“The only disadvantage to working in the Caribbean is having to wear shades, particularly when you have sensitive eyes,” admits Steven Andre, general manager of Kimpton Seafire Resort & Spa in Grand Cayman.
“Everything else is a plus. Grand Cayman, the largest of the three Cayman Islands, has fantastic water and diving, it has a great food scene, and it is safe,” explained the calm GM. “Every day here I wake up not knowing quite what to expect during the hotel day but I know I can cope. In other destinations I have gone to work, come home and that is that. Here I can then go off diving, sometimes with the houseguests we often have – no one wanted to visit us when I worked in Houston,” he added with a laugh.
Named for the horizon color flash at some sunsets, the 266-room Seafire, Kimpton’s first hotel outside the U.S., opened November 15, and as with all openings there were continual untoward challenges to be surmounted, but Andre and his team took them in their stride (wherever he has been, he has used sport as therapy, be it golf in Houston or, here, diving). This is the first hotel owned by Cayman’s mighty Dart Realty, and it is said that one of paper-cup heir Ken Dart’s acolytes, when walking past another Kimpton property in a sudden rainstorm, was so impressed when a doorman offered him an umbrella that the boss decided this was the brand he wanted for his beach-set property.
Andre, who was then at Kimpton’s Tideline Ocean Resort & Spa in Palm Beach, Florida, was interviewed for this job in late 2014 and arrived in April 2015. Over the next 18 months he had to recruit 400 staff members, not easy on a 76-square-mile island country with a total population of under 57,000 and a mere 3% unemployment. As the fifth-largest banking center worldwide, catering to companies lured by Cayman’s tax-free status, financial services take up 36% of employment. There is ever-present labor demand, too, from thousands of part-time condo owners, and from an always-growing number of duty-free stores to attract the 1.6 million cruise-ship day-trippers every year. “Fortunately the government was really helpful as they realize the importance of tourism, and although there were hiccups we were able to source far and wide, including Poland. We provided limited temporary housing, and our loss rate in the first few weeks has been barely noticeable – who would want to leave this paradise?” he asked.
From day one, two months back, the hotel’s seven-room spa, restaurants and bars were noticeably attractive to locals. Rather than the usual beach-shack casual restaurant, the Kimpton team devised a Mexican beach restaurant to complement the all-day AVE, which has an integral finer-dining section, Avecita. To make an impact, New Year’s Eve dining offered French oysters and real Kobe beef, from Japan. “Ninety-eight percent of foodstuff has to be imported but dining is good value nonetheless – our comprehensive breakfast buffet is the equivalent of US$37.”
The business mix is 95% U.S. and is expected to be 30% groups, maximum 200 rooms. Following Cayman standard, the hotel has a daily resort fee, in this case US$60 per room, for watersports, under-5s kids’ club, free local calls, weekly poolside events, valet parking, bicycles and the Kimpton-standard evening cocktail wine-tasting.
To Andre, value is not dollars but experiences. “We have a really great lobby library with a huge range of hardback books, and displays of nautical knots and ships-in-bottles on the walls, plus island festivals include food and movie events, and pirates,
every November,” he explained.
Although he knows Kimpton’s owner, IHG, will be an integral part of the hotel’s future, at present the hotel sticks to Kimpton values. Andre reports to Kimpton’s SVP Operations Nick Gregory, who in turn reports to Kimpton CEO Mike DeFrino (“It was, coincidentally, DeFrino who first hired me to Kimpton in 1999 – he succeeded in sharing the compactness of the company, and the fact I could make a difference,” said Andre).
He moonlighted as a busboy while at high school back in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Both his Polish mother, and his father, who has French-German heritage, are great foodies and food and hospitality lured him away from economics and math. After various Marriotts and Kimptons, he diverted briefly to the Kor Group, and then to Amerimar Enterprises, to be opening GM of its Hutton Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Looking back, one of my proudest professional achievements is that after seven years, the senior management team at the Hutton is still in place,” he declared with a smile. Then, in 2014, he returned to Kimpton, first briefly in San Antonio, Texas, before transferring to Palm Beach, on his way to the Cayman beauty.