There’s so many opportunities for our brand to grow it really becomes a function of do we have the leadership talent to actually, effectively take advantage of that so I spend at least 50% of my time thinking about ‘are we putting the pieces in place?’- do we have the support, the international growth that will be available to us over the next 5-10 years?
How do you split your time between focusing on the short-term and the long-term story?
We spend a lot of time internally recognising the fact that yes we have to develop the strategy for today, but 30,000 colleagues are not going to go away.
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US $4 billion of hotel real estate is not going to go away, we’ve got commitments and responsibilities to owners who are just opening hotels.
But what’s interesting about Fairmont – even thought it’s a 100 year old brand, by 2013, 40% of the inventory in Fairmont will be less than 10 years old. So we have these great iconic assets – the Savoy, the Plaza, the Peace Hotel, the Fairmont Banff springs, but then you turn it around and we’ve got this brand new hotel in Abu Dhabi, we’ve got this hotel here, we’ve got a fantastic hotel we’ve just opened in Cairo, the Nile and these properties are truly outstanding hotels and so we’ve got both the history and some amazing new products.
Some hotel chains say ‘we’re going to be all about old properties’ and like you say you’ve got the mix now, so how are you capturing the customer who says ‘when I go travelling I stay Fairmont’?
What do we stand for? We have three things we stand for – properties that are authentically local, that have unrivalled presence and that offer engaging service and those three things are put together and what we attempt to do is turn memories into moments for our guests.
So we’re all about creating a personal memorable experience for our guests. So that can happen just as easily in this brand new hotel in Abu Dhabi as it can in an historic asset like the Banff Springs Hotel.
You mentioned your amazing shareholders – is it harder for a company that’s publicly listed, especially when the economy becomes an issue. Is it another thing that detracts from the issue of running the hotels or does it make choices easier?
There are some weaknesses in both models – I think that in a public company it’s very difficult to hold real estate because it’s an inefficient model for holding real estate.
In a private company when you have access to capital you can hold access to real estate, but sometimes it’s more difficult to raise capital efficiently. So at different stages of the revolution I think companies would probably be better in one format or another.
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