THE MAKING OF A TEAM!

Leonardo I. Perli I., Director of Maintenance

As a first collaboration for this blog I wanted to proudly talk about my team and the way we are structuring the organization of the Maintenance Department and maybe get feedback from all of you good’ol readers about our organizational concept.

The key goal is to build a solid and efficient team, capable of growing and adapting to a cyclical business, that we know will start slow and grow by the day. We hire attitude and train knowledge.

This is my team:

All the people we hired were ‘stolen’ from their previous jobs… or as we say in Mexico – we ‘pirated’ them (Arrgh!). It is very different to hire people with little to no previous knowledge --- but the current concept gives us the advantage to hire very spirited people; as these guys have ample experience on property maintenance in the hospitality industry, my responsibility is to empower and inspire them so they can reach their highest potential.

In order to achieve the key goal we have found challenges and opportunities. The challenges are:

Building structures and systems from scratch without clear framework or boundaries

Welding together a cohesive high performing team

Create momentum and build behavioral patterns oriented to excellence

Exceed budgetary estimations

The opportunities are:

We can mold and create from the beginning

People are energized by the possibilities

There is no preexisting rigidity in people’s thinking

Our atmosphere from corporate and passing thru our GM is courageous and energized

http://www.youtube.com/v/GQ97LPDLsnY

A wonderful experience

By Enrique Turcott (Operation Director)


It’s a wonderful experience to share with you my adventures in the Hotel Industry and all what this involves. I have been working in the hospitality for many years and I still consider it an exciting world. Today, in my new journey at Casa Dorada I am more exited than ever and I fill thankful for so many things.

Just to mention one of these things: A few months ago, we prepared a cocktail party for a very important travel agency for Los Cabos area: Earth, Sea & Sky. This was a very important event for us as we needed to show how impressive our new hotel is. Just imagine the setting: the hotel was still under construction, we didn’t have any operation staff, no kitchens, no equipment, no nothing but spectacular views and a wonderful team. Believe me, that day I was really inspired and thank to my dream team we made a wonderful cocktail out of nothing. This kind of things can only happen when people is happy and enjoy life, just as us in Cabo.

I’ve been living in Los Cabos for 11 years now, every time I met a new comer they agree that they have not seen sunsets as beautiful as ours anywhere else in Mexico. That reminds me that sometimes we can get lost in routine. People with fresh eyes had to come and remind me how lucky I am to live where I live and have the opportunity to enjoy such spectacular landscapes.

If I wasn’t in the Hotel business, I think I would be photographer, a good one for sure. I usually carry my digital camera everywhere I go; taking pictures of all that I consider it could be a good shot. I am particularly fond of landscapes and I must confess I do have really good photos.

I invite you to see the pictures and the colors I can capture in Cabo. It’s amazing. Nature and I are a good team.

This is a photo that I love. This is the view from one of the terraces, which by the way, is the same view I will enjoy from my office starting next week!!

This is a shot on the same evening, a little bit earlier. I was discussing something about the 12 Tribes menu with the Chef. I am the one who is not dressed like a Chef, sounds logic, don’t you think?

This one was taken from my house, it’s one of my favorites and I use it every now and then as a desktop background, it brings me some calm.

With a spot like this you can easily understand why I feel like a professional photographer.

I want to send my regards to all my friends from Los Cabos and I invite them to visit this blog and add a comment. I would also like to send my best regards to my friends from Casa Dorada. They know how much I love them.

By the way… I have a new camera. I lost my last one a few months ago, here you can see how…

http://www.youtube.com/v/o92lA--YtdA

The incredible experience of traveling.

By Thierry Baurez (Dir. Sales & Marketing)


Whether you travel for leisure, business or any other reason, there is always an enriching experience in each of your journeys.

Traveling enables you to live parallel lives. Your day by day life is placed on hold while you start a new traveler’s one. You bring with your thoughts, concerns, responsibilities, cultural baggage but you will experience them in a different background. A new version of yourself will come up and act in a slightly different way than the “home” you.

If you travel for leisure you will do all those things you never have the time to do back home: wake up late, enjoy a real breakfast, spend a whole afternoon reading a book, pamper yourself with a good massage for 2 hours, explore and exchange anecdotes with new people and many other activities which are not in your regular schedule.

If you are traveling for business, you will experience a completely different routine. Even if at night, back to the hotel, you need to touch base with your regular life through the emails and office phone calls, your mind is freed from any possible monotony, you become more efficient and your creativity is enriched.


