What do you find is the hardest thing about having to fire someone?

Doing it right.

There are a thousand or so ways to make a mistake and do it wrong, some of which can get you in a lot of legal trouble, others of which can buy you lots of nuisance-level consequences and repercussions for months or years afterward. (We won’t even go there about the possibility of provoking repercussions that constitute security threats to your company, property or staff — ever hear the term “Going postal”? . . .)

And the one way to do it right seems to vary by individual.

What I want above all else is a clean break. Have the employee move on, and have something to move on to, and have that departing employee quietly float away. It may be possible that time heals all wounds, and nothing would please me more than to have exactly that happen eventually, and we can meet again amicably and achieve some partial reconciliation, and no hard feelings in the interim; but on this day, until I’m sure there are no hard feelings, I never want to hear from that person in the foreseeable future.

In a perfect world . . .

• Everyone all around — including the departing employee — would agree that the situation isn’t working, and that it's best for all that we have a parting of the ways.
• The departing employee would move on with his or her life, and have something to move on to that would have him or her content to move on with his or her life, and never look back. I don’t want any ‘disgruntled former employees’ running around loose in the world.
• The impact of the termination upon the departing employee would be limited to the discontinuation of his or her employment by our company. No wipeout of any savings he has from the sudden loss of his income, no eviction because she couldn’t pay the rent, her kids don’t suffer because there’s no longer enough income to keep food in the house, no cars repossessed because he gets behind on the payments, no difficulty finding future employment because of a bad or questionable reference.
• It all gets done without pushback, resistance or a bad fight on the part of the departing employee — and the departing employee doesn’t try to leverage our commitment to get it done clean, quietly and without any problems, against us.
• There would never be any hard feelings, or grounds for hard feelings. Everyone goes their way, complete.

But in most cases, achieving all of this requires a world more perfect than the one you and I live in. Not even Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God and had all of the attributes of God while also being fully human, who literally needed no reference checks, who “did not need anyone to tell him what a person was like. He already knew” (John 2:25 - Easy-to-Read Version ); could select twelve guys to carry His message into the world and continue His work after He was gone without getting a Judas in the bunch. In a really perfect world, you’d never make a bad hire, an employee would never fail at his training or have performance problems or develop issues or fall into temptation and go bad on you, and no one would get fired at all.

What are some interview questions for a general manager of a hotel?

So, you want to run one of our hotels?

This is a question that I took my time answering because I wanted to 'finish' it. But I'm never going to 'finish' it. Even if I could give you an exhaustive list, anyone who approached interviewing applicants for hotel manager accountabilities intelligently and responsibly would keep changing it or adding to it.

(I don't want you to have an exhaustive list, anyway -- I don’t like people ‘gaming’ my interviews, and giving up an exhaustive list would be like posting the 'right' answers in advance for those who'd want to access them.)

I'll add more as I have time and opportunity.

Frankly, I think the whole model of job seeking, resume-writing, and interviewing that prevails, is a sick game to begin with. Like a parole hearing in a prison it rewards, and even reinforces and encourages, inauthenticity; and it penalizes honest applicants.  The interviewee tells the interviewer whatever he or she wants to hear, the interviewer knows this and corrects (often as not overcorrecting) accordingly, both sides try to look good, very little true communication occurs; and if any subsequent choices or decisions made on the basis of the conversation turn out to be correct or even respectable, it's by not much more than chance. Actual studies have shown that you can make decisions almost as well as most any employment interviewer by simply deciding it on the basis of a coin toss.

But unfortunately, we're stuck with it -- like Sir Winston Churchill said of democracy and its well-known dysfunctions, no one's ever been able to come up with a different way of doing it that works even that well.

That's why I try to come up with questions that are not so easy, for people who want to tell me what I want to hear, hoping to manipulate the outcome in their favor, to anticipate the 'correct' answers to. It’s also why a short class in listening and re-creation, the way the Landmark Introduction Leaders’ Program trains people in doing it, is something that I try to give most people that I have doing any interviewing for anything more than a low-level hourly employee.

What information do luxury hotels keep on guest profiles?

A guest profile on a good property management system will come with everything you see here. Make a reservation, or check into the hotel, one time, and that ‘file’ will exist for years — or until they change the system.

And that’s their ‘floor sample’, the screenshot provided to their prospective hotel company buyers. The ones I’ve used have an added button on the above screen where, with one click, we can bring up your photo and a sample of your signature (both of these come off your drivers’ license when we scan it the first time we check you in).

Hotels for sale: Best Western Governors Inn; Richmond, Virginia

Property offering

Listing broker: Stephen Albis, CAS Associates, via The Hotel Inventory

TripAdvisor reviews: Bubble score 4.0

Property website:

• Best Western - Governors Inn -- Best Western child site

The facility:

This is an attractive, interior corridor property in two buildings, that appears to be custom designed -- actually, a bit quirky, with the turrets -- and not conforming to any brand prototype, constructed in 1987.

Is there a demand for a well-designed hotel website service?

Nothing would please me more. If the cost were modest, I'd probably use it even for hotels that don't really 'need' it. (Franchised properties, and Best Western member properties, each have their own webpages on the big brand site. They might have a static website of their own, but click the 'reservation' link, and you go to the franchise organization's reservation page for that property.)

But that's just me.

