Hello everyone,

I hope you are all having a fabulous week – even though London seems to be cloaked with gray skies this week – although it has remained mild – but apparently the temperature is due to drop sharply tomorrow so it will definitely feel like more seasonal January weather from tomorrow! I normally have a holiday to the sun planned for January or February but it hasn’t worked out that well this year so I am having to wait until April  and at the moment it does feel like a long wait to see some decent sunshine!!

This week we have been having a mini staff appreciation week in the hotel with lots of different activities – our morning briefing meeting has been themed by different departments, we have had some great inter departmental competitions including cocktail making, cake decorating  and valet standards – which is a great opportunity for staff to showcase to other staff from different departments what they do and what standards they have to maintain – so it is a fun form of cross training! Today we had a wonderful themed Caribbean lunch in the staff restaurant -  the team did a fantastic job – I almost felt as if I was on holiday for the half an hour it took me to have lunch!

We seem to be racing through January at a rate of knots – yesterday we just launched our Valentines packages and menus! We have a delicious six course menu that we will be serving the One Twenty One Two restaurant and then a speciality afternoon tea designed by our lovely Pastry Chef Jo that will be served in the Lounge – or you can package them both up with an over night stay so there are plenty of options at your disposal! As Valentines is on a Tuesday this year  – and not everyone wants to celebrate on a mid week night we have all our Valentines’ offers open for both weekends both before and after the 14th February. Oh and Ladies if you don’t get asked the question you have been waiting for on the 14th February – don’t forget it is a Leap Year this year so you can take matters into your own hands on the 29th February……!!

Next week I will be attending the annual Master Innholder General Manager conference which is probably one of the most important events that takes place for General Managers in the UK – this year we have a record number of attendees – over 450 General Managers are signed up to attend – there is a fabulous line up of speakers notably Danny Meyer who has written a Bestselling book call ‘Setting the Table’ . There are also some interesting panel discussions – in particular one titles ‘Who need who’ which has a panel with representatives from the AA, Trip Advisor , Best Loved Hotels and other industry experts – and will be led by the indomitable Mr Jeremy Rata – Managing Director of Bovey Castle and one of my favourite hoteliers who is never short of things to say or shy in sharing his forthright views!!! So I am sure it is going to be a lively debate!! This is a great conference as it is designed to be relevant to managers of differing levels across the spectrum of our industry – from large five star corporate hotels to smaller family run hotels. It remains the only conference of it’s type that is organised by General Managers for General Managers   – and it is also one of my favourite events to attend as it gives you the chance to catch up with so many friends and colleagues in the industry that you do not often get the chance to see!!

Even though it is January – London as always has plenty to offer and if you are at a loose end this weekend here are a few thoughts of things to do – The London Bike Show is on at Excel form the 12-15th January – this is a 3 day show that provides a unique opportunity to meet some of cycling’s top stars, try out the latest bikes and watch some incredible live demonstrations. If you enjoy heritage and Royalty there are also Private Tours of Buckingham Palace still available until the 29th January – this gives you the chance to enjoy a special tour of the Palace’s fantastic state rooms with a private guide – the tour lasts approximately two hours and gives you a great opportunity to see our monarch’s London home at close quarters then I would highly recommend this tour. One other highlight is the Cirque du Soleil has returned to the Royal Albert Hall until the 16th February with TOTEM for four week of awe inspiring acrobatics!! What ever you end up doing I hope you have a spectacular weekend!

Anyway dear bloggers that is all for this week – I am afraid the blog front will be quiet for a week or so as I am heading across the Atlantic again to spread the word about the Royal Horseguards to lots of travel agents in New York and Washington – but I will be back with more updates upon my return!

Anna

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Hello everyone!

I hope you have all survived this wild weather we have been experiencing this week – on Tuesday night I thought the roof of my flat was going to blow off in the storm!! Luckily it did not but the noise of the wind and the rain made sleeping impossible so in the end I got up at 4.30am and came into work – and not being a morning person by any stretch of the imagination you can see how bad it must have been!!

This is probably our last busy week of Christmas functions in the hotel – our Food and Beverage teams have really been focusing on their daily up selling targets this week and taking great delight in beating their colleagues in the rooms division department  by managing to have a higher daily revenue in food and beverage than rooms on three occasions this week! We all get to benefit on these days as when F&B out perform rooms Ben Purton our Executive Chef normally brings us a little sweet treat to the morning meeting to celebrate their success!! So we all enjoyed the waffles with maple syrup – even if our waistlines did not appreciate it!!

