Hospitality Careers Archive

Tag Archive for: Hospitality Careers

Introduction – Becoming My Own Project

Introduction – Becoming My Own Project

This series of articles was never part of a plan.
For most of my professional life, I have been asked to analyse businesses, hotels, projects, organisations, and occasionally the people leading them.
I would arrive in an unfamiliar place, ask questions, review reports, challenge assumptions, search for root causes, identify risks, and try to understand why things were performing as they were.

Over time, I developed a certain methodology:

Observe
Listen
Dive deep into the business
Challenge assumptions by asking hard questions
Follow the evidence
Look for patterns
Distinguish symptoms from causes

And eventually ask a simple question: What is really happening here?

For the last 15 years, I applied this approach to others.
First as an independent adviser, then with a team of fellow specialists carefully assembled over many years, and eventually, in parallel, as a sector coordinator for a development bank.
My work brought me into contact with entrepreneurs, family businesses, investors, institutions, and banks across a wide variety of countries, cultures, and business environments.
Looking back, I believe I have helped many small and medium-sized businesses grow, adapt, or recover.
It is a heartwarming feeling to have done something meaningful.

The framework with the development bank was retired for all participating advisers, bringing my own involvement to a close after eight years of uninterrupted service.
Assignments ended. Roles changed. Professional priorities shifted.
After more than twenty-five years in hospitality and advisory work, I found myself entering a period of transition.
For the first time in a very long time, I had the opportunity to stop and reflect.
Frankly, the timing was probably good, if not overdue.

For years I had spent too much of my time away from home, moving between assignments, hotels, airport lounges, and meetings.
Suddenly, I had time for family, long walks with the dog, and, for once, plenty of time for myself.

Initially, the objective was practical. I wanted to improve my professional positioning.
Like many professionals approaching a new phase of their career, I was reviewing old projects and thinking about what I wanted to do next.
But the exercise gradually evolved into something else.
Instead of asking where I had worked, I started asking what I had learned.
Instead of reviewing achievements, I started reviewing experiences.
Instead of analysing businesses, I became the subject of my own analysis.

The process was not entirely comfortable.
For the first time, I became the subject of my own hard questions.
Looking backward rarely is. Some memories involved success.
Others involved mistakes, disappointments, failures, conflicts, poor judgement, misplaced trust, and lessons learned the hard way.

Titles changed. Projects came and went. Countries changed.
Yet something else happened.
As I reconnected with people from different periods of my life, some conversations resumed as if no time had passed at all.
Others never happened. Some doors remained open. Others had quietly closed. A few I chose to close myself.

The lessons remained.

The articles in this book are not intended as management theory written from an academic distance.
Nor are they intended as a memoir.
Rather, they are an honest reflection on experiences that shaped how I think, how I lead, and how I understand the world today.
They are also a reflection of what I have come to believe matters most.

Some lessons came from hospitality itself. Others came from remarkable people.
Some emerged from advisory work.
And some came from life outside hospitality altogether.

Together, they tell a story that took me many years to understand.
Not the story of a career. The story of the person behind it.

Looking back, I realise that hospitality taught me much more than how to run hotels.

It taught me curiosity, and…

Perseverance
Respect
Calmness
Leadership
Responsibility
Trust

… and eventually, humility.

Whether these lessons will resonate with others, I do not know.
But they have helped me understand myself.

Before deciding where I wanted to go next, I first needed to understand how I had arrived here.
And perhaps that is reason enough to write them down.

And by doing so, perhaps I will discover what else there is to learn.

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

20.06.2026/by gransier

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 Prague 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.
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 crisis taught me calmness.

This is the fifth 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

Website

https://gransier.com

17.06.2026/by gransier

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 fourth 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

Website

https://gransier.com

17.06.2026/by gransier

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 third 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

Website

https://gransier.com

17.06.2026/by gransier

Tag Archive for: Hospitality Careers

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