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“We listen to customers, we are not pretentious or arrogant,” Reibel said in one of the property’s meetings rooms that overlooks its signature water fountain in the hotel’s lobby entrance.
HONG KONG—To say Jean-Jacques Reibel is a stickler for details is putting it mildly. The managing director of the InterContinental Hong Kong Hotel admits he strives for perfection but understands that rarely is achieved. “We listen to customers, we are not pretentious or arrogant,” Reibel said in one of the property’s meetings rooms that overlooks its signature water fountain in the hotel’s lobby entrance. “We will never reach perfection. This is a very difficult plateau to reach. When you start to think you are perfect, it’s the beginning of your downfall.” But that doesn’t mean he won’t keep trying—and he expects the 1,000 employees of the 503-room hotel to do the same. A prime example of that came a few days before the October start of the Hotel Investment Conference Asia Pacific—an event his hotel has hosted for a number of years and one that the managing director places a high importance on because it draws peers to the property. Wanting to add a unique element to the lobby in time for the conference, Reibel had commissioned a two-and-a-half ton wooden table to be placed in the space to the right of the reception desk. The table was designed by an American designer in China. Upon delivery, which required removing lobby doors and making sure the floor wouldn’t crack from the weight of the moving machinery, the table was inadvertently scratched and its lacquer started peeling. “I love wood … the burnt wood of our humidor is also visible in the table, and it had to be perfect,” Reibel said. “We searched for wood artists and found three men in Hong Kong, and for 10 nights they just hand sanded and put lacquer on the table.” “Until Tuesday morning there was a tent over the table because they didn’t want dust to stick on the table,” he said. No one attending the conference, which started the day after the tent was removed, appeared to notice any flaws in the table as it was used as a gathering spot throughout the three-day event. Neither did the three couples who used it as backdrop for wedding photos on the day after the conference ended. A distinguished journey Such is the life of a detail-oriented person running the show at a luxury hotel: plenty of behind-the-scenes work to please guests. “You have to be passionate to manage a hotel like this one. It’s a flagship. It has a great history,” Reibel said of the property that flew the Regent and Four Seasons flags before joining the InterContinental brand 12 years ago. Reibel is happy to have the opportunity to move around the world as a hotelier. He spent significant time in Europe, the United States and Hong Kong. Reibel ran the show at the Willard InterContinental in Washington, D.C., before moving to Hong Kong nine years ago. While the InterContinental Hong Kong sits on the edge of Victoria Harbour, allowing visitors to closely watch the colors, sounds and hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, Riebel’s experiences at other locations have brought him in touch with national heavyweights. The Willard InterContinental Hotel is one block from White House and has been open since 1818. While working there, Reibel met presidents Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush. “In one morning you welcome (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu and one hour later you welcome (the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser) Arafat … You know what diplomacy is all about,” he said. An eye on design Renovating hotels is one of Reibel’s passion—he’s been around the industry long enough to have gone through two renovations at the same hotel, and he likes the challenge. He led the renovation of hotels in New Orleans, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Hong Kong. “I love renovations—you build, you work with artists, engineers,” he said. “It’s an incredible partnership between the world of business and arts.” “At the end you have the artists … money’s no option and you admire their creativity and sometimes their craziness,” Reibel added. “Then you work with the architects who are more formal. It’s fascinating to renovate a hotel.” He talked of the renovation of a suite at the Willard InterContinental that was designed to be able to sit in a Jacuzzi tub and see the Washington Monument through big round windows.
Food and drink rules the roost Food and beverage are also on Reibel’s list of passions. From the day he joined InterContinental as F&B director at the Mark Hopkins San Francisco, which is the home of the legendary Top of the Mark restaurant and cocktail lounge on the glass-enclosed 19th floor, he was hooked. Perhaps it was the many dinners he enjoyed with chef Julia Child and vintner Robert Mondavi that gave him the devotion to F&B? “That was part of it, but I do simply have a passion for good food,” he said. And the InterContinental Hong Kong places a high emphasis on its F&B operations. It creates more revenue through F&B operations than it does from its guestrooms, Reibel said. Among the offerings is Spoon by Alain Ducasse, Nobu and The Steak House—each of which are Hong Kong’s most successful restaurants in their competitive set, Reibel said. “We are very successful because we have a great team,” Reibel said. “We pay a lot of attention to detail. We bring a pastry chef from Denmark to make sure the morning Danish is perfect. We bring an Indian chef to make sure that cuisine is authentic.” Even the take-home boxes are special. “We have, in vulgar terms, the doggy bag because portions are big,” he said. “But our doggy bag is designed as a beautiful box so you can go into the hotel and no one will know it is food.” There again is the attention to detail. “This is all about passion—trying to do the best way we can,” Reibel said. “Making sure we meet the customers’ needs and deliver beyond the expectations.” A man on a mission Reibel demands a lot from his employees, projecting a tough but fair attitude. An assessment that he said that is accurate and one of which he is proud. “My reputation is to be fair but very demanding,” he said. “You cannot run a successful business without being demanding. I have no patience for average or good.” “If you make mistake because you don’t know, I have no problems because anyone can make a genuine mistake,” Reibel added. “What I don’t accept is people making mistakes because of carelessness because they want a short cut, because they just don’t care. I don’t tolerate negativity around me. Negativity is like an illness … it takes everybody down. If I find one, I get rid of them.” Reibel regularly encourages employees to “squeeze their brains” to maximize idea generation. “You have to think before, not after, something needs done,” he said. “For a GM it’s all about logic, and it’s all about people,” said Reibel, who said he has no desire to move into a corporate role because of his intense love of property-level work. “I love to teach young people. I want to see them have success some day.” Reibel said it’s important for leaders to understand that learning is a two-way street. “I learn a lot from the people that work with me,” he said. “I can learn from a young computer-savvy engineer who knows all the latest technology. I learn from everybody, and I expect everybody should learn from each other.” Change is good Making changes is all part of staying on top, and Reibel said there’s one way for a hotel to ensure that it stays ahead of the curve. “If they are not listening to customer expectations, they are not listening to new trends,” he said. Listening is also important when interacting with employees and helping them form their own career paths. Reibel said there are a number of things young people need to remember when entering the hotel industry—the first being that life is too short to do something you don’t like. “Do what you love to do,” he said. “Do not do a job because your parents told you to do it or because of peer pressure or because it’s fashionable. Do a job that makes you happy in the morning to go to work because 50 or 60% of your life is going to be at work.” “If you think in one or two years, hotels are not for you, then drop it.” There are four paths to becoming a GM: finance, F&B, rooms, and sales and marketing. “You will have to choose what excites you the most,” he said. “In F&B you have to deal with emotional people—they are artists. People in sales and marketing think outside the box. Finance is about logic and rooms is about procedures to make guests happy. “In general, you have to have passion and extreme compassion to be in the hotel industry,” he said. “Whichever way you take to get there is only important if you love doing it.” |
