“I do not miss banking at all. I love the people side of owning and running hotels,” says Bernhard Praml, talking at his 10-room Hotel San Telmo La Palma in the old town of Santa Cruz de la Palma, Canarias (one of Spain’s Canary Islands).
Until 2015 he had been one of over 147,000 employees of the mighty UniCredit financial services company, headquartered in Milan. For five of those years he had been chief of the customer care center of HVB Direkt GmbH, part of one of UniCredit’s main subsidiaries, HypoVereinsbank, based in Munich, Germany. Customer consideration is obviously in this hotelier’s blood.
Hotel San Telmo La Palma is a conversion of early 20th century houses perched, as if in a three-dimensional jigsaw, into the steeply sloped land rising above the port of La Palma’s capital, which has a permanent population of around 16,000. “I had stayed in so many hotels, both for work and on vacation, I knew what I liked and what I did not like,” he explained.
The Praml philosophy is to allow guests to feel at home. Enter from narrow San Telmo street direct into an invariably sunny reception. The first thing you see is a big bowl of perfect apples and bananas, all local, and country-style tables where tomorrow’s breakfast will be served. Look ahead and through green-bordered windows down to a courtyard with a koi-filled pond, and across to an upper-level terrace with local wicker seating. Exterior walls everywhere are bold and bright, salmon or ochre-colored, rising to fluted terracotta roof tiles. There are also at least a couple of resident cats (Praml wanted, as a child, to be a veterinarian).
“People seem to like what they get here. We have had many leisure guests who return regularly every year, and since this is the capital of the island we get good commercial traffic as well. Average length of stay is five nights, and minimum stay ranges from two to five nights,” he said.
New business comes from brochures displayed in tourist offices, via booking.com and, the preferred method, direct through the hotel’s own site, which has a simple reservation facility. Room prices fluctuate depending on the season: for this Sunday, May 5, prices start from US$143, hotel-wide WiFi included but breakfast is US$11.22 (larger rooms, at US$183, throw in breakfast).
Hotel San Telmo shares some departments with Praml’s other hotel, the 18-room Hotel Benahoare, 20 miles west on the other side of the 107-square-mile Palma island. “I have a team of 10 full-time employees, between both properties, and another eight who work part-time. I have no labor issues, and I cannot think of anything that would make my life easier,” said the former banker.