Journals of a Hotel Manager

During the recent sales trip a couple of weeks ago on the west coast I squeezed in 15 minutes to visit my former hotel in Southern California. The area is celebrated for the multi-million dollar mansions overlooking the Pacific, various pristine beaches and harbors paraded by 30-ft yachts. Needless to say, our guests were the rich and famous from both the west and the east coasts. Sadly, our hotel was not on the beach and ocean view was only available from 10th floor and above.

There were plenty of guests who couldn’t care less about the ocean view or the lack of it. We had at least five long-staying guests in house permanently. One guest occupied two suites on the top floor: one suite was converted entirely into a giant closet for his clothes. Another couple stayed at our hotel for nearly five months while waiting for their mansion to be completed. In the meantime, the GM at that time and the wife had taken a liking to each other. When the mansion was finished, so was the marriage. The GM and the lady have been together ever since.

One of the most remarkable long staying guests was the founding father of a popular household condiment. So I shall call them Mr. and Mrs. C. Mr. C was at least 85 years old when I met him. He was a pale, frail little man stuck in a wheelchair. Mrs. C fared slightly better as she could walk on her own with a walker. His children didn’t want to put them in a nursing home so he and his wife came to stay at our hotel. They occupied one of the largest suites. A full time nurse stayed in an adjacent room. Their monthly bill was at least $20k.

Three times a day room service was in charge of feeding the old couple. Due to their poor hearing and difficulty in movement, room service had the privilege of going into the room without knocking and set up the table with candles and flowers. This went on for seven days a week as clockwork, despite the hotel occupancy. Like clockwork, Mr. and Mrs. C would always complain about the food. The first complaint was always that the food was not hot enough although we had put in at least three burners in the hot box and the plates were searing hot. The second complaint was that the food was bland, even though the chef had spent hours with both of them and their children to draw up the monthly menu that was healthy and tasty. They were never vicious but they would constantly make these comments to the waiters, managers and even to me. Our sad conclusion was that their palates were so worn from their advanced age that they couldn’t taste or feel the temperature anymore. It was an ironic tragedy for someone who invented a famous condiment to lose the taste-buds.

While room service had their duties, the concierge had a different daily task and that was to wake Mr. C up. Every morning, a bellboy would enter the suite with his master key to deliver the daily newspaper. Mr. C was rather deaf and old folks tend to sleep quite deeply. The only way to awaken Mr. C was to tickle his feet. Bellboys had a set of gloves for that purpose alone as one can imagine what naked feet look or feel like on an octogenarian.

Every holiday the second generation of the condiment empire would converge at our hotel with the entire clan to visit the old couple. They spent a lot of money at the hotel and payment was always prompt. The daily complaints about the food and generic old folks incessant chattering notwithstanding, Mr. and Mrs. C were very easy to take care of. When I heard that Mrs. C eventually passed away I felt genuine grief for Mr. C. It must have been really lonely in that suite all by himself.

Every staff at that hotel was a hero in my eyes in the aftermath of the flood. I admire the courage and loyalty of those who walked for 3 hours and swam through a river of sewage to come to work on the day of the flood.  In the days after, despite there was absolutely nothing to do at an empty hotel nearly all staff members turned up every day.  We organized many team building exercises, bazaars, training and cleaning programs just to keep them occupied.  When their pay was frozen, staff still showed up.  Eventually, some resigned for better opportunities. We also transferred out many staff to our sister properties around the world.  But the bond created in the darkened empty hotel would link us together forever.

I still remember Mrs. Emma, the Executive Housekeeper who was like everybody’s mother.  She paraded through the hotel with her troop dusting, mopping, and cleaning as if we were expecting guests at any moment.  As a result, the hotel suffered no further damage due to neglect or mildew.  When the money ran out for supplies, the housekeepers brought their own brooms and rags from home.

I later hired Melvin, a quiet engineer, again at one of my postings.  He swam through the dark and filthy water to switch off the main electrical control immediately after the flood. He wasn’t even the one to be asked but he had rather risked his own life of being electrocuted. His heroic act was publicized throughout the company.

The first expat to be transferred out was our Executive Chef, a whiny German, who complained about the local staff every single minute of his six months on the job. On the day of the flood, Chef cooked on a kerosene burner for nearly eight hours, without whining. When he left, almost one hundred staff from different departments crowded the lobby to say goodbye. He was truly taken aback and shook hands for 45 minutes before rushing to make his flight. I clearly saw his tears when he got into the car. Within two months on his new job, he hired five of his former ‘useless’ staff from our hotel and wouldn’t let them come home.

