Checking In, Checking Out
In the city’s increasingly crowded hotel market, some bosses aren’t staying much longer than the guests.
- Illustration by Tim Bower.
When the Renaissance Boston hotel opens on the South Boston waterfront this month, it will boast 456 guest rooms, 15 suites, and a general manager named Terry Worden. Settling on a GM is one of a new hotel’s most critical decisions—he or she does everything from hiring staff to ordering equipment—but the Renaissance didn’t have to look far to find Worden, who had spent the past seven years leading the Marriott Long Wharf, about a mile away. The move is the latest example of an incestuous, and increasingly common, practice: As new luxury hotels join the already-packed marketplace, many seek managers with deep local experience, and that means luring them away from competitors.
This hiring strategy tends to have a domino effect on the industry. For instance, when the Taj announced it was taking over the Ritz on Arlington Street, it tapped David Gibbons as GM, just a month after he’d taken the top job at the Lenox. That left the Lenox scrambling for a new boss, which it found in Dan Donahue, who was working as second in command at Jurys; Jurys in turn filled Donahue’s spot with Adam Sperling, the GM from the Hotel Tria. That caused Tria to hire Deborah DeGalla, who was sales director at the Wyndham in Andover. And the list goes on. “It is musical chairs, isn’t it?” says Taj spokeswoman Caron LeBrun.
Soon, there will be even more seats to fill. The W Hotel is tentatively slated for a 2009 opening, and several others—including at One Franklin in Downtown Crossing and Waterside Place in Southie—aren’t much further away. But employees need not polish their résumés yet: Some hoteliers say they’ve hit job-swap fatigue. “The level of experience for a luxury hotel is not really available locally anymore,” says InterContinental manager Tim Kirwan (who previously oversaw the openings of the Hotel Commonwealth, the Cambridge Hyatt Regency, and the Bostonian).
The Mandarin Oriental, which opens this summer, plucked GM Susanne Hatje from its flagship in Hong Kong, proof, it says, that it takes Boston seriously. But it hasn’t eschewed using Boston talent: The hotel’s public face remains one of its developers, Robin Brown—in a role he assumed after leaving the GM job at the Four Seasons.
