“If I could change something every day, then we would have an even better hotel,” declares Pierre Perusset, general manager of the world’s tallest hotel, The Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong.
The 312-room hotel is on floors 102 through 118 of the 1,574-foot-tall IFC tower on Hong Kong’s mainland. Soon after its 2011 opening, one or two little challenges came up. “We had a slight problem in taking down used laundry and garbage. Even with three service elevators, we realized we had to schedule transportation at night,” the highly organized GM explained.
A bigger challenge is the changing incoming market from mainland China. “The general slowing of the Chinese market is affecting everyone in Hong Kong,” he shared. “We now expect to close 2016 at 85% occupancy, whereas we should have been 86%. But we are busy sourcing additional business, especially from other markets throughout the region, particularly Indonesia and Thailand.”
He is helped by so many factors. Being the world’s tallest hotel, measured from its front door up to its 118th-floor rooftop, attracts visitors every day of the year. The rooftop’s indoor-outdoor Ozone bar is packed, for photo-taking as well as for its Spanish tapas (fortunately it holds over 600). Up there, too, for hotel guests only, is the 24/7 fitness center, with an outdoor terrace with 12-foot-high glass walls. Next to it is a 65-foot indoor pool with LCD ceiling showing constantly changing images.
“I am also lucky in that both the head of Ritz-Carlton Asia-Pacific and the representative of our owner, Sun Hung Kai Properties, SHKP, are based here. Both are highly respected hoteliers and continuously supportive of my determination to make The Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong, even better,” said the GM.
Recent additions to the hotel’s F&B offering include a Michelin-starred Italian restaurant with an ever-popular eight-seat chef’s table and a leased-out caviar bar. “It is brilliant. Peter Rebeiz, who heads world-renowned Caviar House & Prunier, approached us out of the blue and they paid for the entire new look, turning what had been an underutilized counter into a world-class bar,” Perusset said with a smile.
He gets ideas daily, from people and from social media, and he is an inveterate list-maker, all of which is a far cry from his childhood. His grandfathers were both farmers in the rural Jura area of Switzerland. His father was a truck driver. “At about 14, I had a vision of working in a five-star hotel and started as an apprentice sommelier. The problem was I did not speak a word of English. At 18 I went to what was then the Swiss Centre in London, now the site of W London—Leicester Square, and became a server,” he recalled.
At 26, having graduated from a private business school in Lausanne, he joined Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne EHL, graduating with honors. Finally leaving the academic world at 30, he joined Swissôtel The Drake in New York, before moving down Fifth Avenue to The Peninsula New York. Always climbing up the F&B ladder, he switched to Regent Hotels & Resorts, starting in 1990 at The Regent Hong Kong (now InterContinental Hong Kong) and moving on to Bangkok, Jakarta and Singapore (the only one still called Regent but managed by Four Seasons). In 1998 he switched to The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., enticed by the challenge of being in what was then a small company in Japan’s second city, Osaka.
“The company’s philosophy and culture of learning and constant innovation attracted me then, and it still does today. I always have to be innovative. Last week, on vacation, it was camping and hiking in the mountains of Kazakhstan with my two sons, which required lots of ingenuity. Today, back on the job, I am as always inspiring my team to be innovative—I am personally trying to work out how to open our bathrooms’ packaged loofahs with wet hands.”