A brilliant move: Brian Williams MD of Swire Hotels

Brian Williams relishes the idea of frontier travel, the allure and intrigue of the unexplored. He reads virtually everything he can about untamed territories, and why not? The Managing Director of Swire Hotels is helping to guide one of Asia’s legendary ‘hongs’ – trading houses – on a new adventure: creating and managing small luxury and contemporary hotels that provide exceptional experiences for travellers seeking individuality, style and personalised service.

When John Swire moved from Yorkshire to Liverpool to seek his fortune in trade in the early 19th century, little did he know that he was really on the way to building a corporate brand with particular resonance in Asia.

But in a century where travel has become less of a discretionary activity than a lifestyle, even the notion of defining the customer experience and what people expect of it is somewhat forbidding.

Luckily, in Asia Pacific and particularly China and Hong Kong -- where Swire’s footprint is nothing if not vast – having the Swire name helps. The 200 year-old Swire Group is a global conglomerate whose business activities cover everything from aviation to agriculture, property to shipping. When John Swire moved from Yorkshire to Liverpool to seek his fortune in trade in the early 19th century, little did he know that he was really on the way to building a corporate brand with particular resonance in Asia.

‘You know if Swire is behind it, it’s going to have the stamp of quality. It will be safe, secure, consistent, and properly managed. It’s going to have good customer service, a sense of authenticity and longevity. In a Swire hotel, things are going to work,’ says Williams.

If reviews are anything to go by, The Opposite House in The Village, Sanlitun, central Beijing, certainly works. Opened in summer 2008 in the middle of the Beijing Olympics, Swire Hotels’ first China property has smashed all expectations, and with its invisible reception desks and ‘no fuss, no muss’ approach, may even signify the future of luxury hotels.

An iconoclast? More like moving with, or better yet, anticipating the times. Williams knows that the templates are shifting in this age of the uber-sophisticated customer. ‘One of the things we try very hard to do is to make sure our service is absolutely appropriate for our type of customer. And I don’t think the customers who want to stay in our type of hotel are looking for that old fashioned, traditional service. They’re not looking for anything that’s any less ‘expert’ in terms of delivery, but something a little different in the way it’s delivered.’

"‘One of the things we try very hard to do is to make sure our service is absolutely appropriate for our type of customer ."

The company is opening its second hotel, the 117-room The Upper House, in Hong Kong’s plush Pacific Place in October 2009. The idea is to have smaller scale, upscale hotels with generally around 100-115 rooms. ‘We’re not looking at multiple function space and banqueting and conferences. It’s very much for the individual traveller,’ says Williams.

Swire Hotels was officially launched in 2008 as a new division within Swire Properties, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Swire Group. Swire’s long-established expertise in property, travel and tourism – it owns Cathay Pacific Airways, Hong Kong’s flagship carrier -- made the formation of a hotels division a case of logical progression. ‘The hotel business is really travel, tourism and property, depending on which way you look at it,’ says Williams.

Hotel ownership is in Swire’s blood. The company has significant financial investments in four established hotels in Hong Kong -- Conrad, Marriott, Shangri-La and Novotel City Plaza -- and also owns 75% of the Mandarin Oriental in Miami.

The new division is based in Swire House in London, but Williams flies to Asia several times a month to visit new hotel developments, many of which are located within Swire’s mixed-used property empire. He says that one of the chief aims of setting up Swire Hotels is to enable Swire to become an in-house operator of hotels, rather than just standing back as owner or asset manager. However, this won’t apply in all cases. Swire owns the upcoming Mandarin Oriental, Guangzhou, which Mandarin Oriental will continue to operate.

‘It’s wholly appropriate in the Guangzhou market for the Mandarin Oriental to manage our hotel,’ says Williams, a professed ‘hotelier through and through’ who spent 17 years with Mandarin Oriental and was Chief Executive of the UK-based Scotsman Hotel Group before joining Swire in 2006.

As owner-operator and developer, Swire Hotels is understandably focussed on the return on investment of its real estate portfolio. ‘As property owners, it’s absolutely clear to us that we must maximise the potential income out of an asset,’ says Williams. A rooms-driven model is certainly one that Williams believes will work and is beginning to work.

‘It’s worked very well in Europe and North America where small, interestingly designed upscale hotels allow owners to maximise the use of their real estate with bedroom accommodation aimed at individual travellers,’ he explains. ‘Sometimes, this is preferable to trying to be an all-market entity with significant amounts of real estate allocated to conventions, conferences and banqueting, with all the ancillary support services that goes with them back-of-house.’

‘The hotel business is really travel, tourism and property, depending on which way you look at it.’

Not to say that Swire Hotels doesn’t recognise the value and potential of business travel. Williams has been in the industry long enough to know that the customer of small, luxury hotels will also find use for bigger hotels, depending on the purpose of the visit. This is where Swire’s new primary brand, East, comes in.

The first East hotel will open in Hong Kong in January 2010 as a 350-room, 5-star business lifestyle hotel. It won’t be grand luxe, but it will be fit for purpose. Swire Properties also owns 7.5 million square feet of prime office real estate in Hong Kong’s Taikoo Shing, and the objective will be to create an outstanding rooms-driven product to service its office tenants. A second East will open in Beijing in 2011.

In the UK, Swire Hotels is launching a different business model altogether. Growth will be measured and organic, and the company has already acquired properties in Bristol, Cheltenham, Exeter and Brighton.

‘We’ll be putting up quality, upper but not ‘upper-upscale’ hotels of around 60-70 rooms in each location, and targeting interesting university towns and cathedral cities where they have a 7-day week market, a mixture of business and leisure,’ says Williams. ‘We’re looking at Regency, Victorian or Georgian period buildings in areas that present us with a development or expansion opportunity.’

Depending on the property, the company may add new contemporary wings, restaurants or gardens to attract customers willing to pay around £120 a night for a hotel room.

‘We think there is a very interesting niche within regional towns for a quality hotel that’s quite casual and relaxed, not too formal, with good quality rooms and a simple restaurant,’ Williams says.

By simple, Williams means that Swire Hotels in Britain won’t necessarily be ‘star chasing’ with fine dining operations, but offering quality, well-cooked produce in open kitchens at post-credit crunch prices. He’s adamant that a restaurant in a one of their hotels should perform by square metre as well or even better than any restaurant on the high street.

‘The key is a sense of authenticity,’ he says, ‘and we’re very focussed on local produce. There‘s no reason why our hotel in Cheltenham can’t source 75% of its menu produce from within a 30-mile radius using local farmers and growers. Local resonates with our customers.

And we’ll have nice rooms with good technology. But this isn’t Asia and we’re not saying every room is 45 square metres with a sanctuary bathroom. This is England and it will feel English as well. We’ll offer great, hearty freshly-cooked English breakfasts using nice organic eggs and sausages.’

Amongst other things, Williams is keenly aware of the differentiating power of the hotel breakfast.

The parent company’s motto ‘Esse Qua Videri’ – to be and not to seem to be – is very much part of the culture of Swire Hotels, preached amongst its people. It means doing exactly what they say they do and doing it very well, albeit not in a showy, ‘look at me’ sort of way. This tangential and self-effacing attitude is typically Asian.

‘We don’t say we’re better than anybody else, just a little bit unique, a little bit different,’ says Williams. ‘So we treat everybody in the hotel, guests or colleagues, with the greatest respect. As far as I’m concerned, every guest who checks into the hotel can be met by the general manager, as a start.’

Leading from the top and seeking top talent are absolutely essential, part and parcel of the Swire tradition. Drawing on the best of East and West, the company has hired a mix of international and local talent to lead its hotels in Asia.

‘We have a multi-cultural team of our own. Our team in Beijing is led by an Australian, whilst East in Hong Kong is led by a Hong Kong national. The Upper House GM is English and our number two in The Opposite House is Taiwanese,’ says Williams.

Williams sees spotting and nurturing local talent as a key way forward. A two-year management training programme is already in place in Asia, with five hospitality management graduate trainees selected each year mainly from the prestigious Chinese University of Hong Kong. A similar scheme is to be initiated in the UK in 2010, when an exchange programme will give graduate trainees from Asia and the UK the opportunity to swap places for six months. The strategy is designed to attract the very best graduates from top-rated schools, such as Oxford Brookes University.

‘For us, this is very much a case of long-term planning, and people to us are incredibly important. We put a lot of time and effort into talking about how our brand, Swire Hotels, is personified through our people. Our brand is not about marketing, it’s not about a logo or a building. It’s about people,’ Williams says.

For someone who first dipped his toes in hospitality as a bored sixteen year old before embracing the hard graft needed to rise through the ranks, leading the hotels division of a powerhouse listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange might seem like the pinnacle of a brilliant career. Not so for Brian Williams, who never expects anything to be served to him on a plate. But knowing that Swire Hotels’ vistas are long and wide soothes his restless nature. ‘I hope my experience adds some burnish to what the company does,’ he says. ‘I really like what I do.’

A BRILLIANT MOVE

Brian Williams, Managing Director of Swire Hotels, spoke to Leader’s Gina McAdam about how a legendary company is making the most of its investments and good name.