But when COVID-19 hit that information immediately began to flow in the other direction, with hospitality quickly adopting protocols from America’s healthcare systems that have been deployed for decades to protect patients and staff from infections. Hospitals for years have been borrowing designs from hospitality to create more welcoming patient experiences, Fuerstman tells me. The next thing Fuerstman’s teams they knew they had to do was solve for sanitization, which, for someone steeped in operations, was easier than Fuerstman thought. That meant, among other things, refunding and moving thousands of upcoming reservations to later in the summer or fall.Ī Pendry interior courtyard with tons of room to widen furniture layouts and spread our Courtesy of Pendry We all had to adapt quickly.”Ī few days later, Fuerstman decided to temporarily shut Montage and Pendry down altogether except for the residents who were sheltering in place. “The industry as a whole had never seen anything like this happen. “The first few weeks were very hectic,” Fuerstman admits. At the time, Montage’s properties were running at 80% occupancy, amounting to over 5,000 guests spread across four states and one property in Mexico who were directly at risk of a surging pandemic. Zoom triage for Fuerstman and his management team began minutes later-“thousands of them, it felt like, every day”, recalls Fuerstman.Įveryone was involved-general managers, operations executives, PR and communications, in-house architects, real estate-to get a drone’s eye view of what the company needed to do immediately, hour-by-hour. Thursday March 19 th, the day Governor Gavin Newsom shut California down, was when it all hit home. Lots of space to social distance Courtesy of Montage Hotels That’s when it hit him that he could be doing his own thing, and Fuerstman founded Montage Hotels in 2002. A few years later, Fuerstman was recruited as general manager of a new Arizona resort where he quickly was promoted to managing director, running a $500 million show. From doorman he became a bellman, and after college helped open a new Marriott resort in Rancho Mirage, CA, first as a front desk manager, then overseeing housekeeping operations. Now we have to give them the confidence that we can do all of those same things while ensuring their health and safety and not compromising the experience they came to us for in the first place.”įew people understand the complexity of that proposition better than Fuerstman, who got his start in the hotel business when he was 18 working as a doorman at a Marriott in Saddlebrook, NJ, humping luggage and cleaning snow off windshields in winter.įuerstman worked his way up from there the old school way, learning hospitality’s trenches by doing it instead of getting a fancy degree. “There are so many things that go on inside a hotel that guests never see or thought about before. “Consumer confidence is our biggest challenge right now as an industry,” says Montage founder Alan Fuerstman. It’s a moving, mental target everyone in hospitality is scrambling to figure it out right now.Īlan Fuerstman, founder and CEO of Montage Hotels, started working as a doorman for Marriott when he. No one wants to make panicked decisions three months into a pandemic with an unknown endgame, because betting wrong on two thousand rooms, four pools, nine restaurants is a slow-moving ship that’s hard to right once it has momentum, and could prove financially disastrous if coronavirus is vanquished by a vaccine next year and the world moves on.īut what if COVID-19 persists, even mildly, or surges again next winter? The psychological suspicion that everyone around you could make you sick will likely linger far longer than the virus itself-and have a much larger impact on what people expect from hotels to feel confident that their health and safety are being respected and protected. Hotels, especially big, luxury, convention center, resort-style ones, take years to envision, design, and build. The answers coming from the industry’s highest levels are still mostly speculation. The reality is that no one knows just yet. Will we ever be able to do this on vacation at the hotel pool again? Getty
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |