Brice Pean, general manager of Kempinski’s complex at Yanqi Lake, China, feels he is more like the mayor of a small town. “This is what they call me, but I am unelected,” he quipped.
Pean was, in fact, summoned to Yanqi Lake, an hour’s drive from Beijing, 15 months before a meeting of APEC in November 2014. A 140-acre (57-hectare) complex, suitably skirting a lake, was needed to host leaders from Asia Pacific.
Development plans featured a 21-floor standing-balloon Sunrise Kempinski hotel, plus a traditional three-floor hotel and no fewer than 12 separate boutique hotels. These were to have been individual villas for President Obama and 11 other perceived top dignitaries at G20, which President Xi Jinping hosts this November. But in honor of China’s richest tycoon, Jack Ma of Alibaba, it was decided to move the meeting to Ma’s birthplace, Hangzhou.
“Yes, that has left us with something of a challenge,” Pean admitted.
Both main hotels fill up on weekends with the local drive market. Weekdays are occupied by conferences, meetings and groups. The 12 boutique hotels are sold only as buy-outs, 310,492 yuan (US$50,000) per night, regardless of the size of the hotel (12 to 19 rooms) and regardless of the number of guests. However, the price does include breakfast for all, and each hotel has its own 75-foot (23-meter) heated pool and a movie theater.
The “mayor” oversees the complex’s sizeable conference center, and his responsibility also includes the APEC meeting room, the size of a football field, with the circular table and name cards left for tourists to admire.
Daily tour buses bring sightseers, who are charged 100 yuan (US$16) to visit the island. He outsources security, which is 343 strong, and gardeners to keep the 161-acre (65-hectare) complex in pristine order. Pean’s 14 restaurants and bars are run by his own team, a total of 800, with only six expats.
“How many hoteliers run so many hotels and outlets, and control tourists?”’ he asked.
Sometimes he also adds helicopter management, working with a local company that has put the Kempinski logo on a Bell 407, that cuts the time to central Beijing to 15 minutes.
Fortunately Brice (pronounced “Brees”) Pean is a man of versatile skills. Born in Paris, he graduated from high school in Austria and then had to do compulsory French national service. Next came hotel school in Innsbruck, Austria, before he joined Half Moon Bay in Jamaica. After that, in order, came Le Méridien Paris Etoile; Plaza Athenée Paris (where he made amazingly useful entertainment contacts); the U2-owned Clarence in Dublin, Ireland; The Britannia, London; and then 13 years with Hilton, variously in Vienna; Adelaide, Australia; Cairo; Nadi, Fiji; and Shanghai. He joined Kempinski first in Qingdao and moved to Yanqi Lake June 1, 2013.