BORN FOR THE BUSINESS

Guy Rigby was born to be an hotelier, and he has no regrets that he has chosen that career as his life’s work. He became the General Manager of the Regent Bangkok on April 15^th 2000 taking over from Bill Black. Guy jokes that he became an hotelier because he wasn’t good at anything else. You know that’s not true but the self effacing Rigby says, “I wanted to be a lawyer because I was good at debating. But you needed to study for hours and hours and read a great deal which I found boring. So I took a year off and ended up pulling pints in a pub. I realized then I liked the idea of being a landlord, so I thought I would try the hotel business” Guy Rigby was born to be an hotelier, and he has no regrets that he has chosen that career as his life’s work. He became the General Manager of the Regent Bangkok on April 15^th 2000 taking over from Bill Black. Guy jokes that he became an hotelier because he wasn’t good at anything else. You know that’s not true but the self effacing Rigby says, “I wanted to be a lawyer because I was good at debating. But you needed to study for hours and hours and read a great deal which I found boring. So I took a year off and ended up pulling pints in a pub. I realized then I liked the idea of being a landlord, so I thought I would try the hotel business”

Influences? “Well, both my parents were in medicine. But I had always had an interest in food and wine. My mother was a great cook and dad had a wine cellar. One day, my mother suggested I go to hotel school, so I did a three-year degree at a hotel school in Cheltenham, England. While I was there I met many influential people including Tony Elliott, who owned and ran the Greenway Hotel, a beautiful countryside hotel just outside of Cheltenham. He gave me my first part-time job in the business while I continued my studies.”

Guy started at the Greenway as a waiter but quickly moved up to barman. Elliott became so impressed with his organizational ability and people skills that he eventually introduced him to his next mentor, Michael Duffell, who was the GM and Managing Director of the Ritz in London.

This came about when Elliott sent Rigby a memo one day entitled “future career” and then picked him up at college and drove him to London to visit all his colleagues in the hotel business. The pair eventually ended up visiting thirteen different hotels that day.

They started with the GM at the Sheraton Park Tower, which in those days hosted the Bob Hope Golf Classic, and all the players stayed at that hotel. Then they went to meet the MD of the Intercontinental before walking up to see Ron Brown who ran The Atheneum Hotel at that time. Then onto Langans Brassiere where they met Richard Shepherd, who was the chef and one of the co-owners with actor Michael Caine. They then walked over to The Ritz to meet with Duffell, who although very suave and debonair, was one of the most intimidating men Guy had ever met. He used to run the palaces of King Hussein of Jordan.

Duffell took to Rigby and gave him a job as a receptionist at the Ritz. Fourteen months later he was promoted to Assistant Food & Beverage Manager. While there, he learned a great deal working for the German Food and Beverage Manager named Ralph Birnbaum. He stayed in the position for three years before landing the opportunity of a lifetime.

In the mid 80s, many Americans were taking advantage of the strong dollar by visiting the UK and spending lots of money. This started the country house hotel boom where people would convert beautiful English houses that were too expensive to run as homes anymore into hotels. Tony Elliott became the consultant for one such hotel, Horsted Place in East Sussex, which had been owned by Lord Rupert Nevill, a close friend of The Queen and Private Secretary to Prince Philip.

Nevill had owned a beautiful Victorian Gothic mansion with sixty-four rooms, situated on a thirty-acre estate, but when he died in 1982, it was bought by a developer from Toronto named Brian Turner who decided to convert the house into a country house hotel, develop a championship golf course and then open an additional North American style club house and conference facility.

Turner invited Elliott to be a consultant and the pair went looking for a young manager. Rigby got the job. “At the time I was a bit of a sucker, willing to work whatever hours anyone threw at me.” The project was a four million pound investment with seventeen suites, a stunning restaurant, and fantastic landscaped gardens designed by well-known landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe. It also had a staircase designed by Augustus Pugin, one of the great interior designers of the nineteenth century. Horsted Place became extremely well-known and was one of the most expensive country house hotels outside London. It won three red turrets from the Michelin guide (one of only eight hotels in the UK to be listed as such at the time), four red stars in the AA Guide, and was listed as “newcomer of the year” in the Good Hotel Guide.

But one day Duffell warned Rigby that he was too young to spend the rest of his life running a country hotel. Duffell was going to Philadelphia to open a hotel for Cunard, which owned and operated the Ritz in London, called Hotel atop the Bellevue. He asked Rigby to come with him and be his Resident Manager.

Unfortunately, the experience didn’t work out as Guy had hoped so he moved on and started his employment with the Four Seasons where he became the Director of Food and Beverage of the company’s hotel in Houston, Texas. Guy remembers, “It took me about two years to feel comfortable with the way in which we as a company run a hotel. Our sophistication in operations, sales & marketing, finance, human resources, and the different levels we operate on as a company was all a little overwhelming at the beginning.”

While in Houston, Guy worked for Chris Hunsberger, who is now the Regional Vice President and General Manager of the Four Seasons in Washington. “He’s an exceptional leader and was a great inspiration to me. He taught me and motivated me and eventually gave me the opportunity to go to Tokyo, where I became Consulting Food and Beverage Director for the Four Seasons Tokyo at Chinzan-so”. After Tokyo, Guy moved to the Regent Hong Kong, a Four Seasons Hotel, to run the Food and Beverage operation during the run up to the handover.

In July 1997 he was posted to Toronto as the Executive Assistant Manager at the Four Seasons Hotel, which is where he was before coming here.

