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From a managerial and corporate standpoint, we are a fairly decentralized organization that respects the individuality of each of our properties. Of course, this requires a very strong management team at the local property level. If you compare the shape and size of our company, our head office would be much smaller than many others, and we would spend much more on the local management teams at the actual hotels. The managers really are key to our properties. We do set standards for the quality and the types of expenditures that the managers should be making, but for the most part they have a great deal of autonomy. Another indication of this is that we do not try to move managers from hotel to hotel, as many companies do, as part of their effort to standardize the experience everywhere. From our point of view, if a manager wishes to move on and develop, we respect that, but there is no great encouragement to jump from property to property – that is not the aim of what we are doing. We are very happy to have them seated in the same property for 10 years or more so that they can really develop the personality of that hotel as well as relationships and a rapport with their regular guests.
We value highly this special relationship between hotel and guest. In order to foster it, we communicate predominantly with guests at the individual hotel level rather than try to take over and ‘run’ the guest centrally (the approach of most conventional brand chains). For example, if a guest goes on one of our Orient-Express Safaris in Botswana, they will be contacted in the future by that business unit. After all, what they will be interested in will most-likely be very different from guests visiting the Reids Palace Hotel in Madeira. This is part of a broader picture, developing and fostering unique, individual relationships with guests, even after they have left the hotel, and we believe this is best done by building the local relationship between the guest and the property.
In short, our managerial approach is to try and enjoy the benefits of a mom-and-pop personal approach, and combine this with the benefits of a large organization that has a strong balance sheet, tight financial controls, financial clout, sophisticated marketing, and so on. We try to find a balance that gives us the best of both worlds.
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