In our morning meeting we start the meeting by taking a few minutes to highlight, discuss and celebrate the successes created in the business the day before as we are trying to spend more time focusing on what went well rather than the natural inclination to talk about the negative – so yesterday the Restaurant achieved it’s highest average check ever at £88, Chris Monico one of the sales team based in New York has had some fantastic appointments with a lot of interest for the hotel on a sales trip to South Florida, the M&E team confirmed £54k new business yesterday of which £12k is for January.

This year we are not sending out Christmas cards from the hotel – instead we have worked with a local charity Make a Memory. The charity’s aim is to support young people to positively contribute to their local communities. They do this by advising and educating them of groups in the local community who need assistance, such as those experiencing hardship due to ill health or disability. They then provide young people with the support and guidance needed in order to plan and run fundraising activities which then fund respite events and experiences.
In 2011 they took children who have been affected by cancer, and their families to Disneyland. They have also organised an annual Halloween party, pamper evenings and trips to adventure parks. The trip to London, which includes an experience at The Royal Horseguards hotel, has been made possible by the fundraising of 6 young students. I think you will agree these families need a break and a bit of fun and happiness if only for a couple of days. Therefore, in the festive spirit, we asked the children to prepare a card themselves on how they see the hotel, in return we have organised a very special event for them with a Christmas Afternoon Tea which we will host next Thursday in true Royal Horseguards style. The picture we have chosen for our card has been drawn by 10 year old Eben Kriek, who has a 5 year old brother suffering from Leukemia  and if you want to see this extraordinary picture of our hotel check it out on Facebook  at Guoman Hotels.

It is hard to believe it is now a year since I started my weekly blog about the life and times of the Royal Horseguards – so I would like to thank the many of you who have followed the blog during this time – and I hope it has given you a little insight about us, our hotel and the ethos of our teams! There will be one more blog to go before Christmas and New Year so I will save my festive messages until next week – until then I hope you survive the arctic weather forecast this weekend and more from our lovely hotel next week!

Anna

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Hello everyone,

I hope you have all had a spectacularly successful week – I have returned after my whirlwind visit to New York have just about recovered from the jet lag in order to embark on another very busy week!!

I enjoyed my frenetically busy week in the Big Apple working with our US sales team – there are now several hundred travel agents that know more about The Royal Horseguards than there were before we went! I also went to Boston for one day – I experienced the delights of the Amtrack Trains which took three and a half hours but was still quicker than flying and they have free wifi so at least it meant I could catch up on all my ‘day job’ General Manager e-mails while travelling! In the latter three days of the week we went out of Manhattan to New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester to visit different travel agents that were not so familiar with the Royal Horseguards – we took Magnolia Bakery Cupcakes (made famous by being featured in Sex and the City!!) I have to say they looked divine and I am not sure how I managed to resist the temptation to try one – but I did (which is just as well considering how much business entertaining I had to do over there!) – but the agents loved them so hopefully they will also assist them in remembering us when they are booking London next!!!

This week we have had some great meetings in the hotel – Carol Paddison ran a feedback session with all the Heads of Departments so that we can become more accomplished in giving feedback to each other – sometimes it is so easy to get caught up in being so busy we can forget to recognise the team members that go the extra mile and also it is important we are focused and practiced on giving constructive feedback when it is necessary as well! Feedback is an important part of our leadership culture and so this week we thought it would be good to focus on it and practice with each other. Then on Wednesday we also held a meeting for all the senior managers including myself who are mentoring up and coming apprentices and supervisors in the business to ensure we are nurturing our talent and future managers of tomorrow – we spent some time revisiting what the role of the mentee and mentor is and what each party hopes to get out of the meetings – I think this will be a great support to some of our future superstars as they continue to climb the ladder of success.

London continues it’s build up towards Christmas – the Southbank Festival which includes the Traditional Christmas Market opens on Friday 18th November and will be running until the 24th December – there will be over sixty traditional wooden chalets festooned in fairy lights all along the Queen’s Walk offering an array of different Christmas presents – if past years are to go by you can soak up a magical riverside Christmas atmosphere, browse for gifts, eat drink and there is also plenty to entertain the children including a big carousel ride. Also included during these dates are a Christmas Chocolate festival from 9-11th December and two real Food Christmas Markets the first on the 2-4 December and the second on the 16-23rd December – so absolutely loads to do and see on this key landmark site – for more information visit the Southbank Centre website.

