Special Report
flown-in to help cheer them as they head down into the conference suites. It’s an emotional moment and I feel proud for them myself. It would be easy for a big boss to sit in an
ivory castle – in this case, Ritz-Carlton’s corporate headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland – and never experience the frontline. Not this one. “So far, now having 94 hotels in the company – including three Bulgari hotels – and 41 branded residences, with the exception of maybe two hotels since we started the company 33 years ago, I have attended all the openings,” says Humler.
“Alors – it’s important to the staff!” says
Humler. “I believe people need to see me – not just because I am the president, but because they see how much I enjoy doing
it.And I always make notes on how we can do things differently.” Ritz-Carlton is hailed the world over as a
master of customer service and even runs its own Leadership Center, which offers advisory services, courses and presentations to external organisations that wish to benchmark its award- winning business practices. In The New Gold Standard, a book about the company, Joseph Michelli distills Ritz-Carlton’s formula down to five key leadership principles – Define and Refine; Empower Through Trust; It’s Not About You; Deliver Wow; and Leave a Lasting Footprint. So what of those service stations, banks and
taxis? Well, during his staff talk, Humler uses incidents of when he had unsatisfactory
experiences in all of those scenarios and just wished things could have been done better – “simple cleanliness and friendliness” would have enhanced each experience, he says. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to run off and open any of those kinds of businesses – but it’s often just so easy to see where they are going wrong.” He should know. This man travels a lot, always
keen to be on the road liaising with business partners and hotels, gaining new experiences – bad and good. Within a few weeks of our time in Budapest, which was part of a multi-stop Europe tour, he was heading off on another big trip, this time to Asia, including Bali, where the group now has one each of the brands Humler oversees – Ritz-Carlton, Reserve and Bulgari. A lucky few travel agents would also have been
experiencing Bali with him. Ritz-Carlton has an invitation-only board of agents, selected “from among some of our best agencies around the world”. Ritz-Carlton engages with them regularly but they take one trip together a year. This gives agents a forum to share insights that will inform the evolution of the company’s services. “We also like to expose themto Ritz-Carlton product of course,” says Humler.
Join the revolution Humler doesn’t pretend to be the best candidate when it comes to technology, but he says he understands what people seem to want and stresses how Ritz-Carlton has been busy embracing new technology. “Take mobile technology for example. People
want to be able to check in online, ask for service requests online, order food and beverage online, even order something to eat from the beach lounger via your smartphone,” he says. “The obvious thing is to deliver the food to the beach restaurant – but there could be 100 guests there or around the pool, so maybe you also need GPS so we can tell where they will be when that food’s ready so we can find them. We’re benchmarking this kind of system now; in Barcelona, Dubai and in Shanghai and a few of our hotels on the east and west coast US. Once we know it’s working, we can deploy it at the same time globally.” Overall, he says customers seem to want
things simplified. “When they arrive at the hotel, they don’t want to stop at the desk anymore. It’s easy to see how soon, when you arrive in San Francisco for example, your app will tell you ‘we are expecting you around 10pm, your room is number 1011, you can operate the lift by swiping with your phone and get into your room’. And then we can ask you what newspaper you like and what you want for breakfast, or any other service request. We are seeing already that people don’t want to pick up the phone anymore – they want it done digitally and they want it now.” But will luxury hotels lose the opportunity to
have human interactions, the kinds that brands are always telling us help to “create long-lasting memories”? Does Humler worry about that? “Even if it’s a digital delivery of service, it still
has to have high standards. But we are not replacing our concierge or front office,” he says.
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