The problem you're going to encounter in marketing such a thing is that owners of franchised properties expect the franchise to hand them everything - and if they don't, it's presumably because they don't have it to give. If the owner has a 72-room property, he expects the central reservations system to send him fifty new reservations a night. In real life, it doesn't work that way. So, he concludes, it's not possible: after all, Choice and Wyndham are professionals. Or, if it's a corporate-owned property, they might hire an in-house sales director, who'll try to pull it off by soliciting personal connections and face-to-face contacts in the area - 'sales' without any good marketing. There seems to be no convincing people that better can be expected or demanded of a hotel website.

The problem you're going to encounter with franchise organizations is, they're collecting fees and royalties on what they have at minimal investment to themselves, so why should they invest in anything more? (Likewise, why should a grungy biker bar with tattoo-covered topless dancers spend the money to renovate into an upscale gentlemen's club? They're already making all the money they can imagine with exactly what they have, and the overhead is as low as it can get . . . You get the idea.)




Here's my wish list: Stand by for lots of edits - and additions - over coming months: I'm just getting started. And I intend to never finish - this business is constantly evolving. (Anyone who tells you otherwise probably runs an older property with a badly dated '70's appearance that smells musty and is probably in need of serious renovations.)

Rate configurability:

I want more than 'Best Available Rate', AAA-AARP, and whatever whiz-bang promotion the franchise organization has going that, as often as not, has your hotel renting a room for next to nothing so the franchise as a 'whole' can benefit. One feature of a very suite-intensive (if not all-suites in all locations) new brand that we're working on (http://pinterest.com/beechmont27... , if you want an advance sneak peek) is going to be a rack rate that drops automatically if you request a stay of three days or more, and again if you request a stay of a week or more.

The terminology

Thanks, Anthony (Timeline Photos - Anthony Melchiorri | Facebook ). This could be the start of something big once we keep adding to it and linking back to it.

Some terms are industry jargon, others are specific to a particular brand or chain.

Contributions are welcome.





'Bucket': A vertical file, with a tabbed divider for each room in the hotel, into which the registration sheet that you signed is stored until you check out. In the days before computers, when this was a much more useful piece of equipment, it was also the repository for your bill (see folio).

What would you do with an historic hotel built in the 1920s that was condemned and is now being given a new life as a boutique hotel?

Bring a large budget and a crowbar. And leave both of them locked up securely in the trunk of the car until you've checked out the neighborhood very thoroughly. 

(Of course, if in checking out the neighborhood, you think you might need to get to that crowbar in a hurry, I'd pass on that hotel. We'll get to that part.)

I love old hotels and old theatres (So much history yet to make... | You don't see this anymore... | Old theatres (Rockin' the Paradise . . .) and I've barely started on those Pinterest boards . . .  ), particularly those having some, at least local, historic significance. (The brand new Microtel on the next exit will be old in about 70 years, but not necessarily historic - 'cheap old' doesn't get it. The life expectancy of any building - like that of a person, and not entirely coincidentally - is seventy-something years. Yes, there are a lot of 80- or 100- or 200-year-old buildings out there, but in order to make that average work the way it does, there have to be an equal number that didn't make it past 40, or 50, or 60 . . .). 

But while a project like this can be rewarding in terms of more than just financial return, you want to be careful with your emotions on something this delicate and potentially tricky . . .

Here are some things you should know before you even begin.

How do hotels assign rooms to guests?

However the desk clerk wants.

There is some planning that might go into it for a well-run hotel, however. (Every hotel will do what works best for that particular hotel.) 

• You want to match the room type with the needs of the guest and what he or she is willing to pay for. Families generally get double-doubles (that's your standard, mark-one-mod-zero 'hotel room' with two double beds, and the trend in better hotels is going to two queen beds in such rooms). Couples, or people traveling alone, like a room with one king bed. Cheaper hotels have a room with one double bed - a single - for people who don't want to pay a lot of money. (What the guest asks for is the ultimate guide, to the extent practicable at all, but if you're going to make the call based on no more info than "how many people?...")

• Reservations have priority: we've already made a commitment to those people and we have to honor it. Advance reservations also make better advance planning possible.

What is the best hotel strategy to increase occupancy and revenue? How can we differentiate ourselves to compete with other big hotel competitors?

No single 'expert' has an answer to this one that will work for everyone, and any answer I give you will be questioned (along with my 'expertise', and 'qualification' to answer the question), by someone, somewhere. So -- as with any question that calls for me to give you expert advice, I can tell you how I'd go about it, with most any hotel. Parts of it won't work for every hotel. Nor will I pretend to you that I have all the answers.

(I'm assuming here that you have a marketable hotel that does not have a franchise -- or that, if you do have a franchise, you are smart enough to know that your franchise organization does not have all the answers either, which puts you ahead of 95% of the people in this business.)

Here is how I'd go about it:

What does it take to run a successful hotel?

I could ask, 'define success'. Are you running a Motel 6 on an I-80 offramp in Podunk, Kansas; or are you going to go all out with mega-luxury, rooms you can rent for $800 to $3000 per night, lots of meeting and banquet space, and a restaurant that people will fly in for; and give the St. Regis [http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel...] a run for it? It makes a difference. Usually. For this answer, I'll try to not let it.

Like my answer to What does it take to start a hotel?, this is one of those open-ended questions that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, but for the fact that someone of the caliber of David S. Rose was doing the asking (which could work into a great leap forward for my company if he should ever decide to stray outside tech ventures and into more real estate, "Main Street" businesses, and bricks and mortar-related stuff, and he likes my answers on the subject); because no answer anyone could give would come close to adequate.