On the first New Year’s Eve after the flood, only the lobby was powered up with electricity.  The living-in expats joined the staff on security duty for a small party at the main entrance.  All we had was a case of warm Coca-Cola for the celebration.  Someone turned the music on his cell phone to full volume.  We toasted to a bright new year.  The gathering lasted only 15 minutes but it was one of the most memorable NYEs of my career.

Four years later, the hotel hosted a GM’s conference and my return was emotional.  Seeing it clean, sparkling and operational again was the antidote to the nightmare that lasted a year.  Many staff from pre-flood were again working in the hotel.  That hotel and its staff will always have a special place in my heart. I have certainly matured from that traumatic experience and it also prepared me for future emergency situations.   But I wish this experience on no one.

After the flood, the owners tried to scam the insurance company and got caught.  The hotel was a cash cow for them and we had been breaking even at 26% occupancy. Once the operation stopped, the owners confessed that they were actually running out of cash. They had gambled heavily on the hotel profitability and invested in numerous personal projects such as massive villas which tied up all the funds. Therefore about six months into the hotel closure none of the staff, including the GM and myself, was getting paid. We had 300 staff but with their families we were looking at feeding up to 900 people. To try to get the staff paid was the main reason for the stress that drove Alfred to drinking.

There was a regular guy called Jack who was a commis in the kitchen. Jack’s wife was seven months pregnant when we announced to the staff the sad news that not only they wouldn’t get paid, but their benefits such as health insurance would also be stopped at the end of the month.  A few days later, the HR manager told us that Jack had come to ask for her blessings.  He and his wife had decided to induce the birth of the baby before they had to face the monumental maternity bill when the baby would be born in the next month.

Simon and I were shocked and disgusted by our own inability to get staff paid. We each pitched in a few hundred dollars and gave to Jack so his baby could be born at full term.

Since the owners had no money, the hotel eventually belonged to the bank.  The bank in turn wanted their own insurance assessments.  Thus it dragged on for months.  As the money situation worsened, I regularly received phone calls from loan sharks threatening to kill my staff. Grown men stood in front of me, sobbing, as they resigned from a job they loved and looked for another job that paid.  A promising young star in F&B who graduated from a top hotel school in Australia began selling wicker baskets at dawn in the local market to make ends meet.  As a result, we began to allow staff to have second jobs while still being registered as hotel employees so they could at least feed their families.

Never in my life had I felt so frustrated and helpless.

A couple of months after the flood we rounded up several teams of security guards and housekeepers to inspect every single guest room for damage. Since electricity had been down we were preparing for further damage from mildew which would not be covered by the insurance.

The team I led was on the second floor when a nauseating smell hit us. Had a guest forgotten to flush the toilet? Second floor was mostly banquet meeting rooms and a handful guest rooms. The meeting rooms turned up clear and as we approached the guest rooms at the end of the hall the smell thickened. Eventually we located the room and I still remembered the room number, #226. When I opened the door with my master key I was fully expecting to see a decomposed body in the bed, although I knew in my heart every single guest was accounted for during the laundry trolley evacuation. The bed was bare, the toilet was clean but the smell engulfed us like a death shroud. I had never seen a decomposed human body, but I surely thought that was the smell.

The four of us struggled to open the balcony windows for fresh air. But the moment we took a lungful of the expected clean, sweet air, it was the foul odor that filled our nostrils and mouths as the smell seemed to have been emitted directly from below #226. Gagging, we retreated back into the corridor to recover.

Further study of the location of #226 revealed that it was adjacent to the banquet kitchen elevator. Had someone died in the elevator?

Several hours later when we managed to pry open the elevator doors it was mercifully bare of any human body. But the mysterious smell lingered in the air and on my mind. The constant stress of having lost count of someone: a night shift staff who had fallen asleep in the locker room; a hard working guy who wanted to pull a double shift and camped out in his car; a hooker who was too ashamed to come out after the business was done; a driver who waited in the car for his rich boss at the hotel (with the hooker)… the possibility went on and the fear gripped my heart every time I thought about “what if…”.

Eventually the stinking smell was credited to our wonderfully successful banquet operation. Apart from the owner’s daughter’s wedding, the banquet kitchen had prepared enough food for an army for the week ahead. Sadly, it all rotted away in the sewage and gasoline.

