The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself Archive - Page 2 of 2

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

International Financial Institutions (IFIs)

International Financial Institutions (IFIs)

Years later, I entered institutional advisory work.
It was a very different world from hotel operations.

Instead of guests, employees, and owners, I found myself working with:

Banks
Donors
Development programmes
Procurement frameworks
Governance structures
International advisory assignments

The objective was simple: Help businesses grow. Create jobs. Strengthen local economies.
Use public and donor funding responsibly.
Much of the work was rewarding. Some of it was frustrating.

What surprised me was how similar the underlying challenges were to those I had encountered in hotels.

People remained people
Ambition remained ambition
Fear remained fear
And trust remained fragile

The larger the system, the easier it became for reality and representation to drift apart.

Reports could look better than facts
Processes could look stronger than implementation
Compliance could exist on paper while problems continued underneath
Whenever reality and representation diverged, difficulties eventually emerged

The larger the gap, the larger the consequence.

Over time, I realised that governance is often misunderstood.
Many people see governance as bureaucracy.
I came to see it differently. Governance is simply the process of managing expectations.
Who is responsible? Who decides? Who is accountable? Who knows what? What happens when things go wrong?

Without clear answers, trust slowly erodes.
That observation reinforced something I had learned many years earlier in hotel operations.
Integrity is not a slogan. It is alignment between what is said and what is done.

I achieved many positive things through international development programmes and remain grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the growth of many small and medium-sized businesses.
The work convinced me that IFI institutions remain necessary where markets, public administration, or political systems alone cannot adequately support economic development.

But it also taught me that no institution, process, or governance framework can substitute for personal integrity.
In the end, every system still depends on people choosing to do the right thing when nobody is watching.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how institutional work taught me that trust is built when reality and representation remain aligned.

This is the ninth of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

10.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

The Banana Republic hotel

The Banana Republic hotel

This is not an article about politics. It is about a hotel where informal power had gradually replaced formal governance.

Having worked in both luxury and volume hospitality, particularly in emerging markets, I learned that hotels attract more than guests seeking a good bed, food, and friendly service.
They can also attract colourful and opportunistic investors, managers, and employees who are drawn to the movement of cash.

Over the years, I encountered pilferage and corruption that, at times, took my breath away.
It reflected a broader environment in which weak governance had become normal across both the private and public sectors.

One hotel in particular has remained with me throughout my career.
I knew when I accepted the assignment that it would not be easy.
The hotel had established a certain reputation.
I was brought in, or so I believed, to change that culture rather than become part of it.

This 1,000-bed hotel operated more like a factory than a hotel.
It had developed its own informal economy resembling a small banana republic.
Staff bribed supervisors. The supervisors bribed managers. Managers, in turn, bribed upwards.
Salaries were not what motivated behaviour.
The real money flowed elsewhere, through vendors, suppliers, and commercial relationships that existed largely beyond the hotel’s formal controls.

As I gradually came to understand, the relationships influencing behaviour extended beyond the hotel’s walls.
The absence of governance was so deeply embedded that, at times, it seemed to extend beyond the hotel itself, making me cautious about how and where I reported what I was discovering.

What was missing was something much simpler.
Nobody owned accountability.

Responsibility had become fragmented.
Decision-making had become blurred.
Authority had become ambiguous.
Everyone participated, yet nobody was ultimately accountable for the outcome.

The hotel management company promoted a culture inspired by family values, spirit, and bespoke authenticity.
It had engaged highly capable professionals who genuinely believed in the standards, processes and services defined in the Hotel Management Agreement (HMA).
Regular meetings were held to review key performance indicators, with discussions centred on revenue, profitability and operational performance.
Yet, when I walked the hotel floor, the reality told a very different story.
The HMA seemed strangely disconnected from everyday operations, almost like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial being far away from home.
The language spoken in boardrooms bore little resemblance to the behaviours I observed throughout the hotel.

It was a banana republic.
Looking back, I probably should have walked away.
Instead, I chose to confront it.

The team working alongside me did an extraordinary job.
Replacing everyone would probably have been easier, but economic reality dictated otherwise.
I have found that people employed at the same company have a remarkable tendency to accept what is inappropriate when management has normalised it.
To reduce reality to villains would have been too easy; people deserve better.
Therefore, when signalling a different approach, one that was guided by transparency, many members of the existing management team chose to walk that path with me.

