Profile Leader Client Feature

HIS OWN MAN

Geoffrey Gelardi had the good fortune of being born with an hotelier’s spoon in his mouth. But beyond that, the Managing Director of The Lanesborough has built a formidable reputation for ceaseless innovation and knowing just what to do for his gilded guests. Gina McAdam met him in the unique Garden Room @ The Lanesborough.

The weather outside is below freezing and much of London is at a standstill, nursing a hangover of snow and ice. Yet inside The Lanesborough hotel, perched serenely on Hyde Park Corner, the air is warm and buzzing with good-natured activity, a very British glamour and a distinct lightness of touch. For one thing, the doorman, concierge and bellhop all have a spring in their step and a twinkle in their eye.

Standing at the centre of the narrow lobby, you have the sense of an establishment that wears its gilded clientele and exotic Regency interiors with easy grace. Such self-assurance makes The Lanesborough seem like the old-money aristocrat of London hotels, despite the fact that it’s only twenty years old.

Step forward Geoffrey Gelardi, Managing Director of The Lanesborough. A fourth generation hotelier, he’s also one of London hostelry’s most enduring leaders. He was there when The Lanesborough first opened its doors in 1990 after a multi-million pound redevelopment transforming what was once a hospital into the favourite haunt of the seriously affluent, recession-proof traveller and guest. These are people willing to pay up to £7,000 a night for a suite or £950 per head to savour the Dom Perignon Menu at Apsleys – A Heinz Beck Restaurant. No one said that oyster and champagne risotto was for everyone.

Walking tall

When we first meet Gelardi, he too is walking with a spring in his step. This is even before the announcement that Apsleys – A Heinz Beck Restaurant has earned a Michelin star in a space of five months, the fastest London restaurant to do so. A great lover of Italian food, Gelardi personally chose Heinz Beck, one of the world’s top chefs, for The Lanesborough.

‘I think Heinz Beck was one of the best decisions I ever made,’ Gelardi says, grinning widely. ‘I was impressed by his three-Michelin-starred La Pergola in Rome when I visited with my wife and a very amusing restaurateur friend. No, I wouldn’t call myself a foodie, just don’t mess with my meat!’ Or with him, for that matter, or the standards he sets for his hotel.

‘I feel that if you’re going to pay a certain amount for something and it’s supposed to be the best, you should get the best. And it’s the manager’s job to make sure that happens,’ he says, looking purposefully around him.

Secret garden

By now we’re comfortably installed on smooth leather-on-rattan chairs in The Garden Room @ The Lanesborough, a lush, laid back open-air hideaway for those who still practise the dark art of smoking, in this case cigars costing as much as £1,500 each.

Pasquale, the Amalfi-born manager and resident cigar expert, is hovering over us, quietly pronouncing the virtues of premium hand-rolled Havanas, including the pure organic tobacco of a Cohiba Sigulo 1 and the full-bodied flavour of the limited edition Partagas Serie No.5, a petit robusto. Since being called upon more often to entertain guests in London’s only smoking bar -- winner of The Imbibe Hotel Bar Awards 2009 – Gelardi has come to enjoy his cigars more. In truth, even non-aficionados might be tempted by the sumptuous humidor at the entrance to the bar.
This luxurious smoking den is just one example of Gelardi’s determination to anticipate guest needs, and in a style in tune with their expectations. That it was even contemplated at all reveals the sharp business brain behind The Lanesborough’s profitability from day one.

‘Before the new rules and regulations about smoking in public spaces came into force in 2008, we used to do a great business in cigars and cognac,’ Gelardi explains. ‘So when they announced that there was to be no smoking anywhere in public areas, obviously we knew we’d lose a fair amount of revenue and started looking around for what to do.’

What to do meant going through the necessary rigmarole of seeking approval from English Heritage and the Health & Safety Executive, before turning what used to be a redundant stone-clad courtyard into the only one of its kind in any hotel.

