Are hoteliers all just plain crazy people?

By Colleen Isherwood, Editor

There, I’ve said it. You’ve got to wonder what type of person would stay alive and indeed thrive in a world that sometimes seems to be conspiring against them.  

Of course I’m talking about all the multiple hits hoteliers have suffered in the past decade or so.  Y2K didn’t materialize, but 911 did, and SARS, and WHTI, and now the double whammy of the new HST and taking away the GST rebate from our already beleaguered American visitors.

And we’ve got labour issues.  Steve and I were recently in Thailand, where we met restaurateurs and hoteliers from around the world.  We compared notes on labour.  In Thailand, there’s no problem with getting people to work, and budgeting for their salaries which are much lower than in Canada.  The biggest problem one restaurateur had was training Thai people, who are often quite shy, to deal confidently with patrons from different countries.

The beautiful Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi hotel in northern Thailand has a staff-to-rooms ratio of more than four to one.  If we had that in Canada, the rooms would cost thousands of dollars per hour, not to mention per night!

But when we talked to two people running operations in Europe, their staffing problems were every bit as onerous as our own.

The economic news is getting better. All the pundits seem to be saying that the economy has turned a corner and while the recovery will be slow, at least the trend lines are heading in the right direction.

So what do hoteliers tend to like about the industry?

First of all, it’s not often dull.  I just finished reading Bruce Gravel’s book, titled, appropriately for this editorial, Inn-Sanity: Diary of an Innkeeper Virgin. It deals with a couple who take over a hotel and face every problem under the sun — the low-flow toilets mandated by the Building Code that constantly back up in a hotel setting.  A pool that blows up.  A bank bureaucracy that turns down their loan after they have started gutting rooms.  Embarrassing brochures that keep turning up even after the innkeepers think they have tracked down the source of the problem.  And the movie shoot from hell.  

As president of the Ontario Accommodation Association, Gravel lends an ear to many an innkeeper. He swears in the introduction that most of the incidents are based on actual experiences.

Back to the advantages of this business.  It’s a people business — you’re usually not stuck away in some cubicle pushing paper. Hoteliers deal with people and their very real emotions and problems.  

There’s variety — as a hotel magazine editor, I enjoy writing about food, housekeeping, front desk, tourism, computerization, decor, trends, maintenance, environmental control and marketing.  They’re all part of the industry.

So maybe hoteliers aren’t crazy after all.  They’re generally friendly and outgoing, like variety and solving problems. A truly remarkable breed!