Rather than beginning with punishment, I decided to begin with accountability.

The management team had historically received unofficial bonuses to compensate for unrealistically low salaries.
Instead of accepting the arrangement, I increased management salaries and made remuneration transparent.
Rather than banning unaccountable staff purchases through the hotel store, I publicly bought the same items during management meetings, paid with my own credit card, and asked for a receipt.
Nobody needed an explanation. The signal was clear.
I chose to work with the trade union rather than around it.
Together with its representative, I presented the hotel’s performance to the staff each month in language everyone could understand.
Sharing reality fostered a shared sense of ownership.
Gossip and speculation gradually disappeared.
I was invited by a leading newspaper to be interviewed.
Many General Managers use such opportunities to represent their hotel to the local community.
I chose a different route. I asked the journalist to interview my line staff instead.
Over the following months, interviews were published with maids, clerical staff, and many others who would normally never find themselves in the limelight.
I deliberately chose not to influence, edit, or manipulate these interviews. It was a gamble.
The outcome still gives me goosebumps.
The care, pride, and sophistication with which these colleagues represented the hotel were extraordinary.
Each represented the hotel as though they carried ultimate responsibility for it.
Sharing the hotel’s performance with them had made a difference.
Wholesalers, tour leaders, and suppliers occasionally arrived carrying envelopes, hoping to negotiate next year’s contracts.
They left with those envelopes unopened.
Instead, I insisted on transparent pricing and encouraged them to use the additional income to reward their own employees fairly.
Slowly, steadily, and deliberately, I repositioned the business.
We developed a new market positioning strategy and established a sales team to implement it.
Low-yield wholesale business was gradually replaced by a market segment the hotel had never seriously pursued before: Meetings & Conferences
Direct bookings increased through a fully redesigned website that rewarded guests with additional value rather than discounted prices.
Despite resistance from both inside and outside the organisation, I gradually tightened payment discipline while reducing wholesale allotments.
Rather than reducing payroll or removing staff benefits, I converted an unused restaurant into a multifunctional staff canteen that also served nearby office workers.
A cost centre became a profit centre, strengthening both staff morale and my relationship with the trade union.
Food and beverage was strengthened by recruiting a signature Executive Chef.
For the first time, the hotel actively promoted its culinary competence—not to compete with the city’s restaurants, but to demonstrate that we were no longer simply the cheap half-board hotel.
Managers became accountable for their departmental KPIs.
Accountability migrated to where decisions were made.
As a result, I no longer needed to chase operational shortcomings.
When F&B guest capture rates or average guest cheque values fell below target during a particular shift, department managers initiated the analysis, identified the cause, and implemented corrective action themselves.
That allowed me to spend less time exercising control and more time providing leadership.
Leadership also meant accepting that not every operational inefficiency should automatically be eliminated.
For example, I disliked the twelve-hour reception shifts.
They were physically demanding for the front-line staff and, from a service and revenue perspective, far from ideal.
Yet they created alternating short- and long-work weeks that allowed several receptionists, many of them single mothers, to balance work and raising their families.
I could have changed the rota. Instead, I chose to understand why it existed.
Not every compromise serves the business. Sometimes it serves the people who make the business possible.

The hotel ultimately achieved a significant turnaround.
It was not driven by major capital expenditure.
It was driven by changes in culture, accountability, market positioning, and management discipline.

Ironically, I was no longer there to witness the turnaround.
Change management creates resistance. Long-established interests rarely disappear quietly.
I left before the full benefits became visible.

The real achievement was never receiving the credit.
Others received much of the recognition for the turnaround, and rightly so.
Completing a turnaround is every bit as important as starting one.

Looking back, I have made peace with that.
It was enough to know that the culture had changed.
Those foundations helped my successor complete the journey, something he did remarkably well.

That experience taught me something I have carried throughout my career.

If governance depends on one individual, it is not governance at all.
Real governance survives the people who introduce it, creating a succession of leaders guided by principle rather than opportunism.
Looking back, I realise that this assignment marked the beginning of an idea that has guided my professional life ever since.