Then a highlight to end the week tomorrow night I will be attending The Hotel Cateys which is an industry awards dinner that was created to recognise and applaud people and teams within the industry that achieve great things and also work so hard to support the UK’s hotel sector. There will be over 750 people attending this event so it gives everyone in our industry the chance to celebrate some great achievements and also network and re-connect with friends and colleagues that you don’t always get the opportunity to see very often. So I am certainly looking forward to a fantastic evening – made all the better for being on a Friday so I do not have to worry about getting up early for work the next day!!

Anna

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Hello Everyone

I hope you are all having a spectacularly good week – even though it has felt as if Autumn and Winter are really here now that evenings are dark so early now after the clocks changing last week! Never mind only another six months and they will change back again – and in the meantime over the next few weeks London will be fully alight with sparkly glittery lights as London starts to prepare for the festive season with all the Christmas lights. It is a really magical time to walk around the city and every year they seem to get more impressive and extravagant – I was out running this morning in Hyde Park and noticed the Winter Wonderland is also starting to be built for this year as well – this is a great trip out for the family and will be in it’s fifth year this year – this year they will be having an ice rink for the first time. The Winter Wonderland runs from 18th November until the 3rd January – and if you are interested in more details check out further details here.

The week we have been doing a lot of business reviews with the Heads of Departments – specifically around their balanced scorecards and our progress with our Engagement Survey Action plan – there has been lots of positive progress made – but we are focusing on making sure we have really specific action plans in every department to ensure all the teams in that department understand what the department goals and objectives are and what needs to be done to achieve them. It is a very new process for the team here so there is still a lot of coaching and mentoring need to get this key process really embedded into the hotel. Our Engagement Survey is focused around 12 questions called the Gallup 12 (if you want to know more about these questions – just Google them and they will appear!) I have just placed a print out of them on the wall next to my desk to remind me to stay focused on them personally and challenge myself as a leader how I can make sure I am applying them consistently when I am walking round the hotel and interacting with the team.

We have also been working on our Apprenticeship programme – Carol Paddison our HR Business Partner had a meeting at Westminster Kingsway College today to discuss how we can continue to develop our apprentice programme further and also develop a bespoke programme for chefs for all the hotels in London. We have also decided to allocate everyone of our current apprentices a senior manager as a mentor to continue to support them as they develop their careers further within our hotel and group – so we will be starting this new initiative next week with a training sessions for the Mentors!

Last night we welcomed about thirty journalists to the hotel where we hosted an event to showcase our food and beverage departments in the hotel – and specifically the creativity of Ben Purton our Executive Head Chef and Joanne Todd our Head Pastry Chef. The event was held in the cellar which is a very historical room in One Whitehall Place as it contains the foundation stone for the building laid by William Gladstone in 1884 – it was also a room used a lot during the war as there was an underground passage here that used to link the building with the War Rooms and the Houses of Parliament – sadly it is blocked up now but it is a great reminder of how the room was used in a different era in time!  The team were also using the event to showcase some of the Guy Fawkes Afternoon Tea which we have on promotion in the Lounge at the moment – the journalists really seemed to enjoy the evening and we had some really fabulous feedback today as a result of the event.

Anyway dear bloggers another post coming to an end – I am afraid there will be radio silence on the blog next week as I will once again be taking the US by storm with a very frenetic and busy week of sales calls in New York and Boston – a big thank you needs to go out to our US sales team – to James Enright, Michael Laumanns and Chris Monico for securing some outstanding appointments for Adam Morriss our Director of Sales and Marketing and myself next week – there is going to be no worries about our time management next week  – practically every minute our feet will be on US soil has been accounted for!! Let’s hope the crazy weather New York has been experiencing will have moved on by the time we arrive in the Big Apple this weekend!

So I will be back with more updates form our lovely hotel on the week commencing 14th November!!

Anna

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Hello everyone,

I hope you have all had a fantastic week – despite the weather – it definitely feels as if Winter is well on the way now!

We have had another busy week at the Royal Horseguards starting on Sunday when we welcomed 55 Global Directors of Sales from Preferred Hotels to the Royal Horseguards and One Whitehall Place for dinner and it was also an opportunity to showcase our hotel to them – so we now have another 55 ambassadors that know a lot more about us and can sell our property around the world now! Preferred Hotels were having their global sales conference in London so it was a great opportunity for Adam Morriss our Director of Sales to spend time interacting and strengthening some key relationships  – particularly for some new markets around the world that we are interested in getting more business from.

