Owning and operating a hotel requires patience most of the time. You weather the slow times and navigate the busy season, all with a focus on maximizing long-term performance. Sometimes, though, a crisis comes: the loss of a manager or management team, or a disaster leaving your property in need of an overhaul. When a true emergency arises, you need to refocus for the occasion. Interim hotel management offers a way to address the immediate need and set yourself up for the long haul.
Restore Order
If you have a month that dips under forecast, you look to ways that you can improve your property or service. You meet with the management team, convene with your investors, and find a way to navigate. This isn’t a crisis, but rather a moment to look at what you provide and how to better plan, market, or serve your guests.
Some situations call for more immediate action. If you have to fire your general manager, or if that person and his or her whole team leave, you lose that steady, long-term presence in your hotel. You need to act quickly, to restore stability or even keep the business running. Here, bringing in interim hotel management can help. Bringing in someone from the outside helps you get around the panic within your team. You gain an experienced, steady hand for your property, someone who will help you pick up and keep things running.
Focus on the Problem
One key advantage to an interim manager is that he or she will do more than help you return to the status quo. Sometimes an emergency arises as a freak accident, but often there are underlying problems. This can be dishonesty or incompetence from your previous manager, problems in the hotel itself, or even mistakes from the ownership or investment team. An expert in hotel management can assess everything with an open mind and help identify the crux of the problem.
From there, interim managers can analyze those underlying issues and recommend changes you can make. Where a long-term manager might pick at the obvious symptoms or tiptoe around the situation, an interim manager has the freedom not to worry about protecting himself or herself politically. The focus lies on addressing the issue and fixing it so your property can move past the crisis as effectively as possible.
Set Up Your Future
Your crisis should hold your focus in the moment. Before you can move forward, you have to address and repair the problems in front of you. Still, as an owner or investor, you still need to keep an eye on the future of the property. Here, interim hotel management can help by giving you the freedom to look at the bigger picture. You are not auditioning him or her to run your hotel for years to come. You are working with an expert to help you through a crisis, so the next manager or management team can step into a functional environment.
When you have someone devoting to your current moment, you can start screening future management candidates. Your hotel will operate under close scrutiny while you interview, check references, and follow through the process of ensuring you have the right fit to manage your property. Meanwhile, you will work with the interim manager to clean up the mess in front of you and get a sense of not only what went wrong, but what the next manager will need to give.
Hotels depend on stability and patience to perform well over time. Even so, crises arise from time to time that require you to focus on the moment at hand. These inflection points demand change, and require a steady hand when you may not have one available on your team. Working with an interim hotel management team gives you a way to address the situation and find a path forward.
