So, you want to be a General Manager? Or maybe a "Director of Marketing and/or Sales? Chief Chef, Kitchen Manager or Rooms Manager? Make it your career...for a lifetime?
Move to Switzerland where you start at the bottom, young and eager, and work your way to the top, white table linens and all, check in guests, carry bags, hand out keys, call on convention clients, sign contracts, manage staff.
Do it all. Then, at 40, you're in.
Not here in America, that has now gone by the way of high button shoes. In Tucson, the fanciful Marriott nestled into the Tucson Mountains, thrown up in 2005, indebted to $145 million, crashed a year later in the boom/bust, has now gone up for auction. The big deal money guys can't float any more credit and on the auction block steps March 2, it goes to the highest bidder. I'll be there.
It looks like Versailles. No kiddin.
The staff? Oh, I imagine they're well paid and the new owners will say, " no need to panic, we can use you, please stay."
And the staff, if they are smart, will warm up their resumes, put them on the market and get the hell out as soon as possible. NOT THEIR FAULT. It is the nature of the biz today in the good ole US of A. Staff is fungible, expendable and turned around like laundry cart loads. That's why the quality of new-hires ain't so good any more....they probably won't be around career-wise if you catch my drift.
There are two other high-powered high-dollar, world-class resorts in the mountains high over the Tucson, Arizona landscape headed in the same direction. And the fate of the staffs all down hilled for the same rock pile as the Quality Inns and Holiday Inns of the past.
They are just jobs now, Check out the resumes of these folks: no more 5 years, or 8 or 10 years of rich, full experience at any one employer. You will be lucky to find three (3) full years of length at any one hotel or resort for anyone before some hotel "investor" buys or sells their job out of existence to someone who can find a cheaper replacement.
Welcome to the 21`st century of the Hospitality Industry.
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Monday, February 6, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Hotels, Resorts, in the modern day - 2012 Regrets to all
It is said that the Swiss are the world's Innkeepers. Probably, they still are, because the Americans now are just investors, keepers of the assets, passers on of the properties, cash-in, cash-out, profits in the till, employees to the street.
Once-upon-a-time in a time now gone, hospitality was an industry where the soup ladle was taken seriously in the back-of-the-house (kitchen), and the front desk was operated with the skill of a war-room. "Service" was a trained art and skill at the higher and lower end of hotels and resorts around the country.
No more.
"Investors" now buy 'assets' with beds and restaurants that hopefully gain value in their market place. Old adages fly high here, buy-low, sell high, and if you can't raise the bridge you lower the water. A.K.A - fire the highest paying layer of staff: i.e. gentlemen, warm up your resumes.
I once worked at a Denver hostel where within one year the same hotel was bought and sold four times within twelve months and the color of my paycheck changed four times. I got an ulcer waiting to get canned and never was. Finally, after threats from the management, I hired an attorney, found a better job in the Pacific Northwest and left quietly.
Funny, how the heat cools off when you mention, LAWYER. My wife had died in a hospital up the street, I fell to pieces, so did my work, and my employer started backing me out the door. Lawyers in concert with my doctors banded together and protected me until I could recover and get a better job elsewhere.
The 'investors' finally sold that dump to somebody else with the increased value received while I was there. Investors made millions, I left penniless, due mostly to cancer bills from the local hospital, mind you.
The owner of that hotel had also built a sleep-cheap property in the Seattle Tacoma area and hadn't even opened it yet when someone made him an offer "he couldn't refuse" at twice his construction cost, so he sold it. Staff hired and trained, the new owner blasted them right out the door, hired his relatives, and that, as they say - was that.
Another resort I can think of in Chekotah, Oklahoma was built by the state and later bought by a couple from Arkansas. The husband lost it to the wife in a divorce settlement and she "decorated" it - every one of the 250 rooms. Due to a lack of money, they opened the doors to the locals who trashed the rooms at $29 a night, smoked up the property and cooked pigs in outdoor cookers and balconies. Okies.
A management company was hired to forestall bankruptcy, minimal funds were raised for a cosmetic overhaul. The General Manager quipped he could spend a half million and the public would "never see it." The owner, I'll call her "Daisy Mae" flew in from shit-creek Arkansas and demanded high priced food for a re-grand opening, something we couldn't afford to do. We lost money.
The biggest event in downtown "Chekotah," in the past five years was the opening of a Walmart where the citizenry showed up in Tuxes.
Last I heard, she still owns it and the new General Manager was found inebriated on the lobby couch at nine in the morning. Such is the "Hospitality" industry in central Oklahoma these days. One of their sales people was arrested in the middle of the night, naked in the lobby. Details were sketchy as to how he got there.
Industry reports that most of the high-priced world-class resorts in sunny Tucson, Arizona are either in receivership or are filing for bankruptcy. In the language of the investor class, things are NOT panning out at the bank. The ONLY downtown Tucson convention hotel of any consequence is so bad
it is being used as a pin-cushion by the daily morning newspaper. About 20% of it's available rooms are not even in working order, they reported.
###
Once-upon-a-time in a time now gone, hospitality was an industry where the soup ladle was taken seriously in the back-of-the-house (kitchen), and the front desk was operated with the skill of a war-room. "Service" was a trained art and skill at the higher and lower end of hotels and resorts around the country.
No more.
"Investors" now buy 'assets' with beds and restaurants that hopefully gain value in their market place. Old adages fly high here, buy-low, sell high, and if you can't raise the bridge you lower the water. A.K.A - fire the highest paying layer of staff: i.e. gentlemen, warm up your resumes.
I once worked at a Denver hostel where within one year the same hotel was bought and sold four times within twelve months and the color of my paycheck changed four times. I got an ulcer waiting to get canned and never was. Finally, after threats from the management, I hired an attorney, found a better job in the Pacific Northwest and left quietly.
Funny, how the heat cools off when you mention, LAWYER. My wife had died in a hospital up the street, I fell to pieces, so did my work, and my employer started backing me out the door. Lawyers in concert with my doctors banded together and protected me until I could recover and get a better job elsewhere.
The 'investors' finally sold that dump to somebody else with the increased value received while I was there. Investors made millions, I left penniless, due mostly to cancer bills from the local hospital, mind you.
The owner of that hotel had also built a sleep-cheap property in the Seattle Tacoma area and hadn't even opened it yet when someone made him an offer "he couldn't refuse" at twice his construction cost, so he sold it. Staff hired and trained, the new owner blasted them right out the door, hired his relatives, and that, as they say - was that.
Another resort I can think of in Chekotah, Oklahoma was built by the state and later bought by a couple from Arkansas. The husband lost it to the wife in a divorce settlement and she "decorated" it - every one of the 250 rooms. Due to a lack of money, they opened the doors to the locals who trashed the rooms at $29 a night, smoked up the property and cooked pigs in outdoor cookers and balconies. Okies.
A management company was hired to forestall bankruptcy, minimal funds were raised for a cosmetic overhaul. The General Manager quipped he could spend a half million and the public would "never see it." The owner, I'll call her "Daisy Mae" flew in from shit-creek Arkansas and demanded high priced food for a re-grand opening, something we couldn't afford to do. We lost money.
The biggest event in downtown "Chekotah," in the past five years was the opening of a Walmart where the citizenry showed up in Tuxes.
Last I heard, she still owns it and the new General Manager was found inebriated on the lobby couch at nine in the morning. Such is the "Hospitality" industry in central Oklahoma these days. One of their sales people was arrested in the middle of the night, naked in the lobby. Details were sketchy as to how he got there.
Industry reports that most of the high-priced world-class resorts in sunny Tucson, Arizona are either in receivership or are filing for bankruptcy. In the language of the investor class, things are NOT panning out at the bank. The ONLY downtown Tucson convention hotel of any consequence is so bad
it is being used as a pin-cushion by the daily morning newspaper. About 20% of it's available rooms are not even in working order, they reported.
###
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