Transforming Perceptions: The Power of the Hoteliers Charter
Timothy R. Andrews and Sarah Kettel engage in a compelling dialogue with Sally Beck, the General Manager of the Royal Lancaster Hotel, as they explore the multifaceted nature of the hospitality industry.
Sally's extensive background in hospitality, stemming from her childhood experiences in various hotel roles, frames her as a passionate advocate for the sector.
The conversation delves into her career trajectory, marked by significant achievements and a commitment to operational excellence. Sally's transition from various roles to her current position as General Manager illustrates her deep-seated connection to the industry and her understanding of its intricacies.
Central to the discussion is the introduction of the Hoteliers Charter, an initiative designed to elevate industry standards and reshape public perception of hospitality careers. Sally provides insightful commentary on the challenges of combating negative stereotypes associated with hospitality work, drawing on personal anecdotes that highlight the need for a shift in societal attitudes. Her reflections on the importance of mentorship and community involvement underscore her belief that the hospitality industry offers rewarding career paths that deserve recognition and respect.
The episode culminates in a forward-looking perspective on the hospitality sector's recovery and transformation in the wake of recent global challenges. Sally's vision, coupled with her call to action for industry professionals to embrace the principles outlined in the Hoteliers Charter, serves as a beacon of hope for a revitalized hospitality landscape. This episode is a rich tapestry of experiences, insights, and aspirations that collectively advocate for a robust and respected hospitality profession, inspiring listeners to reconsider their views on the industry and to take part in its promising future.
Takeaways:
- The podcast highlights the importance of addressing public perceptions of careers within the hospitality industry.
- Sally Beck emphasises the need for mentorship and community support in the hospitality sector.
- The Hoteliers Charter aims to promote positive practices and recognition within the hospitality profession.
- Listeners are encouraged to explore varied career paths available in hospitality beyond traditional roles.
- Sally's journey illustrates the diverse opportunities that arise from a commitment to the hospitality industry.
- The conversation underscores the importance of resilience and adaptability for hospitality professionals during challenging times.
Links referenced in this episode:
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Royal Lancaster Hotel London
- UKHospitality
- Hoteliers Charter
- Hilton Paddington
- Conrad Hilton
- Royal Garden Hotel
- Landmark Hotel
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Editing & Visuals by: Timothy R Andrews
Theme Tune: "Mandarin & Chocolate" by Doriane Woo
Sound Effects by: Epidemic Sound & Pawel Sikorski
Special Guest Appearance by Bertie the cat
Transcript
Welcome to Talking Hospitality where I, Sarah Kettel and my co host Timothy R.Andrews are talking hospitality, bringing you solutions to the issues we're facing and inspirational stories from the incredible people who make up our hospitality industry family. This podcast is shared on all major platforms, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, YouTube and Spotify. And it's marketed on social media. Hi Tim.
Timothy R Andrews:Hi Sarah. How are you doing?
Sarah Kettel:I'm doing very well, how are you?
Timothy R Andrews:Very good, thank you very much. Welcome to another show.
Sarah Kettel:It's Chinese New Year and I love Chinese New Year and we recently found out that we do have quite a lot of listeners in China which is really lovely. So we'd like to wish them Gong Xi Fa Cai and Xin Nian Kwai Le and we wish you all a very prosperous and happy Year of the Ox.
This week we have an incredible guest with us. We're delighted to welcome Sally Beck, General manager at Royal Lancaster Hotel London and founder and board member of Hoteliers Charter.
Welcome Sally, nice to see you.
Timothy R Andrews:Welcome to the show. Tell us your story. How did you get into hospitality and what was your career path?
Sally Beck:Well, I was pretty much born and bred in the industry. I'm a fourth generation republican's daughter, so I didn't own a house when I was about, I don't know, 17.
We've moved around the UK in various little pubs and hotels and when it came to me deciding what to do, I suppose it was line of least resistance.
It's what I knew I'd bottled up before school, I'd done the pipes for the beer, I'd worked in the kitchen, I'd waitressed, I'd pot washed, I'd done all the stuff. So I went and did hotel catering and institutional management. Scraped a pass because I discovered boys.
I'd been to a girls boarding school and then went and did a training course down at Dormy in Ferndale, which is an event hotel, four star under a great guy called Derek Silk and worked for two years, worked around every department, you know, kitchens, housekeeping, night credit, did the whole lot.
