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The Banana Republic Hotel and What It Taught Me About Myself

The Hotel Chief Operating Officer Who Managed Pace

The Hotel Chief Operating Officer Who Managed Pace

This story is about how patience taught me that sustainable change happens at a pace people can absorb.

A hotel chief operating officer I worked closely with taught me that progress is not measured solely by speed.
Sometimes progress is measured by what survives the journey.

The CEO represented ambition.
The COO represented management.
That combination proved both powerful and instructive.

The COO was exceptionally intelligent. Capable. Curious.
And perhaps most importantly, humble enough to learn.
Over the years, he absorbed an extraordinary amount of knowledge.
Operations. Finance. Performance management. Governance.
Strategy. Commercial thinking. Organisational design.
He learned continuously. Not because anybody forced him to.
Because he wanted to understand.

As the organisation matured, he became increasingly capable of connecting the dots.
He understood why certain decisions mattered. He understood why assumptions mattered.
He understood why expectations mattered.
He could see the chain.

Yet he responded differently from me.
That difference would teach me an important lesson.
When the organisation began asking larger questions, my instinct was to follow the logic and accelerate.
The answers were needed. The decisions mattered.
The opportunity existed. Why wait?

The COO saw the same reality. Yet he reached a different conclusion.
The organisation could only move as fast as it could absorb change.

The business could only move as fast as its culture could absorb change.
His instinct was not to accelerate. His instinct was to regulate.
To create time. To allow understanding to develop.
To allow acceptance to develop. To allow people to move together.
He was not opposed to change. He was protecting its sustainability.
Organisations do not change when a conclusion is reached.
They change when enough people are ready to accept it.

Throughout my career, I have often been drawn toward the logic of an argument.
Follow the chain. Understand the consequences.
Reach the conclusion. The logic remains important.

But organisations are not spreadsheets. People require time.
Cultures require time. Trust requires time.

As discussions progressed, both the CEO and the COO chose a more measured pace.
Despite the slower pace, the organisation continued learning.
The culture continued evolving.
The curiosity survived. The momentum remained.
Perhaps the pace was not a weakness.
Perhaps it was a bridge.

The more mature I become, the more I appreciate that sustainable change is rarely determined by the quality of the conclusion alone.
It is also determined by the organisation’s ability to absorb it.

Looking back, I have come to appreciate that a mandate is not implemented in a vacuum.
It must adapt to the reality of the organisation it serves.

Thank you for reading my story.

This story is part of a series—”The Banana Republic Hotel and What It 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.

If you enjoyed reading the story and have the appetite to read another one, you are invited to visit G&A’s website, in particular its INSIGHTS page, where you can find all stories.
Alternatively, click here to be taken to the next story.

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.

Terminology for non-hoteliers:

SOP: Standard Operating Procedure – a documented process describing how a task should be performed to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance.
KPIs: Key Performance Indicators – measurable indicators used to monitor performance and progress against objectives.
ADR: Average Daily Rate – the average room rate paid by guests.
RevPAR: Revenue per Available Room – a measure combining occupancy and room rate to assess hotel revenue performance.
Occupancy: The percentage of available rooms that are occupied.
DOF: Double Occupancy Factor – the average number of guests staying in each occupied room. A DOF of 1.0 means every occupied room has one guest; 2.0 means every occupied room has two guests.
AGC: Average Guest Check – the average amount spent by each guest in a restaurant, bar, or other food and beverage outlet.
CRS: Central Reservation System – the central booking system that manages a hotel’s room inventory, rates, and reservations across all sales channels.
PMS: Property Management System – the software used to manage reservations, guest accounts, and hotel operations.
OTA: Online Travel Agency – websites such as Booking.com or Expedia that sell hotel rooms on behalf of hotels.
GDS: Global Distribution System – a worldwide booking network used by travel agents and corporate travel departments to reserve hotel rooms, flights, and other travel services.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management – systems and processes used to manage guest relationships and marketing.
F&B: Food & Beverage Department – all restaurant, bar, banquet, room service, and catering operations within a hotel.
Half-Board: A hotel meal plan that includes breakfast and one additional meal each day, usually dinner. Drinks other than those specifically included are generally charged separately.
MICE: Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events – the hotel business related to corporate meetings, conferences, exhibitions, and incentive travel.
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning – an integrated software system that connects key business functions such as finance, procurement, inventory, human resources, sales, and reporting into a single platform.
USALI: Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry – the internationally recognised accounting standard used by hotels to measure and compare financial performance.
GOP: Gross Operating Profit – the operating profit generated by the hotel before management fees, rent, financing costs, depreciation, taxes, and other non-operating expenses.
EBITDA: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation – a widely used measure of an organisation’s operating profitability.
COS: Cost of Sales – the direct cost of producing the goods sold, such as food, beverages, or merchandise, expressed as an amount or percentage of revenue.
FTE: Full-Time Equivalent – a standard measure of staffing that converts part-time and seasonal employees into the equivalent number of full-time employees.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 30 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

16.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel and What It Taught Me About Myself

The Empty Castle

The Empty Castle

This is another story about the “Highest-and-Best-Use” (HBU) for hotels.

