Eric Long, general manager of the Waldorf-Astoria
As told to Lauren Elkies
We’re operating a luxury hotel and a super-luxury hotel under one roof: The Waldorf-Astoria, which has roughly 1,175 keys, and The Waldorf Towers, which has the remaining 240 keys.
My responsibility is to run the whole complex.
I’m in at approximately 7 in the morning. I’m usually out by 7:30 or 8 p.m.
My job is to coach, to ensure that everyone works effectively together in every aspect of the business. I get particularly involved in sales and marketing, finance, human resources — particularly in the area of staff selection and oversight of our capital reinvestment program.
My day is largely comprised of meetings of short duration. They’re five minutes. They could be 20 minutes. A long meeting would be one hour.
I’ve been at The Waldorf for 13 years. I’ve got the enjoyment of what hotel people really get into this business for — there’s a great deal of satisfaction in working with people and seeing the light in someone’s eyes when they’ve really had a great stay experience.
This is a busy place. We’re sold out almost every night.
We have about 1,675 people on the staff: 125 on the management team; 50 on the supervisory staff; and 1,500 men and women who work in our frontline positions.
We go through an average 3,000 to 5,000 towels a day. We get up to an average of 40 to 80 primary deliveries a day. I’m not talking about single packages — we get hundreds of packages. Some customers will get 200 or 300 themselves if they are planning a meeting here. We spend well in excess of $5 million a year on electricity.
We have well in excess of 50 different venues. Whether you have a small reception, a meeting, a dinner party, a lunch — actual events each year, we do well over 12,000.
We sometimes are cleaning and preparing accommodations literally hours before the projected guest’s arrival for that series of suites, etc. It is sometimes a scene out of a movie.
Somehow, we always make it. Occasionally, we will misplace a bag. In one special case, it was critical that we get that bag to the guest at his next destination by no later than 9 a.m. the following morning. As the various shipping services had closed for the evening, we asked for a volunteer to deliver the bag. One of our bell captains rushed to the airport and flew to an island in the Caribbean to make it happen.
We have so many high-profile people that prefer us because it doesn’t feel like a traditional hotel. Every president since Herbert Hoover has always stayed here. In some properties it is such an uncommon occurrence that it will take the property, in conjunction with the Secret Service, anywhere from three to five days just to prepare for that visit. We have been through this so many times we could do it within a matter of two hours.
One of the mottos of The Waldorf, the original Waldorf, really summed it up beautifully: [the hotel handles] “the difficult, immediately; the impossible, a few minutes longer.”
Christoph Schmidinger, general manager of the Four Seasons Hotel New York
As told to Lauren Elkies
I have had the pleasure of overseeing the entire hotel since early 2004. I couldn’t do that without help, of course.
We have 700 employees. About half of the employees are working in the food and beverage area. More than 100 work in housekeeping. You have about 100 working in the front office — where you check in and check out — and the concierge. We have about 80 management positions, including an assistant hotel manager.
It’s an intense job like every other job here in New York. It is almost a seven-day-a-week job; I start working at 8 in the morning [and stay] until 8 at night.
One of my main duties is to make sure the operation of the hotel runs smoothly throughout the day. We are also renovating the hotel on a continuous basis. That needs to be planned and managed.
There are 368 rooms. In a month like December, we have about 600 guests sleeping in our hotel every day, plus hundreds of people coming to the bars and restaurants. We provide our guests with about 3,000 towels a day.
Little things can go wrong. Fortunately, knock wood, nothing major. Sometimes maybe a customer doesn’t have hot water in his room, or the TV doesn’t work, or you weren’t able to assign the specific room a customer might have reserved or requested. You have to deal with it somehow, whether it’s your fault or not.
I have eight function rooms, the smallest is for eight or 10 people and it goes to about 120 people in my largest room. I have about 2,000 events a year all together.
We get about 60 deliveries a day — there are between 60 and 100 packages of all kinds. For electricity, we spend about $2.5 million a year.
It is a beautiful hotel and I have the privilege to eat in the restaurants and in the bars. You enjoy that on the one hand. On the other hand, you do that because you want to constantly ensure that the product is at the level you want it to be. So it’s always, somehow, related to work. If I really want to have either a relaxing drink or a relaxing meal with my wife or with friends, then I go to other hotels.