So what’s the secret to Guy’s success? “I was born with great opportunities because my parents gave me a very good education, a good upbringing, taught me how me to treat people and to know the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong.” But what about being a successful hotelier? “Well, if you are not born with a passion for the hotel business, you’re stuck.”

How has managing a hotel changed since when he first started out in the business? “I just gave sixty of my senior staff a two-and-a-half hour course on people management. I do this because if someone had done this for me when I was in my early twenties, my own life would have been so much easier. Back in the 80s, in London, the hotel business was still a little bit old-fashioned. In those grand hotels you traditionally had a respect for your superiors regardless of what they did or how they performed. Really understanding how to manage people didn’t become apparent to me until I went to North America and joined Four Seasons. Our company is all about managing its hotels through its people. Our success comes entirely from our staff, as that is our most valuable asset. ”

Was it difficult taking over from Bill Black, your predecessor, who was so immensely popular? “I actually regard it as a positive that I’m following in the footsteps of someone who has done so much for the hotel. He handed over a very well run and happy hotel and I now have to maintain it. The staff is motivated and knows how to do their jobs so that gives me more time to focus on what I’m doing rather than having to put out fires and bail people out. So it was really a great advantage taking over from Bill who had set this place up so well and was extremely well loved.”

As Guy has to deal with so many dignitaries on a daily basis, it’s only fair to ask if he has any tips for dealing with VIPS? “The most important thing we learn is to respect their privacy and give them the time of day. If you try and avoid an issue, hide from it, or pretend it never happened then they are going to get very upset. If we handle each case, as we would want it to be handled ourselves if we were in their situation, then things will work. But this applies to everyone, not just VIPS.

“The golden rule of our corporate culture is to treat one another as we would like to be treated ourselves and this applies for our staff as well our guests because we don’t differentiate between the two. If you are in a restaurant or hotel, and something goes wrong, the worst thing that can happen is for people to ignore it and pretend it’s not there."

But Thais are known for avoiding confrontation at all costs. “Maybe so but here in the hotel we have created a culture whereby we encourage our staff to deal with problems and not ignore them. Once you make them understand that by addressing an issue they will make the guests happier and it is no longer seen as a negative. We try to move it away from being a confrontational issue to more of a challenge so the staff can work out ways to solve existing and future problems. We also have something called the Glitch Report. If, for example, a newspaper wasn’t delivered with breakfast, we fix it and then follow up by having someone apologize to them again at checkout so they know we have discussed the issue and corrective action has been taken.

What about dealing with specific complaints? “We want to know what’s going on, and we have multiple different systems set up within the hotel so that we can get to the guests before they leave, so we can do something for them if they do have a problem. Typically, people will always make something that is small appear a lot larger. That’s a normal human reaction, we all do it ourselves when we want to be heard. If something irritates us, we want to make a point and in order to illustrate that point we tend to exaggerate. So you have to make sure that you listen and give the guests a bit of face and then you find out the facts and once you have done that, you can figure out how to solve the situation.”

What makes the Regent Bangkok different than other hotels? “The tangibles are that we have a beautiful building, our location is exceptional, and we have the most dynamic and exciting restaurant program in the city. Of that there is no question. We have five exceptional restaurants that can hold their own with any restaurant in the world. They run lunch and dinner at occupancy of over 110%, every day of the year.

“We also have rooms that are very Thai. This is special because when you stay in a chain hotel, frequently you wake up and you don’t know if you are in Kansas, Abu Dhabi or Malaysia. But when you wake up in one of our rooms you know you are in Thailand because of the glorious silk, rich teak wood and the beautiful local marble in the bathrooms.

“What gives us a competitive edge though is the warmth of our staff. Everyone knows that this is the Land of Smiles so you can go to a number of three or four star hotels and find staff that are smiling but can you find staff that are smiling, that will take the initiative to recognize your name, recognize your likes and dislikes and take responsibility to make decisions themselves? Our staff is extremely well trained and loyal; we have a very low staff turnover - approximately twelve percent annually, which is very low for a hotel with 650 employees.”

Looking back it’s interesting to note that there was a defining moment in Guy’s life that drew him towards the hotel business? When he was young, he and his family went to see George Bernard Shaw’s play, Major Barbara at the Savoy Theater in London. At the interval, he went outside to get some fresh air and he noticed all these Rolls Royces, Daimlers, and Bentleys drawing up to the Savoy Hotel next door and out poured all these beautifully dressed men and women in tuxedos and long gowns and jewels. Guy recalls, “Gosh, I thought it was so elegant and so beautiful. It made such a strong impression on me; I knew right then I wanted to be part of that environment even if I didn’t have all that money myself”.

Now fast-forward a number of years later to Guy at the Ritz in London as an Assistant Food and Beverage Manager. Several members of The Royal family were due to arrive for a party at the hotel’s Marie Antoinette Suite. He was standing on the stop of the steps at the main entrance of the hotel on Arlington Street in his tuxedo, waiting for the royal limousines to arrive. As the first Royals arrived, resplendent in beautiful gowns and jewels he had a little déjà vu and said, “I’ve arrived,” and a little chill went up his spine.

Of all the famous people he has met, has one person really stood out? “Meeting Margaret Thatcher was quite an inspiration because as famous and well known as she was, she always took time to talk to you directly and look you in the eye. The first time I met her she was hosting an important dinner and discussion during the Falklands War at the Greenway Hotel. I was just a waiter at the time but when she spoke to me, I really believed I was the only person in the world she cared about”.

Guy continues to hob-knob with the rich and famous and if you check out the Society Page of either the Bangkok Post or The Nation you are bound to see him meeting with one dignitary or another. He’s lived his dream and is doing a very fine job of running one of the best hotels in Asia.