And at the end of two years I really had this bit of crisis of confidence thinking actually I don't really want to do any of that because I've just been doing it all my life.
And Derek Silk gave me the chance to, to do sales and that was my career basically, then stayed in sales and marketing with an operational background that I didn't really use, although it helps you in sales.
And then from the dormy I travelled for a couple of years and then I went to Clipper Hotels and then I moved up to London Great Western Royal which is now the Hilton Paddington and then I got approached from there to the Conrad in Chelsea Harbour as director of sales and marketing there. So to go from enough knackered three star in Paddington to five star Conrad was slight leap, but that's another story.
But yeah, so did that and then I was three and a half years there, then I went and did the reopening of the Royal Garden which is so exciting.
Sarah Kettel:I love that hotel.
Sally Beck:Yeah, it was brilliant.
ales and marketing in January:Oh, I had three months as a hotel manager and then from when he left, he left in end of February. I was then acting GM of this 465 staff, 411 bedrooms, big events hotel central London, about to go into a 40 million pound refurb in at the.
Sarah Kettel:Deep end you could say Sally.
Sally Beck:Yeah, slightly.
Sally Beck:That's my challenge.
Sally Beck:I worked out it's not rocket science, took the job and eventually was 85 million pound refit and I found my feet as a GM.
Sarah Kettel:So you've actually got a very impressive career CV to date and you have won a KT.
So for anyone who doesn't know what a KT is, that's our Hospitality Oscars and you got Hotelier of the Year and from the back of that I believe you recently launched the Hoteliers Charter. What is the Hoteliers Charter and what are your aims for that?
Sally Beck: ar award which I was given in: Sally Beck:I got this award which I was.
Sally Beck:Totally right about and I needed to make an acceptance speech.
So this award had been going for 37 years and I just found myself thinking about how the industry perceived and whether it had changed in those 37 years. And then I thought about a situation that happened with my daughter, my eldest, when she was 15.
And she wanted to come to our hotel and do work experience. And she'd got a mate of hers at her school that wanted to come too, you know, 15. We all do work experience, you know, for a week.
So I set up this couple of days in F and B day in sales and marketing revenue, front office, housekeeping, the whole nine yards. And it was all very exciting. And then this girl's mum put a.
Sally Beck:Stop to it and said, no, why would I want her to be a servant?
Sarah Kettel:That must have hurt.
Timothy R Andrews:Yeah.
Sally Beck:I thought, oh, my God, how far do we have to go that people don't see the amazing careers that can be had in their towers?
Sarah Kettel:Yeah.
Sally Beck:And it was then, I think, about the public perception and I felt that a hotelier's charter was needed to shout about the good stuff that goes on in hotels and in hospitality. I'm not saying that hotels are just the only brilliant ones.
There's a ton of cracking restaurants, cracking bars that really do care about their staff, but there's a loud minority that think it's acceptable to behave badly. Basically, I did this big acceptance speech and then following day, I had the West London Hoteliers association, which I'm a member of.
There's many little hotel associations across the whole of the uk, and we just sat and talked about the fact that I had this opportunity to be noisy for a year as the hotel of the year, and I'm quite good at being noisy. And I thought, well, I should be noisy. And we make a hotelier's charter.
We should say that we stand for good stuff, that we do apprenticeships, we train, we do have fair, transparent service charges, we advocate diversity, we advocate work life balance, we support local charities and local communities, we support the Modern Slavery act and that we make sure our suppliers do it all properly. Very few of us are on minimum wage. There's a quick succession in our industry and they're not just 16, 17, 18 year olds.
I've got them in the 30s and the 40s, they're doing level fives, et cetera. And there's career paths and succession planning.
Sarah Kettel:I mean, well done you for using your voice as well, because I think once you get this opportunity, it can be quite easy to shy away and just think, well, you know, I've said my piece in my acceptance speech. What you've done is you followed that through and you've made it real.
So those words are translating into something which is, you know, going to be very tangible for a lot of people and I applaud you for that. It's incredible.
Sally Beck: another hotel of the year for:And so I've got another year of being noisy.
Timothy R Andrews:So.
Timothy R Andrews:Fantastic. Yes.
