{ INTERVIEW }
to stay that long before they are moved on to new challenges. Is Sascha here for the long haul? “Brighton is such a well-connected community and I enjoy the openness and the interaction. Down here you don’t get people being careful and talking around subjects. They will tell you to your face. I’ve heard that comment about the GM moving on quite a few times. If this is what people think, it’s actually quite positive because they want stability, they want to see someone make it their own. “Having said that, we’ve been living near Gatwick since June 2011 and the kids are in school just a few hundred metres away from the Sussex / Surrey border. We are really happy there and the children have established roots, so I don’t see an urgent need to move on. And I have really enjoyed the job here so far. “I’ve been with the company for 15, 16 years now, and I haven’t even counted the jobs and the locations I’ve worked in. It’s obviously one of
the biggest incentives if you are travel-minded and if you are career-minded that there is that progression, and that attracts a certain type of people. I am one of them. “Do I think that a GM should ideally stay in a place a little bit longer than a year, a year-anda-half, two years? Yes, but it’s always down to circumstances. And I suppose some changes have been a bit quicker than would have been great for the actual hotel to establish itself but it’s probably part of the nature of the industry and us as a company to a certain degree.” Perhaps Sascha is ready to stick up the ‘Dunroamin’ plaque and settle down. He has certainly stacked up enough air miles. In his early years he was in Mongolia and Zimbabwe, before going to the German school in Japan. “I’ve grown up internationally, including a year in the US as an exchange student. But my passion for the hotel industry developed when I was quite young. When I was fourteen, we went to Bangkok and we walked into the Oriental, which is obviously one of the finest hotels in the world. I walked into this lobby in awe of how great a place it was, and there was this one gentleman standing in the lobby, speaking to guests and speaking to the team members amongst all the flowers and orchids and beauty of that lobby. I said, “Whatever he does, I want to do.” I found out that he was the General Manager. Kurt Wachtveitl was his name, a very, very established and renowned person in the hotel industry. He has retired since, but he was driven to achieve the highest quality in hospitality. And I was like: “Wow, that’s a job I want to do.” “So I found my vocation very early and my career planning was very easy. I did a number of internships in Hong Kong, in Yangon, in Myanmar and in Austria. I studied Hotel Management in Vienna, a great place. I was sent to the Austrian House at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, as I had local knowledge of Japan, and that’s where I met my wife. “I joined the Hilton Elevator Programme in 1999 and worked at Hilton Zurich, Hilton Park Lane, Hilton Trafalgar as well as in Budapest and Hilton Istanbul and became GM at Hilton London Gatwick Airport followed by Hilton London Syon Park. Not bad for an East German!” Is there a difference between how you treat a hotel depending on the location, or are the principles basically the same? “I suppose commercially you treat it differently. It depends on your business mix. Are you, like Trafalgar, a hotel that is right smack, bang in the middle of London, that can sell every single weekend to tourists? In which case, it’s a matter of finding the right price point. Or are
you more, like Gatwick, an airport hotel that is really there because people want to fly out on the next morning and they need a night before and a night after? Plus, you’ve got a corporate base to look after. Are you like the Hilton Brighton Metropole Hotel, that lives and breathes with the conference and events business because we’ve got unbelievable space? I’ve never seen anything like that before. “The Hotel is huge. My first experience with Brighton was during the Labour Party conference in 2000. I was a trainee in London with Hilton, and they called us all over. They put us up with some host families and we were working from
“This year the HBM is celebrating its 125th anniversary, spending 3.75m on renovations”
morning until late at night turning over the rooms and working wherever we were needed. I loved that experience and I realised back then how vast this place was. But back to your question: yes, it makes a big difference where you are - it is all about location, location, location.” For the Hilton Brighton Metropole, it’s a mix between conventions and tourism? “Correct. Our business is completely different on a Friday, Saturday night than it will be on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday where you’ve got a mix of corporate, and, obviously, the convention business. Syon Park was quite similar. If you had a Twickenham match on, you knew you were in for a busy time. That hotel was the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but during my time there we rebranded it to Hilton. We could be commercially more successful if we put the Hilton brand on and concentrated on the core business and the right sales price. We did a fab job over there. It’s a beautiful hotel with a nice spa, great gardens and it’s a big wedding venue.” As the Hilton Brighton Metropole is very much a convention hotel, which cities is Brighton competing with? “Well, there’s London, obviously, because everybody wants to go to London. But nationally, from what I gather, Bournemouth is going to be
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