“I head a family of repeaters – as well as guests who come back again and again. My long-stay team members have often, like me, had spells elsewhere but returned to their home here,” says Andrea Gates, Argentine-born managing director of Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, in Dallas, Texas.
Guests of the 143-key hotel, who have average stay of two nights, show a consistent 40% repeat rate. Typical tenure of the around-200 employee team is decades-long. Dine, and your server could be a charming woman who will have been here 27 years come April 13 – she knows her exact starting date. A colleague is celebrating 30 years with the hotel (“I only had two months out, for maternity leave, and then it was like coming back to family”).
In Gates’ case, she headed rooms here from 1992 to 2006, and then went off, first to Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel, New York. “When I repeated at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in 2013 it was coming back to my family,” she recalled. The same welcome is afforded to new staff members, whose photos are posted in the Mansionette cafeteria. New hires, mostly sourced via word of mouth, are attracted by competitive remuneration, hotel culture and reputation traced back to the late Caroline Hunt.
“My strong work ethic was inherited from my parents, and days in rooms taught me detail, and this is something I pass on to the team. We take great pride in working out what guests actually want. This is not system but intuition.” Here, breakfast servers somehow know not to talk to lone customers immersed in iPads or newspapers. They offer coffee to go when bringing checks – which, unusually, have 18% gratuity underlined with, written in hand, “already included.”
It was the staff who mainly impressed two first-time younger Singaporean visitors. “They stayed two weeks and they said they felt at home,” Gates said. She thinks overseas business, currently running at 10%, will grow, fueled by growing awareness of the Rosewood brand.
Some might say that, by today’s competition in a highly discerning Dallas market, that the 1982-vintage hotel is a little old-fashioned (there are rumors that it is about to have a new look but Rosewood is renowned for not revealing the contents of any parcel until it is ready to be unwrapped). And, at the same time, the evolution of guest trends is giving more importance to history. Here, the unique furnishings of The Mansion’s bar and restaurant rooms, decorated with genuine antiques culled a hundred years ago from cathedrals and palaces all around Europe, come into play.
About half of all F&B patrons are locals: Some are among the 570 invited free to join The Mansion Club, which offers 20% F&B (and rooms) benefits. The younger generation is also attracted by the hotel’s influencer curators, fashion designer Zac Posen and Dallas lifestyle hostess Kimberly Schlegel.
Gates balances her work family and her own family with myriad outside influences. Community, and a long fascination with ceramics, provide her solace.