Today we have our Staff Quarterly Meeting to update all the staff on what has been happening in the hotel and what we will be focusing on over the next three months – we will be spending some time focusing on the hotels vision, reviewing our engagement survey action plan and to make the update on the financial results more interesting we have put that together in the form of a Team Quiz with prizes to be won!  We are also working hard to increase our afternoon tea sales in the hotel – so in order to give everyone a bit more information on Afternoon Tea at the Royal Horseguards we have made a little film on a day in the life of an afternoon tea – which shows afternoon tea being prepared from scratch by the Pastry team right up to being served to the customer! Once we have shown the film we will then serve a sample of the afternoon tea to all the staff so they get to experience the product as well! We try to make this meeting a little more interactive and participative so it is not all about just going through things on PowerPoint presentations – but every quarter we do have to challenge ourselves to think of new ways to be creative with presenting key business messages.

Following the Staff Quarterly Meeting we are holding a staff social evening – organised by our Social Committee in the hotel – so we are all having a buffet and drinks in a  bar close to the hotel –it is a proven statistic that staff engagement is often improved if people feel they have good friends at work – so it is important we provide a platform away from work where people can get to know other staff outside of their own department  – and we can live up to our motto that ‘we work hard and play hard!’ So I am sure the Opal Bar are all ready for our lively team to arrive tonight – and hopefully the DJ has remember to bring his Abba Gold CD along as well!!

Anyway duty calls and I need to get to my next meeting on time so will have to finish off for now – I hope you all have a fabulous weekend and enjoy the benefit of the extra hour on Sunday due to the clocks going back – and don’t forget Halloween on Monday as well – there is a lot going on in London for Halloween this weekend – London Eye, London Dungeon and Fortnum and Mason all have events on for Halloween for more information check out Visit London.

Anna

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Hello everyone

I hope you have all had a fantastic week and enjoyed these last few days of sunshine.

This week we have been focusing on the forthcoming renovation to our meetings and events space in One Whitehall Place – on Monday I attended a meeting at our corporate offices at Heathrow to review the investment we needed to be able to upgrade this space. One Whitehall Place is made up of some glorious grade 2 listed rooms which are beautiful examples of Victorian architecture  – they were fully renovated about 10 years ago but even though the rooms are full of character and heritage it is time to invest in their appearance by carrying out a soft refurbishment which means we will work with English Heritage – as you cannot renovate any listed areas without having their consent -  and agree a scheme to update the carpets, curtains and redecorate the whole venue! I had a meeting with Lorna Griffiths, our designer on Friday so it is all systems go now – although  it will still be a few months until it comes to fruition as with all projects like this there is a quite long lead time to getting the right permissions and – even once the carpet is designed – it will take at least 10-12 weeks for the manufacturer to make it – as always all the things you want to happen quickly take longer than you would like – but this in particular will be worth waiting for and will give our venue a much needed fresher and more luxurious look and feel.

Half term is fast approaching next week and as always London has lots to offer – many of the museums will have special exhibitions on such as the V&A museum which has the  Museum of Childhood  which has recently had an  extensive refurbishment,  The museum has been amassing childhood-related objects and toys  since 1872 and continues to do so. There are regular exhibitions upstairs and the V&A Museum of Childhood has plenty of hands-on activities for kids and special events at weekends and during school holidays, while the café helps to revive flagging grown-ups.

Halloween is just round the corner as well and there are plenty of kids activities in the city to keep you occupied for that as well such as the London Eye is promoting a wicked witch capsule. Also, Maltida the Musical is due to open at the Cambridge Theatre on October 25th which is adapted form Roald Dahl novel – we are so fortunate in London as it is such a dynamic city with so much to see and do and the October Half Term is a perfect week to visit the city as it is not so frenetically busy with tourists as it can be in the summer sometimes – hopefully the weather will hold and the sun will shine down which makes it perfect for sight seeing as well!

We have had a busy week in the hotel and our Chocolate Afternoon tea sold well as part of Chocolate Week last week – our next special afternoon tea will be for Guy Fawkes so will be available form the 31st October – our pastry chef Jo is busy finalizing the menu for it now – so I will of course keep you posted!!
Anyway dear bloggers that is all for my update this week – you will not hear from me next week as I am taking a weeks holiday but I will be back the week after with more updates from the Royal Horseguards – so I wish you all a very successful week next week – and I also want to wish our newly appointed Inventory Manager Lukas Vaverka the very best of luck in running the Amsterdam marathon this weekend – he is hoping to achieve it in three hours – which is a phenomenal time it is  for someone like me that takes just over an hour to run six miles anyway.

Anna

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