Running a city hotel needs quick efficiency, whereas a resort requires more personal attention and the ability to deliver something remarkable, says Sandro Fabris, who a year ago became general manager of Half Moon Jamaica, a few minutes from Montego Bay.
Fabris showed quick efficiency last week when, on Friday afternoon, April 15, it was announced Half Moon was, by mutual consent, severing relations with ski-and-snow specialist RockResorts. “We stress that we are sun-and-beach,” Fabris insisted on the day.
Fabris is not a rookie to this world – he was the highly regarded GM of the 169-room Reid’s Palace, Madeira, Portugal. But Half Moon, with its two miles of private beach, 400 acres and 398 keys, is on a different scale. The resort has grown organically from private vacation houses built by 17 friends in 1954; today its board is chaired by the descendant of one of those families, Washington, D.C.-based financier Guy Steuart III.
“Half Moon is rare in having passionate owners who are in it for the long haul and will invest substantially,” Fabris shared. A recent US$2 million upgrade to Sugar Mill Restaurant, in which a 200-year-old working waterwheel, some 20 feet high, is right next to some of the tables, shows that a 165-seat restaurant can thrive. Especially at weekends, it is booked solid, far ahead, with 35% of diners coming from other hotels and the local community.
A resort like this provides activities for all interests. Dining opportunities also include Italian, outdoor buffets and twice-weekly Jamaican barbecues with limbo and bamboo pole dancing, and crab racing. The GM hosts Monday cocktails and on weekends he makes up a foursome on the Robert Trent Jones course (he admits he prefers merely to watch play on the 13 tennis or the four squash courts, and he is a spectator for swimming, with dolphins or horses, and other water sports).
“Our repeat factor is 35%, average stay year-round is over five nights, and there are minimum stays of 12 nights over Christmas and New Year,” Fabris said. “Over half our inventory is in 31 detached villas, with five to seven bedrooms and cook provided, and these are booked by the same guests, for family gatherings, from one year to the next.”
Distribution is mostly word of mouth, reputation and via Virtuoso travel advisors. Since everyone arrives by plane, sometimes there can be a couple of hundred guests checking in simultaneously, while those who have just vacated rooms have not yet left for the airport. A resort boss has to be creative (just as the cruise industry has discovered, a welcome drink or two can smooth mass check-ins).
“Two of my managers have been here over 50 years each, and the main reason for turnover among my 928-strong team, which includes doing all our own interior design and maintenance, is the opportunity to get work permits for the USA,” Fabris explained, adding that Lobster Ink now helps with short-burst online training.
The 60-person maintenance department has responsibility, too, for 54 swimming pools, 160 buggies and 500 city bikes.
Yes, Sandro Fabris is running a community, which includes currently master-planning for such major investments as a completely new back-of-house building.
Fabris was destined for the hospitality world. He comes from a paternal lineage of entrepreneurial restaurateurs, and after six months’ boring law study he diverted to Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland, where in between classes on profit and loss he met his Swiss wife, Doris.
Coming up the F&B route, early triumphs included establishing the still-renowned buffet at Costa Smeralda’s Hotel Cala di Volpe, Sardinia, Italy. It was Natale Rusconi, then MD at Hotel Cipriani, Venice, who got him into mainstream operations. He spent 20 years with Orient-Express, of which seven were in Lisbon, Portugal (which he still calls home), Madeira and latterly Cape Town, where he also oversaw the company’s three safari lodges in Botswana. He was enticed to Jamaica by a long-time friend, Hansjörg Maissen, and interviews included one day of two-hour, one-to-one talks with senior Half Moon staff, a flight to Vail, Colorado, to talk with the CEO of RockResorts, and another flight to Washington, D.C., for a whole day, including lunch, with the Steuart board.
“Ah, food, and the enjoyment it gives people, this is at the core of my DNA,” admitted Fabris. His face lights up when talking about his 800-plus cookbooks in his library back in Lisbon, which also includes volumes of opera and a collection of over 90 cameras, most them museum-worthy.