Miraculously, no one lost his life in the flood when every car was brought up to the street level and every corner was inspected after the water had been pumped out. But the fear for the worst took its toll. I had trouble sleeping and no appetite. In addition to many other challenges, I developed severe vertigo five months after the flood which doctors called the Meniere’s disease.  Medicine, aromatherapy, massage did no trick.  When I left a year later, the symptom disappeared as mysteriously as it had started.

All staff members suffered to a certain degree from the flood.  To many, the most unlikely victim was our GM Alfred.  He had started work only a couple of months prior to the flood. It was his first posting as a general manager as well. Alfred was a lovely man, very smart and funny. For a financial controller who was earning the big bucks in the corporate office, he was brave enough to tackle hotel operations and eventually became a general manager.

While I had more operational experience, Alfred was by far older and wiser when dealing with owners and insurance companies. We fought the owners together, shed tears of hopelessness together, and shared glasses of wine while living in an empty hotel together.

Alfred began to like wine and liquor a little too much as the stress elevated. He also began to behave strangely such as refusing to turn up at meetings and not getting any sleep at all.  Only later I found out that he had bribed a concierge to bring him constant supplies of wine and vodka to his room.  When I was transferred out a year after the flood, the hotel was still struggling to reopen. Like many staff who came to say farewell, Alfred cried like a baby when I left. That was the last time I ever saw him.

Alfred battled on for another 18 months to reopen the hotel. But as soon as the hotel was reopened, he resigned without explanation. The word through the grapevines was that his drinking problem got out of hand and the president asked Alfred to leave. His marriage fell apart and the last I heard was that he was in the Bahamas running a dingy little B&B, living with a local girl half his age.

I feel very bad for Alfred.  The staff at the hotel still regarded him as the best GM because through the dark days of hopelessness it was Alfred who stayed with them.  I understand what constant stress can do to a man and sometimes I wonder if I didn’t take the transfer offer and I had stayed behind as well, would Alfred fare better today?  I feel guilty about how Alfred ends up today.  I wish him all the very best.

There is nothing scarier than living in an empty hotel. Just think of the hotel in the movie “The Shining”. At least Jack Nicholson had electricity. In the first couple of months after the flood, the live-in expats were housed in various hotels around the city. Soon we were running up a pretty huge bill with accommodation, food and laundry charges for the seven of us. When the electricity was back up by generators, the GM and I decided to move back to the hotel to show the staff that management had not abandoned them.

The generator was unreliable. It was also ridiculous to power up the entire hotel just for the GM and me. The GM lived on the second floor and I lived on the fifth. My suite was at the furthest corner from the fire escape. At times when the generator was down, the corridor looked eerily long and I had to start running half way down the hallway into the safety of my room. For this building had always been haunted.

The most famous resident ghost was known as Lady in Red. The hotel took nearly a decade to be completed, since the owners ran out of funds. Apparently during the seven or eight years when the building was nothing but an empty shell of concrete and metal beams, it became a favorite shelter for the homeless and the hopeless in the city. A young woman’s body was found one day in the building from her apparent suicide. She had been wearing a red dress when she hanged herself.

Lady in Red was first witnessed by a night cleaner soon after the opening. The cleaner was mopping the hallway in front of the fine dining restaurant one early morning, when he noticed that the restaurant had lights on. He paused and looked closely through the windows and saw a young woman in a red dress sitting on her own at a table, lit by a single spot light above her head, serenely eating. The night cleaner knew the restaurant had been closed for hours and this woman must have had gained unlawful entry. He angrily tapped on the window and the woman looked up at him. Then she vanished into the thin air.

The night cleaner went on permanent disability leave and eventually had to seek psychiatric treatment.

When I first arrived at the hotel, I had the task of renovating the fine dining restaurant. The kitchen installation team had to work overnight one day and they complained to the restaurant supervisor the next morning about one staff member who refused to leave the kitchen. They reported that the female staff member observed their work the entire night from a corner without saying a single word. She was wearing a red dress.

Once the newly renovated restaurant opened, the top complaint was about the toilet intrusion. Several male patrons complained about a female being seen in the gents’ restrooms. She, of course, was wearing a red dress.

All these reports from unsuspecting sources collaborated the presence of Lady in Red. All we knew was that she was not happy with the renovation of her restaurant. Now the hotel was flooded, would she seek revenge?