Sally Beck:What an opportunity we've just launched.
Sally Beck:I'm really proud of what we've managed to put together and it's all been done by a bunch of volunteer professionals, consultants that have literally come out of the woodwork and said, sally, we love what you're doing. Can we help? The website's amazing customer communications in PR for me.
Michael De Jong is doing the sort of the database and the structural setup of everything and Adam and Amy from DHM have done sterling work on the website.
Sally Beck:So, yeah, we're ready.
Sally Beck:We've got registered hotels, about 200, but I'm hoping we'll swiftly get that up into the high hundreds or even a thousand or so. UK hospitality are supporting us, Kate's on.
Sally Beck:The board, the AA are going to help us audit and it's general manager led because I believe it's the general manager that sets the culture of their property. Owning companies that own 20 hotels can't sign in. The 20 general managers can sign in.
The owning company can become a champion and support, but it's the general manager that sets the culture and it's the general manager that I hold responsible for taking care of their team.
It will not take long before hospitality bounces back and we need the UK employment to be strong and we need UK parents like that mother, young people and adults to look at, educators, careers, advisors, to look at our industry and think, well, that's a cracking industry to go into.
But then also know there's a body of employers who care, people, those young people or new people that are retraining to come into hospitality to choose a charter hotelier because the charter hotelier has those commitments to that work life, balance to that culture of respect, et cetera. That's really good.
Sarah Kettel:And it's interesting what you just said about the fact that there are lots of little small hotelier organizations and associations.
I think it might be quite surprising to, to a lot of people that, that there isn't just one big one or that the hoteliers charter didn't exist before now, but thankfully now it does. Why, why do you think everything was, was so segmented, so many different chains.
Sally Beck:Organizations, you know, it used to be bha, British Hospitality association and then there's the food associations, there's the brewery, there's, you know, now it's all bunched together in ukh, which is great. So we at least now have one key body and Kate Nichols has done a cracking job, but within their hotels don't have a concise voice.
I don't want to be that voice. I just want it that the hotelier's charter creates some glue across the whole of the UK where that voice can actually hear up and down.
So Kate was instrumental at helping me put the 10 commitments together, working with her government agenda. So we know that that's current, vibrant and is what they're looking for.
And then across the uk, on the website I've put a map where we've linked all of the UK universities and college that do catering and hospitality courses and then the hotels are populated across there.
And then what I'm looking for then is that as the hoteliers joined, say like there's a hotel in Newbie that joins and he then says, and he sees on the map the local hotels that are like minded in his region and they will have a Newbury Hoteliers Association. I can tell you now they will have one. I don't know where it is and.
Sally Beck:I don't know who runs it.
Sarah Kettel:Right.
Sally Beck:But through the hoteliers charter we'll find it.
It's like right now in London, I'm in West London, there's West one, there's east one, there's Heathrow, there's all sorts but they're self driven by like minded hotels in their regions. In Manchester, Adrian Ellis, who's a board member, he has the Manchester one and the northern region, there's 200 hoteliers in that association.
So if Kate wants to communicate to the hoteliers in one hit, she can do it through the charter network.
Sarah Kettel:Brilliant.
Sally Beck:If the charter network wants to communicate to Kate, it all can be done. And then across there you've got the branches of UKH and you've got branches of the Institute of Hospitality.
So you've got the educators, the institute, the association, the hoteliers and hopefully the hoteliers will then work with their local schools and colleges to start changing perceptions and work on local community things that really matter.
Timothy R Andrews:So if you're a hotelier who's listening to this and they are thinking, oh I'd like to get involved, what would they need to do?
Sally Beck:They would go to hoteliercharter.com and they would click on become a charter hotelier and they would literally fill out their details, click send and they would get approved.
Sarah Kettel:And there's really never been a better time to do this because I think awareness across the whole population now of groups that are in need which are within our own communities is so much, so much bigger. There is that awareness that maybe wasn't there a year ago.
Timothy R Andrews:Now is the best time to do it. Like we haven't been this low in our lifetimes and I don't. Even if in recorded history perhaps. What a time to rebuild.
What a time to actually put hospitality on the map as a proper career that it is.
Sarah Kettel:Yeah, I feel like it really is the phoenix that's going to rise from these ashes.