When people imagine hotel consulting, they usually picture boardrooms, PowerPoint presentations, and strategy workshops.

Interim management represents another, far more practical side of hotel consulting.
It is often the solution hotel owners turn to when an organisation needs experienced leadership without permanently changing its management.
The owner remains in control while bringing in an independent executive to stabilise the business, implement change, and get the job done—free from the politics that can sometimes accompany an internal appointment.

Let me tell you about the Empty Castle – an interim hotel management project.

It was a bitterly cold winter night.
My first evening at a hidden castle in the countryside of a Central European country, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, I started an interim management assignment.

There were no guests.
No restaurant. No reception.
By early evening, the few remaining staff wished me goodnight, locked the front door behind them, and drove home.

I was alone.
Completely alone. In a castle.
Outside, the wind swept across the plains. Inside, old wooden floors creaked beneath centuries-old ceilings.
Doors seemed to settle of their own accord.
Every corridor appeared to amplify the sound of the wind.
Like many people, I had seen “The Shining“.

Before going to bed, I quietly placed a chair beneath the bedroom door handle.
Just in case.
Nothing happened, of course.

The following morning, daylight transformed the castle into exactly what it really was: one of the most beautiful hospitality properties I had ever seen.
But it also revealed something else.

The castle wasn’t haunted.
The business was.
Not by ghosts, but by history.

This particular castle had never really needed to function as a commercial enterprise.
It had served as a private retreat, entertaining family, friends, and invited guests through hunting weekends, gourmet experiences, and country-house hospitality.
It was magnificent.
But it had never been designed to compete in the marketplace.

When commercial self-sufficiency became necessary, the symptoms were obvious.

Weak cash flow
Inconsistent occupancy
An organisation built around tradition rather than demand
A product that appealed to everyone in theory, but to nobody in particular

It would have been easy to focus on the hotel.
Instead, I asked a different question.
The same question I had first learned to ask years earlier while managing “the gourmet restaurant that happened to have rooms“—a story for another time.

What business should this castle actually be in?
Or, applying real-estate terminology applied to hotels: What is its ideal Highest-and-Best-Use?

The long – cold – winter evenings left plenty of time to think.
Not about how to improve the hotel, but about what business the castle should actually be in.
The answer wasn’t accommodation.
It was experience.

We got to work!
Together with a remarkably committed local team of chefs and service staff, reception and housekeeping team, and estate maintenance team, we created a dedicated MICE proposition, and I spent my days knocking on doors in nearby cities, introducing the castle directly to companies that had never considered holding meetings there.

For readers unfamiliar with hotel terminology, MICE stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Events.
Despite the name, no castle mice were ever considered a culinary speciality.
Our chef would never have forgiven me.

Weekends became something entirely different.
The castle already hosted beautiful weddings.
Instead of selling guestrooms, meeting rooms, and restaurant meals separately, we stopped selling components altogether.

We began selling the entire estate.

“Rent a Castle”

For one weekend, the bride and groom didn’t simply reserve a venue.
They became the prince and princess of their own castle.
Their families occupied the estate.
The chapel. The gardens.
The dining rooms. Everything.

Commercially, it changed almost everything.
Bundling the experience improved pricing, simplified operations, concentrated labour, reduced energy consumption and transformed the economics of running such a large historic estate.

Behind the scenes, we rebuilt the management systems as well:

USALI
Cash-flow management
ERP
Business intelligence
Food and beverage; not just marketing context, but cooking and service flow, purchasing, storage, wastage, pilferage, FTE, COS – all of it
Sales representation in the key feeder markets
Marketing cooperation with the estate’s winery

Slowly, almost quietly, the castle began to stand on its own feet.

Eventually, I handed the operation over to a professional General Manager who successfully continued the repositioning and further developed the business.
A wonderful gentleman, professional and courteous, and principled; one of the few hotel managers on my list I will call for help.

Looking back, I sometimes smile at that first night.

The chair under the door was protecting me from imaginary dangers.
The real challenge wasn’t hidden in dark corridors.
It was hidden inside the business model.