‘So here we are, outdoors, in the middle of winter,’ he chuckles, drawing on his Partagas. Gelardi has reason to feel satisfied. The bar turned over £1.2 million in its first year, and every month patrons spend £30,000 on cigars alone.

Giving good value

Privilege and standards come at a price, and if The Lanesborough has never been one of the most inexpensive hotels in London, that’s because the stakes are also much higher. Gelardi says, ‘Our guests are relaxed about paying a decent price but they expect good value, which they get.’

To illustrate, he tells the tale of the regular guest who couldn’t check into the hotel’s six-room Royal Suite because an earlier guest had chosen to extend his stay without notice. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Gelardi made the decision to tuck the disappointed guest into a suite in one of London’s other grand hotels, pick up the tab, and supply him with use of The Lanesborough’s Phantom Rolls Royce free of charge for the duration of his stay at the rival property.

‘He came in here nearly every day,’ Gelardi recalls, ‘and he basically said, “Geoff, this is actually the first time in my entire life anyone’s ever chucked me from my hotel, and probably the last, and it’s certainly the last time you’re doing it. But you did it so nicely, I’m coming back in three months and I want the Royal, no questions asked.” He then stayed for six months, left, and afterwards returned to take up residence for another three months.’

At the stratosphere of the hospitality industry, turning around precarious situations so both guest and hotel still come out on top is an art form. As a value proposition, it goes way beyond the complimentary wireless internet access, free in-room entertainment (including all movies), free laptops in every room and complimentary pressing on arrival -- among others -- that are standard Lanesborough.

The faithful apprentice

The art of hotel management flows through Gelardi’s veins. Growing up, many a family holiday was spent in hotels while his father Albert, a top executive at Trust House Forte, opened properties throughout the UK and North America.

His father’s father was the legendary Commendatore Giulio Gelardi, probably the world’s first truly international hotelier (his passing was deemed a milestone by Time Magazine). In the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Commandatore ran The Savoy and Claridges, opened the Waldorf Towers in New York in 1931 – on loan from Claridges – and spent six months of each year shuttling, before the age of mass transatlantic travel, between New York and London. Early in his career, he was Managing Director of CIGA Hotels, whose portfolio included opulent Venetian palazzos. Giulio’s own father had run hotels in Italy.

Of his five siblings, fourth-generation Geoffrey Gelardi is the only one who chose to become a hotelier. His first job was at the bottom of the pile, working as a steward at what used to be the Sonnesta Towers, now the Carlton Towers in London.

‘One of my father’s most important messages was that if I wanted to be anything in this business, I had to understand things from the ground up. I didn’t want to finish my university degree and my father said that a degree was for opening doors and he could do that for me. But I was made to understand that I was going to do what he told me to do at the level he wanted, and I was never going to become even a supervisor. So I was moved around as a commis, and it was one of the most fun times of my life.’

Fun, fun, fun

The idea of having fun on the job is something that has stayed with Gelardi, forming the basis of a tough love principle that he passes on to his colleagues.

‘I always tell people here, if you’re not having fun and like what you do, you can do me a favour and go somewhere else. If you don’t like what you do, guests can tell straight away. I’m not naive to expect people to jump out of bed every morning, but you have to think, this is a decent place to work, people are managed properly and given opportunities and the ability to do their job correctly. It’s as good as it can get.’

He admits that it’s just not possible to be on a euphoria trip every day, and he himself falls short. ‘But you have to look at things from a broad perspective and say to yourself that you like and enjoy what you’re doing. Throughout your career there will always be good, bad, awful days but it can also be rosy for weeks and even months on end.’

Gelardi thinks that many of the new generation of hospitality graduates tend to expect too much, and that they still have to earn the experience and exposure to handle the demands of a true luxury hotel. The candour of the career hotelier!

Way to the top

As a young man, Gelardi was sent off to work in Paris in the pressurised kitchens of the George V and later as a bartender in Toulouse. He even worked under the celebrated London pastry chef Robert May. This was not a sentimental education.

If anything, rather than his propitious pedigree, Gelardi’s real work experience under tough conditions is what helped him to develop the discipline and hard, perfectionist shell needed to -- fast forward several years – keep a property like The Lanesborough in a class of its own.

