In the driving seat

Cora Stuart, Paul Bridger, Janet Fitzner, Stephan Vanden Auweele, Simeon Olle, Henning Fries and Peter Blackburn

What experiences and people have shaped the way you manage your hotel?

Cora Stuart: I definitely have some very strong mentors in my life, some that I always look to and I still contact to be able to understand their take on something. I’m a relatively young general manager but I had good role models, so I look to what they’ve done for me and how they’ve treated me and the people that I’ve worked with as examples of how I should proceed as well.

Aside from my mentors, I work a lot with Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits [of Highly Effective Leaders] and that’s a lot of what I do as well — I preach that to a lot of the people that I work with because I believe in balance in life and a lot of the mentors that I’ve worked with have managed to achieve balance in life, although I’m still aspiring to be as good as them.

Simeon Olle: I think as far as shaping our careers we all have mentors and there’s always something positive to take out of every individual. There can be positives and things that are not so positive; what works for some leaders and managers, those skill sets can’t necessarily apply to other personalities. So it’s a matter of looking in the right places for that.

It does depend on each hotel. For example, The Address Downtown Dubai is quite time demanding because we have bars and restaurants and they are busy late into the night. Just by the nature of the make up of this hotel, or of any hotel if you have that strong food and beverage component, usually you find it goes a little bit later into the night.

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Several of you are in fairly new roles; what are your priorities as a GM going into a different hotel?

Henning Fries: Of course, getting to know the key players and getting to know the employees is most important. That’s what makes the product overall. Secondly, I think it is to get a grasp of what the key drivers of the business are. This is my first two weeks to get my head around what it’s all about at Fairmont. Of course, understanding the brand is very important, companies have their own way of working and you need to find your way around that as well.

Peter Blackburn: Brand recognition is important and at Cristal Hotels we’ve managed to do that very successfully in such a short time.

Paul Bridger: I think clients here have high expectations because they are in Dubai, particularly holidaymakers, they come to Dubai and expect everything to be bigger, better, shinier, so we have upped the service. Premier Inn is very branded, we have 600 hotels, so you’ve got the same product here that you have in the UK — the difference I make is the service, so I really try and push the service

Have any of you wanted to take a different approach with setting up your team?

CS: I have been able to do that twice actually, once at The Address, starting with a white piece of paper in my office with nothing and being able to flesh it out for the Address was an amazing experience, something you can never forget. Then doing it with Media One as well, a brand that nobody knew and then positioning it as a very hip, trendy hotel — to me that’s what I enjoy. That really gets me on a high, when you can develop something and see it come to fruition and then come back and look at it and see how wonderful it looks and how successful it’s become. To me, the best part of my life is being able to do that.

HF: [As GM] you are really setting the tone for the overall approach. I think that really it comes down to leadership style and the way things are being done — the culture that is created within the team has direct impact on how service is delivered. How people are made to feel when they are joining the team [impacts how] guests feel when they are eventually coming through the door and what they say about your brand and the experience that they have at the hotel when they are there.

Stephan Vandan Auweele: I think one thing we need to realise is that the environment in which we are working is not what it was 10 or 20 years ago. People have changed, customers have changed, the environment in which we operate has taken a dramatic shift. Since I joined the Aloft, my eyes have opened dramatically, we as hoteliers — at least I was — we pretty much focus on a kind of customer or a kind of environment which doesn’t exist anymore. The kinds of customers which [we will experience] in the next generation of travellers are not the ones from 20 years ago. They have other expectations; the world was very different 20 years ago. When you went on a plane you were wearing a suit if you were in business class, everything was a lot more formal, whereas today when you take a business class plane people will go in their jeans and some will even go in their pyjamas!

If you look at what a hotel traditionally was, it was for the rich and famous and heads of state, today it’s more for travelling managers, and I think from being an exclusive and very utilitarian place, now hotels have to be a warm place, where you are away from home and you do business. It’s from the staff that this change has to come, you don’t have to speak anymore like the customers are from another planet — they are human beings as we are.