Traveling requires some sacrifices but enables you to discover and value more easily the little details that you wouldn’t notice in your ordinary life because they are it is part of your routine.


For example, I live in Los Cabos Mexico. I work for a new resort located in Cabo San Lucas with stunning views of the calm waters of the Medano bay and Los Cabos’ landmark:


On a regular day I hardly take the time to enjoy those views. I hardly enjoy the fact that the weather down here is just perfect: not to warm and not too cool.

I don’t value the fact that on my way to my office I drive with no traffic for 20 minutes, on a perfect road with outstanding color contrasts between the green Golf courses, the red desert rocks and the blue turquoise of the Pacific.

I don’t notice that very few people in the world might see a whale on their way to work http://www.youtube.com/v/P_EwTNPAE08. I don’t remember that people here live free of smog, crime, stress… I realize how lucky I am to live in Cabo and work for Casa Dorada Los Cabos when I come back home after some weeks out on business trips.

On the spiritual and intellectual side, traveling helps you to find the time you never have on your regular day to be with your inner self. Being in a plane, bus or train for more than two hours enables you to clear your ideas, put some peace in your mind and meditate on those projects you put on hold because you are always busy.

I personally love to enjoy the views of the clouds while I hear new age music to free my mind, when I’m away for a long time and I fly back home I love to hear “life for rent” from Dido (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D80B0HCyQpQ)

When I arrive to Cabo, I find out that I don’t have a “life for rent” but a “life in paradise”.

The parallel life you live on a trip causes positive changes on the “home-you”. You come back full of new experiences that help you to become a richer person. You learn new cultures, new ways of working, acting, eating, enjoying, playing, praying, etc. You become a more complete person and that will benefit your behavior, your personal life, your work quality and your relations with all who surround you.
Once you start traveling you will never want to stop.

A Hotel’s Diary-The guys behind the curtains

It is with these lines that I give the official start of our blog. This is going to be a collaborative effort from several individuals who are passionate about the hospitality industry and who have something else in common… we work in the same hotel, he he.

For a little over 12 months we have worked hand in hand (fist to fist on some occasions) in the pre-opening process of an independent luxury resort in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It has been exciting!

The opening of any business must be exciting and fun, I guess. But in hotels in particular – it’s just something else. Not only the gazillion things that need to be coordinated in order to open your doors (our critical path list has over 1,224 points – from hiring, to budgeting, to selecting the napkins – and these are just the general ones!) but most importantly the commitment to the client – that is, with those that have reservations on the first few days & weeks after opening date; this leaves very little, if any, room for mistakes.

For example, opening a retail outlet, or a bookshop for that matter, must also entail lots of stuff to coordinate; but if you postpone opening for, let’s say, two weeks… well, the owner’s checkbook may be the only one really affected and probably a few disappointed folks who were expecting the store to open, but can certainly wait a few more days. But in a hotel… well, one might imagine how frustrating it is to have a reservation done with weeks or months ahead – a well planned vacation –not being honored by a property. Yikes!

Another way to underscore the complexity of a hotel opening is how big-hospitality faces it; err… big-hospitality being the folks at Marriot, Hilton, Starwood, IHG, etc. Corporations, particularly in the U.S., have whole departments dedicated to this process: not only on the design & development side, but actual operating teams (Housekeeping, Front Desk, Accounting) that go from hotel opening to hotel opening to prepare and set-up things according to their own corporate standards, in combination with the local guys. Now, that is what I call love for the business, huh? As I say, it is known that openings are highly stressful, full of tension with long, long hours – and these guys do it for a living! Wow! Go get’em guys! He He.

So, most of what we will write here – at least in the next few weeks – relates to the opening of a resort. Now, being an independent hotel with no corporate-brand affiliation makes it a bit more difficult, since we are alone in this process, with no hospitality-SWAT teams that will zip from helicopters and lend a hand. But it also gives us lots of more space to maneuver (MOAHA HA HA!!) and be really creative. Which is most of the fun has come from.

So… getting back to subject, the idea behind our little blog is to talk about the life in a hotel – from the (overly stressful) pre-opening days, to the opening, to the day to day operations – told from the guys behind the curtains… which is yours truly and my fellow co-workers. Ergo the name, A Hotel’s Diary. This is our story of how the Casa Dorada at Médano Beach came to happen, and actually happens on a daily basis, he he.

Thus… with 10 days to go to for opening day, lots of coffee and 12 hour days, we will write a blog!!