After 24 years working day-in, day-out in a continuously changing hotel environment, Philippe Roux-Dessarps, newly appointed vice president of the Park Hyatt brand, is moving to what could be called an office job.
On his last day as GM of the 178-room Park Hyatt Tokyo, Roux-Dessarps was coming to the end of a 10-day handover to his successor. “To any newly appointed GM, I will say the best piece of advice is respect the local culture,” he said.
One big change for Roux-Dessarps is moving from a hotel that has 450 associates to a department whose members can be counted on one hand, he joked. At Hyatt’s head office in Chicago, he reports to Sandra Cordova Micek, senior vice president of global brands, who reports to global Chief Marketing Officer Maryam Banikarim, who in turn reports to President and CEO Mark Hoplamazian. Globally, Roux-Dessarps is responsible for 37 hotels, with additional openings this year in Spain’s Balearic Islands (Mallorca), Bangkok and St Kitts.
“We have really good GMs,” he said. “Perhaps in the past we have not celebrated our success enough as a brand. I am looking to change that.”
In the 10 weeks between being appointed and starting in Chicago, on March 6 Roux-Dessarps called as many of those GMs as possible. What did they expect from him? His business brain, honed by the MBA he completed in 2014 at INSEAD, Singapore, encourages him to sort out what he needs to know from the plethora of overload. He sees an opportunity to instigate a better Intranet between the GMs so that if one does a Californian wine promotion, the others know. “The challenge of the autonomy that is a feature of Park Hyatt hotels does require concentration on communication between GMs,” he admitted.
A personal challenge will be to establish a time when Roux-Dessarps can bring all GMs together, by Skype or WhatsApp, as time zones vary from Aviara, California, to Sydney, with the added hurdle of Chennai, India.
He will, of course, be traveling to his hotels, but unlike his GM days, there will be no sales calls, and at the annual Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas in August, Roux-Dessarps no longer has to work the speed-dating tables. He does hope to keep in touch with many of his travel industry contacts, and with a database of consumer friends from whom he learns so much. “I will miss my morning meetings,” he confessed.
Roux-Dessarps will also miss the adrenalin highs of meeting and greeting the rich and famous. “One highlight will always be December 25, 1999, when I was front office manager of what was then Hyatt Carlton Tower London. The president of Sri Lanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, who had graduated in political science from the University of Paris, was recovering from surgery after an assassination attempt. She and I spent Christmas Day afternoon in the Presidential Suite talking French,” he recalled.
Of French-Swedish parentage, Philippe Roux-Dessarps decided at 14 he wanted to be a concierge. After graduating from Paris’ elite Lycée Victor Duruy, he went on to Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne EHL and two years later, in 1994, joined Hyatt. He has since worked, in order, in Bali, Osaka, Guam, Tokyo (front office manager, Park Hyatt Tokyo), London, Paris and Birmingham, UK (his first GM position). He moved back to Park Hyatt Tokyo in 2008. “You could say it is the typical seven-year itch. It was certainly time to move on and discussions about my career seamlessly led to this new appointment,” he explained.
One minor challenge this keen triathlete does now have to overcome is remembering to cycle, in Chicago, on the right side of the road as Japan rides on the left.