Over the years, I’ve discovered that this is true of many organisations.

The problems that keep leaders awake at night are rarely the ones that threaten the future of the enterprise.

The real challenge is usually something much quieter.

Understanding what business the organisation is truly in.
Only then can you begin to build something strong enough to last.

Thank you for reading my story.

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.

Terminology for non-hoteliers:

SOP: Standard Operating Procedure – a documented process describing how a task should be performed to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance.
KPIs: Key Performance Indicators – measurable indicators used to monitor performance and progress against objectives.
ADR: Average Daily Rate – the average room rate paid by guests.
RevPAR: Revenue per Available Room – a measure combining occupancy and room rate to assess hotel revenue performance.
Occupancy: The percentage of available rooms that are occupied.
DOF: Double Occupancy Factor – the average number of guests staying in each occupied room. A DOF of 1.0 means every occupied room has one guest; 2.0 means every occupied room has two guests.
AGC: Average Guest Check – the average amount spent by each guest in a restaurant, bar, or other food and beverage outlet.
CRS: Central Reservation System – the central booking system that manages a hotel’s room inventory, rates, and reservations across all sales channels.
PMS: Property Management System – the software used to manage reservations, guest accounts, and hotel operations.
OTA: Online Travel Agency – websites such as Booking.com or Expedia that sell hotel rooms on behalf of hotels.
GDS: Global Distribution System – a worldwide booking network used by travel agents and corporate travel departments to reserve hotel rooms, flights, and other travel services.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management – systems and processes used to manage guest relationships and marketing.
F&B: Food & Beverage Department – all restaurant, bar, banquet, room service, and catering operations within a hotel.
Half-Board: A hotel meal plan that includes breakfast and one additional meal each day, usually dinner. Drinks other than those specifically included are generally charged separately.
MICE: Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events – the hotel business related to corporate meetings, conferences, exhibitions, and incentive travel.
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning – an integrated software system that connects key business functions such as finance, procurement, inventory, human resources, sales, and reporting into a single platform.
USALI: Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry – the internationally recognised accounting standard used by hotels to measure and compare financial performance.
GOP: Gross Operating Profit – the operating profit generated by the hotel before management fees, rent, financing costs, depreciation, taxes, and other non-operating expenses.
EBITDA: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation – a widely used measure of an organisation’s operating profitability.
COS: Cost of Sales – the direct cost of producing the goods sold, such as food, beverages, or merchandise, expressed as an amount or percentage of revenue.
FTE: Full-Time Equivalent – a standard measure of staffing that converts part-time and seasonal employees into the equivalent number of full-time employees.

About the Author

Website

https://gransier.com

10.06.2026/by gransier

The Banana Republic Hotel and What It Taught Me About Myself

The Gourmet Restaurant That Happened to Have Rooms

The Gourmet Restaurant That Happened to Have Rooms

This story is about the “Highest-and-Best-Use” (HBU) for hotels.

Forget about “location, location, and location” and possibly licensed branding.
It’s all about market positioning, and you really do not need a licensed brand for this.

The hotel was a little gem just outside the city center and a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World.
And while it appeared lovely, it was bleeding from every pore.

The hotel was incurring losses.
It served the wholesale market rather than the high-net-worth individuals it should have served.
Every month was a struggle to meet debt service, payroll, and suppliers, which invited a series of opinions.

By the time I became the hotel’s General Manager, I thought I understood commercial hotel management.
Revenue management had become one of my passions.
I could read a profit and loss statement with confidence and knew how occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR worked together.
To me, commercial success meant improving the rooms department’s performance.

Ownership appointed an external consultant to supervise the hotel.
He held no formal position within the hotel, yet he exercised considerable influence over its direction.
We could hardly have been more different.
His style was demanding, confrontational, and uncompromising.
We challenged each other constantly.

Despite our differences, he possessed an extraordinary commercial instinct.
One day, he proposed something I considered almost reckless.
“We are no longer going to run a hotel with a restaurant,” he said.
“We are going to create a gourmet restaurant that happens to have rooms.”

I disagreed completely.
The destination was becoming increasingly competitive.
In my mind, the obvious answer was better revenue management, stronger pricing, and higher occupancy.
Why would we deliberately invest in a restaurant that might never generate a meaningful profit?

Rather than trying to convince me in a meeting room, he took me into the city.
For several days, we visited the city’s finest restaurants.
We observed how they welcomed guests.
We studied their menus.
We watched how people lingered long after dinner had finished.

During those visits, he quietly recruited several of the city’s best chefs to join our hotel.
When they arrived, I looked at the payroll in disbelief.
It felt as though we had more chefs than cooking stations.
Salary costs exploded.
Food costs increased sharply.

