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Maldron Hotel Manchester City Centre


paign about 18 months ago where we targeted parents coming back into the workplace. When we talk about inclusion and diversity it’s really about spelling it out and saying we’re really flexible, because at Dalata we can train people into their roles if they want to come back into the business.


How do you engage with young people? We have a graduate programme that is part of the Dalata Academy. We take on more than 50 graduates a year and they are not necessarily hospitality graduates – they could be graduates of any sort of business degree, be that opera- tional, sales, revenue, finance or HR. Having separate career streams for HR and


sales is hugely attractive to those graduates, so we work really closely with a number of uni- versities to promote that. We currently have 73 graduate managers on a structured grad- uate programme as part of the Dalata Acad-


About Dalata


Dalata Hotel Group was founded in August 2007 and is Ireland’s largest hotel operator, with a growing presence in the UK and continental Europe. The group’s portfolio comprises 53 three- and four-star hotels with 11,412 rooms and a pipeline of more than 1,300 rooms. It has 31 owned hotels, 19 leased hotels and three management contracts, with brands including the Clayton and Maldron hotels.


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emy. In 2023, we had a 94% retention rate, and in 2022, it was 65%. Ninety per cent of the HR graduate team who have completed the course are in full-time, permanent roles with Dalata. When we open new hotels, a lot of our graduates helped and a lot of them then went on to take up employment too. In fact, 77% of our management teams are inter- nally appointed in our new hotels, so it’s a huge number and our graduates play a huge part in that as well.


How does Dalata give back to the community? We’ve introduced an Adopt a School pro- gramme through the Dalata Academy. We link with a school and talk about the industry and sell hospitality as a great career choice. We’ve also partnered with a number of charitable organisations and we’ve offered some train- ing for Down’s syndrome groups. In Ireland, we trained up a group of people with Down’s syndrome in hospitality and, at the end of the course, three or four of them took on roles in our hotels, so they were employed as a result.


Would you consider introducing this scheme to some of your UK properties? Absolutely, 100%. After we ran the scheme in Ireland, we had an HR forum where we brought the HR managers from the group together and we explained exactly how we had run the Down’s syndrome partnership. As a result, a number of the hotels in the UK have said they’ve since reached out to local Down’s syndrome partnerships to replicate that.


What steps can the industry take to hire people with all kinds of disabilities? People tend to be a little nervous about learn- ing through our development programme. If people have a learning disability we make sure we adapt to it, so we will send course content ahead or we will make sure that what- ever accommodation they need, they have it. Dalata Online will also have an upgrade in


the next couple of months and we’ll be intro- ducing a huge feature on accessibility where, for example, the text can change to green on a black background. I think it’s about making sure there are no barriers to people doing their jobs, because we want to ensure there’s no bar- riers to them getting the next promotion. If that means adapting one of our programmes and our learning, then that’s what we’ll do.


Is artificial intelligence impacting operations and the training of staff at your hotels? It’s not really from an AI perspective, but we have introduced cordless vacuum clean- ers. They have been really helpful and I think it’s transformed some of our housekeeping departments, as they are not straining their backs as much. At some of our properties, people can check


in on their phone or from a pod in the lobby to help take some of the pressure off the reception desk, as there’s nothing worse than having a big queue when you are on front of house duty! But we are looking at technol- ogy all the time, whether that’s from a learn- ing perspective, languages or accessibility, to make things easier for people.


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