Governance is the operating system of decision-making.
It creates clarity around authority, responsibility, accountability and information flows.
When those become clear, organisations begin to change.

That is what the Banana Republic hotel taught me.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how working in a corrupt environment taught me that governance is the operating system of decision-making.

This is the eighth of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and perhaps offered a different perspective on why governance matters.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

09.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

The Credit Policy

The Credit Policy

Another country. Another hotel. Another culture.
In that particular environment, petty theft and corruption at scale were part of daily life.
At the time, people would sometimes say, “If you don’t steal from your company, you steal from your family.”

I spent much of my time firefighting.

Cash disappeared. Controls were weak. Responsibilities were unclear.
Departments blamed one another. There was confusion everywhere.

What fascinated me was not the theft itself.

It was how easily accountability disappeared once money started moving between departments.

I decided to approach the problem differently.

Not by punishing theft. But by preventing it.

I did so by first following the flow:

How cash entered the business
Who touched it
How accountability was transferred
Where controls broke down

Slowly, patterns started to emerge.

Over many months, I developed a credit policy and control framework.
Not because I enjoyed writing procedures.
But because I wanted accountability to become visible.

Years later, I visited another hotel.

The Front Office Manager, whom I had trained while working in another hotel, welcomed me warmly.
Proudly, he showed me what he described as the best cash-control manual he had ever encountered.
He had discovered it in a previous hotel. Not one where I had worked.

The document had travelled.

People had copied it. Adapted it. Used it. Across multiple organisations.
My initials were still visible on the cover page.

The lesson was not about authorship. The lesson was about systems and processes.

Good systems and processes survive the people who create them.
The best systems become part of the organisation itself.
Long after their creators have moved on.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how systems and processes taught me that sustainable improvement is measured by what remains after you leave.

This is the seventh of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how systems and processes taught me that sustainable improvement is measured by what remains after you leave.

This article is about how systems taught me that sustainable improvement is measured by what remains after you leave.

This is the eighth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

08.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

The Revenue Experiment

The Revenue Experiment

While serving as Front Office Manager at a large hotel catering predominantly to leisure groups, I became fascinated by distribution.

At the time, revenue management – both in terms of systems and culture – was still emerging.
Convincing management and ownership to invest in dedicated systems and specialised staff often required as much selling as the rooms themselves.

Most business was negotiated with wholesalers and tour operators at fixed prices.

Something about the methodology fascinated me.
I wanted to understand how it actually worked.
Not the theory. The mechanism. The chain.
How did guests find us? Why did some channels perform better than others? Why did some market segments behave differently from others?

I became absorbed by questions such as:

GDS and OTAs
Distribution costs, commissions, mark-ups, kick-backs
Market segments and sources of business
Pricing, net or inclusive of VAT and city tax
Demand, pickup, washdown, pace, and double-occupancy density
Room categories and benefits, addressing leisure, MICE and business needs
Yield management
Reputation management

I experimented relentlessly.
Without specialised software. Without automated tools.
This was long before today’s user-friendly PMS systems and apps.
All I had were spreadsheets, observation, curiosity, and adjustment.

I changed one thing. Observed the result. Changed another.
Observed again. Slowly, patterns started to emerge. The result was not merely better occupancy.
The result was a different business model. New market segments emerged. Dependence on low-yield wholesale business decreased.
The hotel began attracting guests who had previously never considered it.

What had been considered an out-of-town wholesale hotel gradually became one of the city’s strongest online performers.

Looking back, the lesson was not revenue management.
The lesson was curiosity.
Understanding the mechanism often creates opportunities that remain invisible to others.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how curiosity taught me to look beyond the obvious.

This is the sixth of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

07.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

The Flooded Hotel

The Flooded Hotel

Another country. Another hotel. Another lesson.
I was Night Manager of a high-profile hotel frequented by celebrities, heads of state, and captains of industry.

A Sales Manager had approved the use of fireworks in a ballroom.
The sprinkler system activated. The hotel began to flood. Nobody knew how to stop it.
No one on the hotel team knew how. Nor me.

Water poured from the building’s entrance onto the street and down into the basements.
The situation deteriorated rapidly, and the basement where the kitchens and stores were located was beginning to flood.
Cooks started building dikes out of towels, aprons, and bed sheets to contain the water.

