Displaced Groups

After the flood, Gaylord Entertainment Company Chairman and CEO Colin Reed said, the Gaylord Opryland shut down its sales process for the entire month of May, putting every single salesperson “on a quest” — to make sure that every one of the property’s meeting-planner customers was accommodated. It was no small feat. Approximately 150 groups’ 340,000 room nights were in the balance. “We had all of our folks working with our

customers,” Reed said, “saying, ‘Here is a way we can fit you into Nashville, but if we can’t fit you into Nashville, how can we help fit you into one of our other three hotels? And if we can’t fit you into them because of space or it doesn’t fit your desire, then how can we help you with going [else- where]?’ Of course, a lot of our competitors saw we were wounded, and tried their level best to extract our customers in a permanent way. I had another one or two companies call and say, ‘If there’s any way we can help, we would love the business, but you know we’ll treat your customers well and your customers will come back.’” In the end, Reed said, Gaylord retained “55,000-ish”

guests in its existing hotels, about another 55,000 stayed in Nashville, another 55,000 went to Las Vegas (at the ARIA and Sands hotels), some canceled their meetings altogether, and others went to other cities throughout the country. “It’s very important to us to make sure that when

we have a disaster like this, that customers feel that we care about them and we want them back,” he said. “We don’t look at a meeting as a meeting. We look at our cus- tomer as a lifetime value. We like the idea of our cus- tomers signing up three, four, five, six years with us, and rotating through our business. And so many of them are coming back during the next 12 months.”

MARK OF A LEADER:When he’d

finished this interview, Colin Reed asked for a favor. “Please don’t make this story about me,” he said. “I have an incredible team, and it’s really about them.”

Which naturally pleases Reed, although he puts it in

perspective. “Life is so precious, right?” he said. “It’s the gift we have, and the rest of it you’re responsible for as an individual. I’m on this earth, and how I behave, what I do, is up to me. And the thing that I’m most proud about, that evening, in a very dangerous situation — you know, there were about 30 people killed in Nashville on May 2 — we didn’t put anybody’s lives at risk. We were able to make sure that people were safe and secure. And at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing. I mean, figuring out the conventions and where groups could go a week or two weeks later, you know, that’s the stuff we should be doing.”

did,” Reed said. “It was one of those extraordinary events that will—for those folks in our management teamwho were part of it—live with them for the rest of their lives.”

The Aftermath Hadwe asked Reed for an interviewsixmonths earlier, in the weeks immediately following the evacuation and flooding of the Gaylord Opryland, he likely would have declined— albeit inhis proper, gracious British way. “I was anemotional basket case,” he said. “To see that hotel devastated the way it was, it was just awful.” Whenhe shares the details of the evacuationtoday, though,

On_the_Web

For more information about the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, visitwww.gaylord opryland.com. To watch a video of the Gaylord Opryland restoration project (on YouTube), visit http://bit.ly/bbA9xa.

the emotion that seems closest to the surface isn’t a sense of loss but rather pride—in his management team and entire staff (“STARS,” in Gaylord parlance). This was a defining moment for Reed, personally and professionally. “You know,” he said, “it took us about a week and a half [after the flood] to realize that out of bad canprobably come a lot of good.” But first came the bad.“We let 1,700 people go, but we kept

them on the payroll until the end of June,” Reed said. Gay- lord retained about 500Opryland staffmembers—mostly hor- ticulturists and engineers who were going to be part of the cleanup and restoration team. That project quickly became much more. “We were able to do so many things to this hotel that we neverwould have done ifwe had been operating,” Reed said, “including three brand-new restaurants, two brand-new bars, and every guest bedroom is in great shape. All of the technology that we’ve put into the hotel is brand-spanking-new. The laun- dry is probably going to save us two-and-a-half-million bucks a year in just energy costs alone—stuff that we never would have done had the hotel been up and running. I’m convinced the infrastructure is going to be so much better.” Those employees who were laid off kept their health-care

coverage through the period between when they left and when they came back—which originally was expected to be at the

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