“Luxury is identifying individual appreciation – one day a guest wanted to mark an anniversary and his budget was C$20, so we asked him his wife’s love sayings over the years, hand-wrote them on post-it notes and stuck them in a heart shape on their bedroom wall,” said Andrew Torriani, GM of The Ritz-Carlton, Montreal, Canada.
Since the 129-room hotel re-opened in May 2012, Torriani has taken it consistently to TripAdvisor’s top-in-town. What was an average stay of 1.3 nights now soars, in summer, to five nights. Occupancy for 2016 was 72%, up from 67.5% the previous year. This coming weekend will be heavy, pre-Valentine’s Day. At major music festivals, and the annual Montreal Grand Prix, always the last weekend of June, rooms start at C$800 with breakfast extra.
“Grand Prix is always great as, like two other M races, in Melbourne and Monaco, it takes place around city streets,” Torriani explained. “Every year we have a big party, with about 150 invited guests, and 750 others who clamor to buy a place.” Add to this the fact that 2017 is the 375th anniversary of Montreal, plus the 150th birthday of Canada.
“We like celebrations and they are great for getting the name of Montreal, and Ritz-Carlton, even better known,” Torriani added. As a partner of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., the hotel also occupies a unique place in its history. Built by César Ritz in 1912, and operated by the-then Carlton Hotel Group, it became the first Ritz-Carlton hotel, with its first sibling properties initially paying royalties to use the name.
“I have three brothers and a sister and some of us organized the purchase of the hotel, which we had known for years, in 2005. Our family company, Monaco Luxury Hotels & Resorts, principally led by myself and two brothers, owns 50%.
“TM Hoteliers, namely our parents Marco and Geneviève Torriani, legally holds management”, the GM said.
Andrew had worked at The Ritz-Carlton, Montreal, as a teenager but his career path took him up the Air Canada management ladder, specializing in HR, which was excellent training for heading a 350-strong unionized hotel team – other than F&B, which is slightly higher, turnover is around 5%.
He has never been afraid to take risks (“it is better to show initiative than be conservative and static, and if something does not work we change it quickly,” he declared). Torriani wants his team constantly to show imagination, though consistency is his primary concern and challenge.
Asked about other challenges, Torriani finds it hard to think of any, instead letting slip he does not trust CRMs – “one other hotel’s supposedly infallible system means I always get Diet Cokes as a VIP gift although I gave up drinking it years ago,” he said with a laugh. Instead, shortly before arriving at The Ritz-Carlton, Montreal, you are telephoned personally by guest relations to make sure personal idiosyncracies are up to date.
“To be relevant today we need to communicate more than ever, and to all age groups,” he firmly declared. At The Ritz-Carlton, Montreal, afternoon tea, booked far ahead, is popular with millennials as well as their grandparents. The lobby’s year-round Dom Pérignon bar is joined, in summer, by a sidewalk Moët bar, outside on Sherbrooke. Now he plans a lobby lounge sushi bar to complement the highly successful all day Maison Boulud, which, when weather permits, extends outside to allow ringside viewing of the hotel’s famous duck pond, with six quacking residents.