In the hot seat – Hot.E 2014

On 17 and 18 September, hundreds of delegates met at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower in Belgravia, London, for this year's Hotel Investment Conference Europe (Hot.E).

One of the most anticipated and exciting events was the 'View from the board room', a chance for attendees to hear from some of the industry's leading figures on topics ranging from branding hotels in a competitive market to securing the right staff for future growth.

The panel, moderated by Russell Kett, chairman of HVS, opened with a question about branding. With some of the biggest hotel groups, such as Hilton, Mariott and Starwood, saturating the market with a huge number of brands, Kett was keen to understand how smaller chains manage to compete.

"Not every company can do a budget brand or a super-luxury brand," said Puneet Chhatwal, CEO of Steigenberger Hotel Group. "Not every company has the resources, or shareholder and management structure to do those things. If you can create value by one brand or two brands, then you should be happy with that. If you think your value creation comes from having 20 brands, then you should go for that as well."

The president of Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, Radha Arora, whose company has just one brand, also discussed the importance of distinguishing oneself when operating in a market flooded with different brands.

"We have one brand but 18 properties, all of which are very different," he said. "We believe we have found ourselves a niche. Take London as an example: it was a huge risk to come into Holborn and Covent Garden, but we were searching for opportunities in Europe, and we've been very pleasantly surprised.

"We've been able to articulate London, and we are doing this with other destinations - taking classic building icons and filling them with a breath of fresh air, creating a new destination," added Arora.

Tomorrow's people
After a long exchange on the value of branding, the conversation turned to the differences in the way hotel groups actually manage hotels.

"I think great brands attract great people," said Gerald Lawless, president and CEO of Jumeirah Group. "If you really want to improve the way you manage and operate, it comes down to the people at your organisation."

That answer sparked a wider conversation about how the hotel industry is bringing through new talent. "Are we really creating careers for the youth of today and the staff of tomorrow?" Kett asked.

"Unfortunately not," Chhatwal replied. "We always talk about growth and pipelines, but we've stopped talking about management value, which is the key differentiator going forward. The management value is about how you manage talent at the school level, and how you are able to retain them and help them grow at your organisation, or in the industry more generally. This is the key to the ultimate future success of the industry."

This question about talent seemed particularly pertinent for Ian Carter, president of Hilton Worldwide, whose company has more hotels opening in the near future than the rest of the panel put together. "Where are you going to get all the talent from?" Kett asked.

"We have 500 hotels under construction at the moment in 70 countries around the world," Carter replied. "There are a number of things we try to do. We forge alliances with various educational institutions from within the countries, whether that's China, where we have five, or the Middle East, where we have three or four. Internally, we have 4,000 hotels and 135,000 direct employees. We offer 5,000 training programmes online. Some are completely mandatory, some are voluntary, but we encourage people to take these courses."

With many hotels opening in China, one of the major challenges is setting up training facilities in Europe for new staff.

"What has been done as an industry to foster an exchange programme, where the staff come to the UK, France or Germany to train for six months before they go back to their own country?" Chhatwal asked. "This isn't easy but we have to make a start somewhere."

Lawless added: "What we've been able to do in places where the visa regime is easier is get people in for training. In Europe, you can forget it. We tried to bring some UAE nationals over to London for training this summer, but it was so much hassle. What we do have is a central programme for Chinese employees in Dubai - this helps us put our culture into new hotels, but Europe needs to open up to allow exchange programmes, which are vital for our industry."

Checking in on tech
The final question of the session was on a topic many feel the hotel industry lags behind on: technology. Kett asked the CEOs how quickly they think progress is being made and what some of the advances their own companies are interested in implementing are. The diversity of the panel's responses showed there was no straightforward answer.

"It's about the type of customers you have at a particular hotel," Carter said. "Some will be very interested in technology, but that might not be in a luxury setting. It's all about listening to what the guests say they want. We don't think about technology for technology's sake."

As president of a luxury hotel group, this was a question of particular importance to Arora. "For us, we have to be careful as a business," he said. "There are several brands now where you don't need to check in any more. But we are in a people industry, and there is a fine line between having good technology and having people that serve you. At the same time, we don't want to fall behind."

"Within our industry, we've never really got check-in and check-out right," Lawless added. "It's always a disaster, and we could make it an awful lot easier for the customer.

"We need to give customers a choice of how they want to actually experience the hotel. If I'm staying as a leisure guest, I might want contact with the staff at reception, but if I'm a business traveller, I might not."

The 2015 Hot.E conference will be held 28-29 September at the same venue.