‘My father said that because of who he was, I had to be better than others to survive. And I always remembered that. Being as good as everybody else was never good enough as far as I’m concerned or how I’ve tried to do my work, which is as hard as or harder than anyone else. That goes a long way in this business.’

The US is where his career really took off. To this day, he feels only gratitude for the work ethic and opportunities he found across the pond, where he rose to manage the iconic Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles. He was later offered partnership in a boutique five-star hotel in Seattle, where he stayed for five years.

To lead is to innovate

Gelardi believes that people will follow leaders that show them the way, not in the manner of pointing them towards it, but actually knowing how to deliver the goods if they had to. He has little patience for what he calls ‘technocrats’, those who wouldn’t know how to carry out their orders themselves. He clearly doesn’t see himself in this category.

To Gelardi’s credit, The Lanesborough may be grand, but it stays nimble. Gelardi was named Hotel Innovator of the Year in 2008 at the Luxury Travel Advisor Awards, a nod to his on-going efforts to keep the hotel at the forefront of innovation. The goal was set from the very beginning, when The Lanesborough became the first London hotel to offer butler service and top-of-the range technology in all of its 95 guest rooms and suites.

In the pipeline for the new decade are a catalogue of refurbishments and the creation of a new Presidential Suite to capitalise on the on-going demand for the Royal Suite. The point, like the Garden Room @ The Lanesborough, is to stay one step ahead at all times, without making it look like you’re trying too hard.

The Lanesborough was also one of the first hotels to do away with a dress code, which socially and culturally has all but evaporated in the last few years owing to the proliferation of new industries and fresh approaches to style. Says Gelardi, ‘Today you can’t say no jeans, no T-shirt, no sneakers or whatever because some of my best guests and people we deal with on a regular basis I’ve never seen in a suit and tie in my life. But they do take the Royal Suite from time to time. Part of being a manager is being able to make a decision about whether to take a guest or not. You have to size up how people look, which includes their jewellery and posture. You can’t live by rulebooks anymore.’

A sound legacy

But the burden of standards still rests with the hotel and those who run it. At this level, Gelardi says, you can’t afford to make mistakes. If you do, they have to be corrected swiftly.

‘You have to walk a fine line between being tough and maintaining standards,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to make people think that if they make one big mistake, they’re going to get their head chopped off or else that’s it, you won’t get any feedback. And without feedback, you can’t get at the crux of the problem. As an industry, we’re not good at asking the extra question, that is, why did this happen? Why, for example, did the television fail? The solution is easy, but correcting the problem may not be.’

The Lanesborough does have an enviable reputation for happy, long-staying staff. Remember the twinkling eyes. Gelardi’s formula is simple. ‘I really do think that if you treat people properly and fairly, they will work much harder for you. People don’t mind proper discipline and standards as long as they know what they are. I think people actually like good structure. Having said that, we have very broad guidelines because we want people to be themselves. It’s not a case of you can’t do this or you can’t do that. All my guidelines are very gray and there are no rules that can’t be broken as long as they’re in the best interests of the guest and the hotel.’

Gelardi admits that sometimes even decisions taken in the best interests of the guest and hotel might be the wrong ones, but as a manager he would rather people made the wrong decision than none at all.

‘My job is to make sure my employees have enough training, personnel and equipment to do the job the way it has to be done. Otherwise it’s my fault. But when everything is in place, you can be that much tougher because there are no excuses!’

It’s 8.30pm and Geoffrey Gelardi is off to meet a client who will certainly warm to his straight-talking, easy charm. Later that night, at goodness knows what time, he will be driven home by his chauffeur where he might plan his annual holiday in Arizona, rustling cattle. He says that he hasn’t had to travel too much for St Regis during the last eight years, which he prefers so he can devote all his time and energy to this unique property. He really loves it.

They’re in safe hands, the family legacy and The Lanesborough hotel.

To learn more about The Lanesborough, visit their website at www.lanesborough.com