Many nights, I wondered whether this experiment would end my career.
Yet once the decision had been made, I accepted that my responsibility as GM was no longer to debate the strategy.
My responsibility was to make it succeed.

Together with the team, we transformed the guest experience.
We introduced evenings built around music and local social life.
At the end of lunch, every lady received the rose that had stood on her table as a farewell gift.
It was a small gesture, but guests remembered it and talked about it.

One evening, we introduced something we called the “Chef Catwalk.”
The entire kitchen brigade walked proudly through the restaurant carrying their signature dishes as though they were models on a fashion runway.
It was unexpected. It was theatrical.
People loved it.

Local residents began to visit not simply for dinner but because they wanted to be part of what was happening.
Television crews interviewed well-known personalities in the restaurant.
The hotel developed an identity that reached far beyond accommodation.
For the first time, I understood that people were no longer buying a room.
They were buying a story they wanted to become part of.

The restaurant itself never became a major profit centre.
In fact, after all the investment, it only just managed to break even.
Ironically, that was never its real purpose.

The restaurant changed the perception of the entire property.
Our rooms’ guest mix improved. Booking patterns changed.
Guests no longer chose us simply because we had available rooms.
They chose us because they wanted to belong to something distinctive.

The stronger accommodation performance that followed improved the hotel’s annual gross operating profit by 382% within two years.

Looking back, I realised my thinking had been incomplete.
I believed the rooms were the business because they generated a higher profit margin than the restaurant.
They weren’t.
Revenue management remained essential, but only after we had answered a more fundamental question: what was the highest and best use of this particular property?

The business was creating a destination that people actively wanted to experience.
The rooms simply became part of that experience.

I cannot claim the original idea as my own.
It wasn’t.
I can claim to have learned one of the most important lessons of my career.
Sometimes the greatest contribution a leader can make is not to have the best idea.
It is to recognise a better one, make it their own, and execute it with complete conviction.

This project taught me that numbers optimise performance.
They do not define purpose.
Before improving a hotel’s KPIs, you first have to understand what business the hotel is truly in.
Only then do the numbers tell you whether your strategy is working.

Thank you for reading my story.

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.

Terminology for non-hoteliers:

SOP: Standard Operating Procedure – a documented process describing how a task should be performed to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance.
KPIs: Key Performance Indicators – measurable indicators used to monitor performance and progress against objectives.
ADR: Average Daily Rate – the average room rate paid by guests.
RevPAR: Revenue per Available Room – a measure combining occupancy and room rate to assess hotel revenue performance.
Occupancy: The percentage of available rooms that are occupied.
DOF: Double Occupancy Factor – the average number of guests staying in each occupied room. A DOF of 1.0 means every occupied room has one guest; 2.0 means every occupied room has two guests.
AGC: Average Guest Check – the average amount spent by each guest in a restaurant, bar, or other food and beverage outlet.
CRS: Central Reservation System – the central booking system that manages a hotel’s room inventory, rates, and reservations across all sales channels.
PMS: Property Management System – the software used to manage reservations, guest accounts, and hotel operations.
OTA: Online Travel Agency – websites such as Booking.com or Expedia that sell hotel rooms on behalf of hotels.
GDS: Global Distribution System – a worldwide booking network used by travel agents and corporate travel departments to reserve hotel rooms, flights, and other travel services.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management – systems and processes used to manage guest relationships and marketing.
F&B: Food & Beverage Department – all restaurant, bar, banquet, room service, and catering operations within a hotel.
Half-Board: A hotel meal plan that includes breakfast and one additional meal each day, usually dinner. Drinks other than those specifically included are generally charged separately.
MICE: Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events – the hotel business related to corporate meetings, conferences, exhibitions, and incentive travel.
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning – an integrated software system that connects key business functions such as finance, procurement, inventory, human resources, sales, and reporting into a single platform.
USALI: Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry – the internationally recognised accounting standard used by hotels to measure and compare financial performance.
GOP: Gross Operating Profit – the operating profit generated by the hotel before management fees, rent, financing costs, depreciation, taxes, and other non-operating expenses.
EBITDA: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation – a widely used measure of an organisation’s operating profitability.
COS: Cost of Sales – the direct cost of producing the goods sold, such as food, beverages, or merchandise, expressed as an amount or percentage of revenue.
FTE: Full-Time Equivalent – a standard measure of staffing that converts part-time and seasonal employees into the equivalent number of full-time employees.

About the Author

Website

https://gransier.com

09.06.2026/by gransier

Tag Archive for: Business Transformation

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