Sally Beck:You know, I'm a publican's daughter from Scumthorpe who's running one of the best hotels in London. You know, barely a qualification to point a stick at.
I've travelled all over the world within hospitality and had a cracking time and the world's my oyster. If I wanted to. My husband's Australian. If he wanted to go to Australia and run a hotel, I probably could.
And in hotels we can offer 24, 7 work, which means we can recruit the hard to recruit, you know, the working mothers or people that need to work night shifts because they're balancing. I've got lots of team members that are balancing family lives.
We can offer those 24 hour shifts, you know, that whole night routine that not every industry can. So for people that are either studying young families or all the retired that want to come down and just do some switchboard work, we can do that.
So it's about advertising, the fact that we are a really creative employer, you know, and it's not just housekeeping, finance, engineering. I've got carpenters, painters, air conditioning technicians, wood polishers of seamstresses and salespeople.
And we're like a little microcosm of the world. In a hotel. We have something for everybody.
And that's before you get into the chefs and the food and beverage and the finance and all the rest of it and the hrs. You got all of it here. But people don't think of that. We just need to educate.
Timothy R Andrews:Absolutely. People. It's not just. I hate using the word just. It's not just being a chef or a waiter. It's everything much and it's so much more.
It's just this incredible industry. What advice would you give to anyone considering a career in hospitality right now?
Sally Beck:I would say stay with it. I think in the press it talks about hospitality being closed and on its knees and, you know, all this sort of stuff. Stay with it.
This industry is vibrant. When we open up, the countryside will be more buoyant than the cities. So look for a job where the business is. Find yourself a mentor.
There's people like me, there's a ton of people in our industry. Master inn holders, St. Julian scholars. Find yourself a mentor that can help you stay on track and get as much experience as you can.
This industry will bounce back with a vengeance. And it's good fun. It's really, really, really good fun. No day is the same.
Timothy R Andrews:That's some great advice. Quick fire round. We've introduced a little quick fire round so that our listeners can get to know you a little bit better, Sally.
So the rules of the game are quite simple. We ask you a question and you've got to say the first thing that pops into your head.
Sally Beck:Okay?
Timothy R Andrews:Okay. What's the first concert you attended?
Sally Beck:I can't remember. But I can tell you the one that stays with me is Bruce Springsteen.
Sarah Kettel:What was your favorite subject in school?
Sally Beck:Lacrosse. I was pretty good at it.
Timothy R Andrews:Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your 18 year old self?
Sally Beck:Be more confident. Believe in yourself.
Sarah Kettel:What makes you feel uneasy?
Sally Beck:Negative atmospheres. Where? I'm not sure where it's coming from.
Timothy R Andrews:If you could buy any type of food right now, what would you buy?
Sally Beck:A really nice, amazing barrel of beef. I've got two vegan and a vegetarian at home and I'm hanging out for.
Sally Beck:A piece of meat.
Sarah Kettel:Are you a morning person or a night person?
Sally Beck:I'm a bit of both.
Timothy R Andrews:What is the most delightful word you can think of?
Sally Beck:Plunge.
Sally Beck:Planges and pipes? Engineering Porn.
Sarah Kettel:What's your weapon of choice?
Sally Beck:I'm not really an aggressive person, so I'd say a hug.
Sarah Kettel:Oh, I like that.
Timothy R Andrews:Cat or dog?
Sally Beck:Dog.
Sarah Kettel:Netflix or YouTube?
Timothy R Andrews:Netflix is a burger, A sandwich.
Sally Beck:No.
Sarah Kettel:Salad cream or mayo?
Sally Beck:Mayo.
Timothy R Andrews:Cheese on toast or cheese?
Sally Beck:Toasty Cheese on toast.
Sarah Kettel:Pineapple on a pizza. Yes or no?
Sally Beck:No.
Timothy R Andrews:And that is it. You're off the hook, Sally.
Sally Beck:Thank you both very much indeed.
Timothy R Andrews:Likewise.
Sarah Kettel:Thanks Sally. It's lovely to see you.
Sally Beck:Bye now. Bye bye.
Sarah Kettel:Thank you for listening. Please share, subscribe and like. We look forward to you joining us in the next episode of Talking Hospitality.
Available on itunes, soundcloud, Google Play and YouTube.
Doriane Woo:[Talking Hospitality theme tune]