The aftermath of 02.02.2002 began painfully and slowly. On one hand I had to deal with the monumental paperwork such as the filing of damage assessment reports with the insurance company; on the other hand we had to find a way to get rid of the huge body of the dead water trapped in our building.
We eventually set up an industrial water pump outside the main entrance with wide tubes connected with a public drainage system. The pump worked 24×7 for two and half weeks before we could finally reach the basement garage on foot.

Electricity was still not on in fear of short circuit. One day I escorted one of our owners to the ballroom floor to inspect the damage of the ballroom. This owner, second in command in the ownership hierarchy, had his daughter’s wedding booked in our ballroom on the second day of the flood. Needless to say he was more than unhappy to have to host the wedding at some other hotel and pay the full price there, while he could have gotten away with a token few hundred dollars as gratuity for the staff at his own hotel.

The marble floor was slippery and soggy. We each held a flashlight. The dank smell reminded me of inside the Pyramids. We treaded carefully. The flashlights gave little hint of the nature of the mysterious gray masses on the floor. I had wisely put on my hiking boots while some of the local staff walked around in their flimsy flip-flops. Just as I was thinking about protective footwear issue in the future, Mr. Owner Number 2 made a strange sound as if he was grabbed by a ghost and about to vomit at the same time.

“What is it? What happened?” inquired us urgently.

Mr. Owner Number 2 pointed to his foot with a grimace and my heart sank. OK great, now my owner has his foot penetrated by a rusty nail soaked in sewage water for the past 3 weeks and he is going to die from tetanus and it is going to be on my head. I could already see the newspaper headline: “Local Owner Infected by Tetanus, Expat Hotel Manager Deported”.

We crowded around his foot and half a dozen flashlights revealed that his right foot was embedded in a large wet sack of some sort. The sack also discharged a foul smell. Mr. Owner Number 2 said there was no pain, but the sack could not be shaken off and he was simply disgusted.

Then another shout came at the edge of the crowds. In their local language someone shouted, “A head! I see a head!”

As soon as my heart started pounding at the word ‘head’, another shout came in with a much more relaxed tone, “It’s a goat. A goat’s head!”

For the local wedding, rich families usually roast a whole goat for the feast. Mr. Owner Number 2 had made such an order for his daughter’s wedding. And he just happened to step into the goat’s carcass.

When we came up to the daylight and clean air, we shared a nervous laugh over the goat incident. I couldn’t help but wonder if one day we would encounter a human head.

The suspense of losing a human life in our watery tomb and the gruesome task of the clean-up continued.

For more than three hours, we managed to ship out all our guests in the laundry trolleys. When the head count was tallied, we had to search high and low for an elderly English gentleman who had serenely fallen asleep on a chaise in the garden. We firmly refused his request to stay another night at our hotel.

Once again, most guests thanked us for our response to this disaster and appreciated that all the staff had not taken a break or had lunch. A few people threatened to write to our head office for the inconvenience. A couple of ladies frowned at getting into the increasingly wet and greasy laundry trolleys. The men who refused to take their own computer bags complained about the fact that their luggage might get dirty. A senior director who happened to visit us from the headquarters offered no help but instead he pulled me aside to ask to be housed in the best hotel in the city and to be shipped out in the first laundry trolley.

Night fell over the darkened street. Electricity was still not restored. Female staff and a couple of wives were the last one to get into the laundry trolley. They spent the night across the street in a local hotel. The men remained behind to guard the building. We were not about to leave the doors open for looters. Pillows and blankets were brought down from the guest rooms. Nearly a hundred of male staff slept in the lobby together with the GM and me. All we had were a handful of flashlights and some aromatic candles from the spa through the night.

It had been a long day but it was difficult to fall asleep. We were all very hungry. We each had a ration of biscuits (bakers never got the chance to bake for the day) and left over fruits from the guests as the kerosene burner ran out of fuel. Many questions remained: Would the flood subside? When would the hotel reopen? Would we still have a job tomorrow?

In the middle of the night, the rain returned and it only added to our dread. It was the commencement of the most difficult year of my entire career, and probably of my entire adult life.

By 4pm on February 2, 2002, I had been working for 14 hours. My voice was hoarse from shouting on the phone to get hotel accommodation and to pull strings with city officials. At last, the army agreed to lend us a truck to take guests to the hotels and airport. They could not guarantee if they could wave the army insignia and sail all the way through the traffic jams. But at least they agreed to try.

Some of the guests began to feel antsy. Voice level began to elevate and temper started to flare. The lobby suddenly felt very small and congested. A staff reported that the flyover traffic finally started to move. That was our break. I stood on top of a chair and used my remaining vocal muscle to reassure the guests that they were getting out of the hotel.

