GRAINNE ROSS: General Manager, Dylan Hotel, Dublin
I LIVE IN Portobello, so it’s a 15-minute walk to work. What time I get in at varies depending on what’s on, but today it was 9am.
First up I check the day’s arrivals. We have a lot of regulars, so we’ll know a lot of them. We do get VIPs but in a 44-bedroom hotel, you have to consider every guest is a VIP.
Guests very often have their favourite room, so we’ll be trying to accommodate them with that and any other requests they might have.
We have two totally different markets, business travellers from Sunday to Thursday and Fridays and Saturdays almost entirely leisure guests. The atmosphere is much the same for both – the reason we get so many regulars is because it’s a nice and quiet hotel.
I’ll do a walk around then and talk to the staff, make sure everything is good for breakfast. If guests don’t like their breakfast they won’t come back for lunch or dinner, so it’s really important.
Most mornings I’ll have meetings with suppliers or sales staff. Just now I’m out to a meeting with the Irish Hotels Federation to discuss rates.
A big part of this business is being out and about greeting guests, so I spend as much of my time out front as I can. I like the social side of the work, it’s a perk of the job.
Lunch will be a sandwich at my desk, going through e-mails. I go through phases of healthy eating, then periods when all I eat is the creamy mash in the staff canteen, which isn’t good for my waistline.
We do all our human resources work in-house, so that takes up a lot of my time too. Getting good people is a key part of any hotel’s success and we trade on the standard of our service levels, so it’s worth spending time on.
In the afternoon, it will be more meetings with travel industry people, all of whom tend to be sociable people.
You can’t get anywhere in this industry if you’re not outgoing.
At the moment, I’m doing publicity materials for our new package for dogs. From our customer feedback we realised many guests would stay longer if only they didn’t have to get home for their dogs, so we now provide beds and bones and all sorts of treats, so that the dogs can come too.
There’ll be report reading and wages forecasting and a lot of that sort of back office stuff, but most days I’d be out by 7.30pm. On weekends I’ll stay till much later to make sure our events go off well.
I keep the accounts work for Saturday mornings when it’s quiet and I won’t get interrupted. That’s my least favourite part of the job.
In conversation with SANDRA O'CONNELL