The fire brigade eventually arrived.
They located the switch. The water stopped.
But the crisis was far from over. Night cleaning teams from across the city were mobilised.
The clean-up continued into the early morning, with me sweeping the floors.

The hotel survived.

Looking back, the event taught me something important.
Systems matter. Training matters. Preparation matters.
But reality has a habit of introducing situations nobody anticipated.

No manual had prepared us for that night.
No training session had covered it.
No procedure explained what to do next.

Leadership often begins where procedures end.
One thing I have learned about myself is that I do not need to know everything before acting.
Sometimes leadership is not about having answers. It is about helping people keep moving until answers appear.

When I eventually arrived home, mentally and physically exhausted, I switched on the television to watch a movie on a 24/7 cable channel.
The irony could not have been greater.
The running film was “Towering Inferno”.
A classic disaster movie involving exactly the kind of problem I had just spent the night dealing with.

For the first time after battling my way through the night and into the morning, I laughed.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how uncertainty taught me leadership.

This is the fift of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

06.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

The Overbooked Hotel

The Overbooked Hotel

I had built an early career in hotels where discretion was valued above publicity and where guests occasionally reminded you that the world was larger than the building itself.

Being young and, arguably, naively stupid, I became increasingly fascinated by a completely different side of hospitality: scale.
Large groups, airports, convention hotels, and the logistics behind them fascinated me.
I wanted to know how it worked.

The saying is “be careful what you wish for,” and this story somewhat demonstrates that I landed the jackpot.

I joined one of the largest hotels in town as its front desk manager.
Shortly after being hired, I found myself managing a situation in which the hotel had somehow sold every room twice, an issue that remained unresolved until the day of arrival.
The problem did not start that day. It had been created weeks earlier.
An ambitious sales team, accustomed to significant wash-down and operating in an unstable market, had taken a gamble. This time, the gamble failed.

The hotel had 400 rooms. More than 800 guests arrived. Simultaneously.
The front office team froze in horror.
Management panicked. Guests demanded answers.
Panic was not going to solve the problem. Reality would.
One thing I have learned about myself over the years is that the more panic there is around me, the calmer and quieter I get.

I am not a particularly extroverted person.
Nor would most people identify me as the loudest person in the room.
I may not have caused the problem. Yet when a crisis emerges, I have a tendency to quietly assume ownership.
Not because of a title. Because somebody has to.

Over the years, I have learned that responsibility and accountability are not always the same thing.
Sometimes the person who solves the problem is not the person who created it.
But the guests do not care whose fault it is.
They simply need somebody to take charge.

The bookings were for single occupancy. The rooms were doubles.
So we started with the facts. I spoke openly with the group leaders. I explained the situation honestly. No excuses. No attempts to hide the problem.
In exchange for compensation, many agreed to share rooms.
Additional reception teams searched the city for available accommodation.

Guests who preferred not to accept the proposed solution were relocated.
Hotel-chartered buses transported guests where necessary.

Slowly, the pressure began to ease. The problem was solved. What remained was another lesson.
Clarity becomes most valuable when everyone else loses theirs.
People often believe leadership is about having the right answers.
In my experience, leadership during a crisis is often about accepting reality quickly, staying calm, and helping others focus on solutions rather than emotions.

To understand the situation, it is important to realise the context.

This was an upcoming Central European destination in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The city was changing at extraordinary speed. Tourism was booming, international investment was arriving, and demand often seemed limitless.
It felt at times as if an entirely new hospitality market was being invented in real time.

New hotels were opening, reservation systems were far less sophisticated than today, and market demand often exceeded available supply.
Some hotels could only be booked by joining a waiting list — something that may be difficult to imagine today.
Occupancy levels that would be considered exceptional today were normal.

Our 400-key hotel operated at approximately 92% annual occupancy.
In such an environment, substantial overbookings on the day of arrival were not unusual.

It was a commercial risk many hotels accepted, based on historical cancellation patterns and expected no-shows.

Most of the time the calculations worked.
Occasionally they did not.

