, however, with Walshe using the group’s smaller Urban Retreats brand as an “incubator” for future leaders of upcoming Viceroy hotels.
“No hotel company I ever run will give people a script as to what they say to a guest. What we do is recruit people with personality.”
In this, he is inspired by US restaurateur Danny Meyer, who runs his businesses around the concept of “51 percenters”. Walshe explains: “We all say we need to recruit people that give 110%, that’s like looking for a 26-hour day, it can’t happen, so he talks about the 51 percenters where the dominant connection they have to the business is emotional not technical.”
At Viceroy, Walshe says people at every level are encouraged “to express who they are” as long as they meet the service expectation of their guests.
“I have no respect for unnecessary hierarchy whatsoever. If I could run an entirely flat organisation I would do but we can’t because decisions need to be made,” observes Walshe.
“The company isn’t growing based solely on a board of directors or me creating the future, my role is really to be a catalyst for co-creation. My two most important stakeholder groups, my customers and my colleagues, have equal voice in where the company is going and then we collaborate.
You know what, we get it wrong sometimes but we celebrate efforts as much as we do results and it’s actually OK to get it wrong. That means were trying,” he says.
Walshe acknowledges that it is the relatively small size of the company that makes this philosophy possible, however, even if the pipeline was to double in the next three to five years, that would result in 30-40 hotels — meaning the approach is sustainable.
But don’t be mislead; Viceroy might not be a Marriott or an IHG, and nor would it want to be, says Walshe, but its growth targets are also “very, very ambitious”, with expansion to Asia coming next, plus aspirations for a Viceroy Dubai “in the not too distant future”.
It seems highly likely that this is one hotelier we may be seeing some more of in this region — if he can tear himself away from his dream life in LA that is.
Article continues on next page ...
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