“We will try everything to get you to safety and everyone tonight will have a warm bed to sleep in!” I roared with make-believe confidence.

Our solution was to ferry the guests across the sewage river in laundry trolleys. All male staff members, cooks, engineers, and sales managers had assisted with the guest exodus, which meant some of us had to hike up to 18th floor and come down with as much luggage as we physically could handle. We often came down to the lobby, out of breath, only to find another guest needing help on the 17th floor.

Many guests carried their own luggage but there were a few able-bodied young men refused to even carry their own laptop bags. At time like this, human nature often shows the ugliest trait.

We tested the laundry trolley with a few of our staff paddling with stainless steel salad bowls and found that it needed guidance across the river. A few local men were hastily recruited to swim aside the laundry trolleys to make sure it did not topple or sail down the river instead of across it. We paid them 50 cents for each trip.

The first batch was families with young children. The children didn’t mind the experience as we lowered them into the large blue plastic bucket. They peeped over the edge at the rest of us who remained stranded. A few swimmers never returned - the river was thick with unnamable materials and smelled strongly of gasoline. It was a ghastly job. Therefore we decided to pay the swimmers one dollar each trip upon their return with empty trolleys for the next batch of guests.

The evacuation went on. A few staff were stationed at the opposite bank of the river to help with the guests. When the army truck was full and driven away, there was no promise if the truck would ever return. Out of desperation, the staff started to randomly flag down any decent looking passenger car on the flyover, explained the plight and most guests were taken to their hotel by good natured local Samaritans this way.

8AM, February 2, 2002

Ironically, the rain stopped as the day broke. It turned out to be a beautiful sunny day. As the flood ceased to rise, we turned our focus on what to do with over 350 guests in house. The lack of electricity was the main obstacle. Luckily in February it was not too stifling indoors without air-conditioning. The highest floor of the hotel was 18 which meant that guests had to walk down 18 flights of stairs just to have breakfast. With no power, Chef found a small kerosene burner and started cooking omelets on the pool deck.

I gathered a few mobile phones from the staff and began calling for news from the city authorities. I drained the batteries of 2 phones without any good news. All the main roads were inaccessible and whatever transportation I could find would not be able to reach us or to pull up onto the front door. The worst news was that the road to the airport was also closed off due to flood. It meant that I needed to relocate all my guests to hotels that still had electricity.

I turned to hotels in the area. My only question was, “My hotel is flooded. How many guests can you take?” Most GMs were gracious and accepted my guests at cutthroat rates. One major international brand known for its F&B innovation coldly refused to accommodate a single guest of mine, although it was the largest and the closest to my hotel. A small European brand hotel was the only one to call me to offer help. They took in twenty guests. One hotel even offered to send cars to pick up my guests.

As the day went by, a couple of staff who lived not far swam across the sewage river to report for duty. Later on during the day, more staff would arrive and some of them walked for 3 hours due to lack of public transportation. The majority of them left their own homes in the flood to come to work.

We set up different stations in the lobby so guests could sign up for different hotel options. Most guests were calm and understood that it was not our fault. Once they knew their new hotel destination, a few even went to sit by the pool and read a book. Now we started to source for transportation.

Lunch for the guests was on the pool deck as Chef’s little kerosene burner produced fried lobster rice, foie gras sandwiches, tenderloin wraps to avoid expensive food going to waste without refrigeration.  All the staff ate whatever food was left over from the over night shift in the cold and darkened staff cafeteria.  No one had much appetite.

The afternoon droned on and I took a couple of staff to scout out the hotel boundaries for damage assessment. The flyover behind the hotel was jam-packed with cars in a standstill. Since the center of the city was flooded, the commuters from the outskirts could neither go forward nor back up, thus creating a massive traffic jam.

Our hotel was literally surrounded by a moat of sewage. Cars parked on the street were submerged to the roof. Local children could not go to school so they merrily jumped in and out of the temporary river, oblivious to the disgusting content. Men who missed work sat idly by the sewage and some even brought out their fishing gear. Ignorant of the dangerous ingredient of gallons of gasoline leaked from our back-up generator, many of them were smoking and flicking the cigarette butts into the river. It was another disaster waiting to happen.

We needed to get the guests out fast. I secured hotel rooms for all my guests around the city. The only remaining question was how to ferry the guests and their luggage across the sewage river to the nearest accessible road.