The Conversation LININGS SILVER


Hotel industry veteran Kurt Ritter, of the Rezidor Hotels Group, shares his insights about current business conditions and strategies with Gillian Upton


KURT Ritter, president and ceo of The Rezidor Hotel Company, is an old school hotelkeeper. He was born into the business in his native Switzerland, where his parents ran a hotel in Interlaken. He did what every aspiring hotelier did back then and attended one of the world’s best hotel schools, Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne, and by 1976 had landed the job of general manager of his first hotel, the SAS Lulea Hotel in Sweden. The rest, as they say, is history. He has been lavished with plaudits and bestowed with the hotel industry’s highest accolades during his long career. Silver-haired Ritter is now the longest serving ceo of a hotel company: 32 years at the company and 19 at the helm. He still bears the hallmarks of Mein Host: expertly suited and booted and the epitome of sartorial elegance, despite the


occasional loud tie and shirt, plus the hallmarks of success such as a gold Rolex glinting from his wrist. It makes it hard to imagine that Ritter likes nothing better than getting down and dirty, sitting astride his Lamborghini tractor at his house in France, even though it might be with one hand wrapped round a mobile phone directing business. At 61 he is rather coy about whether he will


stand down in 2012 from one of the world’s largest hotel groups and the largest upscale brand in Europe in number of rooms and hotels. “Will I renew my contract? Never say never,”


he says with a smile. “My contract ends in 2012 and there is no obvious successor. It’s a little premature in any case. Once you start looking you’re out! But we do have people in mind.” Ritter was due to step down in 2009 but the


economic downturn saw to that and the board asked him to stay on as a steady hand at the tiller. That steady hand actually drove growth during those tough years because “during the bad times you make the best deals,” he reveals. Today, with 350 hotels across some 53 countries, it’s a large, multi-brand portfolio and one could argue that Ritter has seen it all and done it all. Are there really more places left to open a Radisson Blu, Park Inn, Country Inns and Suites, Regent or Hotel Missoni, the five brands that fall under the Rezidor mantle? Apparently so. The real push is with the mid-market Park Inn


and the full-service Radisson Blu brands. Park Inn has grown from its European debut in Berlin in 2002 to 140 today, while the funkier Radisson Blu is also burgeoning. Ritter openly


20 I THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE


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