What struck me afterwards was how quickly established procedures became irrelevant.
The reservation system could not solve the problem. The manuals could not solve the problem. Escalating the issue could not solve the problem.
Only people could solve the problem.
The solution emerged through judgement, communication, improvisation, and a willingness to accept responsibility for difficult decisions.
It reminded me that systems and processes are valuable, but they are tools.
Their purpose is to support decision-making, not replace it.
Perhaps that is why I remain cautious whenever a process becomes more important than the judgement it was designed to support.

For me, however, the lasting lesson was different.
Crisis does not create character. Crisis reveals it.
And sometimes it reveals qualities in ourselves that we did not know were there.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how a crisis taught me to be calm.

This is the fourth of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

05.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

The Stewarding Manager

The Stewarding Manager

As a trainee in food and beverage, one of my responsibilities was serving coffee and tea during the hotel F&B Management meetings.

It was a good place to observe.

General Manager
Director of Sales and Marketing
Chief Accountant
F&B Manager
Executive Chef
And many others…

People discussing important matters I barely understood.

One thing puzzled me. Why was the Chief Steward participating in the meeting?
I understood the Executive Chef. I understood the F&B Manager. But the dishwasher?

At least, that was how my young and inexperienced mind looked at it. Only later did I understand.

Health and safety start and end with stewarding
Cleanliness starts and ends with stewarding
A perfectly prepared dish served on a contaminated plate remains a failure and a risk to guest safety
The most talented chef cannot succeed without clean equipment
The most beautiful restaurant cannot function without clean glasses, cutlery, and plates

Stewarding is the backbone of food and beverage.
In much the same way that housekeeping is the backbone of rooms, engineering is the backbone of infrastructure, and night audit is the backbone of financial control.

The lesson was simple: The most important functions are often the least glamorous and the least visible.
As young professionals, we are often attracted to titles, uniforms, status, and visibility. Life eventually teaches a different lesson.
Organisations do not succeed because of the people who receive the most attention.
They succeed because of the people who quietly do their job every day, often without recognition.

That observation shaped how I view organisations today.
Respect is not determined by title. It is determined by contribution.

This lesson in humility has stayed with me throughout my life and career.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about learning respect.

This is the third of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

04.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

Growing Pains in the Restaurant

Growing Pains in the Restaurant

One of my earliest memories in hospitality dates back to my trainee period at a classical grand restaurant, one of the most prestigious dining establishments in town.

This was not merely a restaurant in the modern sense. It belonged to a different era of hospitality. Guests expected classical service, silver service, guéridon preparations, carving and flambéing at the table, and a level of product knowledge that is increasingly rare today.

I struggled with systems. I made mistakes continuously.
I mixed up dishes. I confused a Caesar Salad for Mixed Salad, Rösti with Pommes Frites, Chicken with Pork, and so on… Orders arrived in the kitchen one way and occasionally emerged as something entirely different.

The Executive Chef, not my direct supervisor but obviously frustrated with me as a young man, took me aside and told me I was the worst trainee he had encountered in his career.
At the time, he was probably right, and his feelings were shared by many in both the kitchen and service teams.

Every day, before the dinner shift, the Maître d’Hôtel assembled the service brigade for a formal briefing.
It always began with questions about the menu delivered in almost military fashion. We were expected to know every dish, every ingredient, every garnish, every wine pairing, the correct serving temperatures, and even which vintage might be most appropriate. We were also expected to execute the full repertoire of classical service techniques, from guéridon service to carving and flambéing tableside. Orders were committed to memory as they were taken, and executed. No handheld devices, no POS terminals, no technology beyond the NCR cash registers. The service brigade consisted of the best of the best, many of whom would later become celebrated sommeliers, fromagers, maîtres d’hôtel, restaurateurs, and hospitality professionals around the world. The Maître d’Hôtel’s management technique was not to correct or reprimand those who did not know the answers to his questions. The stares from the rest of the team did the job, and I received many of them.

Yet, for some reason, they kept me on the most prestigious shift: dinner service.
Looking back, I still do not know why. It would have been easier to move me to polishing silverware or room service. At the time, I would have considered that a demotion. Later, I learned that those duties were no less important than any other role in the operation. Hospitality is built on respect for every task, not just the visible ones.

I was a young kid, alone in a different country, trying to find my place in a profession I did not yet understand.
The venue I was working in was clearly in the highest league I could have found myself in. To make matters worse, I was far too proud to admit how lost I felt.
Or that some evenings I cried myself to sleep.

What stayed with me was not the criticism.
It was what I chose to do with it. And what happened afterwards.
I became determined to face the failure. To understand.
Not to defend myself. Not to explain. To learn.
I started asking questions. I watched. I listened. I practised.
Slowly, things started to make sense.

At the end of my training period, the same Executive Chef took me aside once again.
This time he told me he had never experienced a trainee who had transformed so completely.
Looking back, this may have been one of the most important moments of my career.
Not because I received praise.
But because I learned something much more valuable. Weaknesses are not permanent. Provided one is willing to confront them.

Today, whenever I encounter something, I do not understand, I often think back to that restaurant and kitchen.
The lesson remains the same. Failing at something is not the problem. Refusing to learn is.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how perseverance is often learned long before competence arrives.

This is the second of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

03.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

Numbers in the Ballroom

Numbers in the Ballroom

Growing up, my biggest anxiety was around numbers.
I still remember receiving a Chinese abacus during “Sinterklaas”, a Dutch festivity before Christmas during which children receive presents.
As the photograph shows, I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Looking back, perhaps that was the beginning of a much longer story.
Years later, working night audit in hotels, I had to face that same anxiety.
Excel. Daily reconciliations. Accounting. Basic spreadsheets. Basic financial reporting.

The problem was simple.
I was unable to see the forest for the trees.
I could not connect the dots.
I made many mistakes and gave both the accounting and IT departments a headache.
Back then, I was certainly not on the shortlist for Employee of the Month. Quite the opposite.

One night, after once again frustrating accounting and IT by breaking reports and spreadsheets, I decided to do something different.
I printed everything. Every tab. Every page. Hundreds of pages.
I covered the floor of an unused ballroom with all these hundreds of sheets, blocked its availability for a week, and spent several nights walking through the process.
Page by page. Report by report. Formula by formula.
Slowly the connections became visible. Not because somebody explained them.
Because I followed the chain.

That lesson stayed with me.
Whenever I struggle to understand something, I still look for the chain. The outcome rarely explains itself. The path that created it usually does.

Today, numbers are part of my daily bread and butter.
I overcame my anxiety by facing it.
More importantly, I learned that weaknesses are often invitations to learn rather than reasons to stop.
My colleagues and managers recognised the effort and supported me. I owe them my respect and gratitude forever.

Looking back, I do not think the lesson was really about numbers.
It was about humility. Acknowledging what you do not understand.
Being curious enough to keep asking questions. And being persistently stubborn enough not to give up until the pieces start fitting together.

That lesson has stayed with me far beyond accounting.
In operations. In commercial strategy. In governance. And increasingly, in life itself.
Curiosity and humility are a powerful combination.
Together, they allow us to transform weaknesses into strengths.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how numbers helped me to channel my curiosity.

This is the first of a series of articles—”The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

02.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel: What Hospitality Taught Me About Myself

Introduction – Becoming My Own Project

Introduction – Becoming My Own Project

I once managed a hotel that operated more like a banana republic than a business.

In another hotel, I learned more about leadership during a flood than in years of management training
A credit policy taught me responsibility
An overbooked hotel taught me calmness
A dishwasher taught me respect
A revenue experiment taught me curiosity

And so it continued.
Every hotel, and many of the people I met throughout my career in hospitality, taught me a lesson.
None of these lessons came from textbooks.
They came from real people, difficult situations, mistakes, successes, and occasionally complete chaos.

For more than 25 years, I was asked to analyse hotels, businesses, and organisations.
I learned to observe before judging, question assumptions, and look beyond the obvious.
Often, the problem everyone could see was not the real problem at all.

Only much later did I realise I had never applied that same way of thinking to myself.
I decided to apply my advisory methodology to myself.
This series is the result of that decision.

These are not articles about hotels.
They are stories about what hospitality taught me.
About becoming a better professional, a better leader and, ultimately, a better human being.

Perhaps some of those lessons will resonate with your own journey as well.

Overview of Articles

The articles in this series are listed below:

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

01.06.2026/by gransier

Confidential Discussion