Hans Wiedemann: Following Fate, Standing Up For Ideals
By Adam Kirby, Associate Editor -- Hotels, 10/31/2009 11:00:00 PM
Hans Wiedemann believes in fate—how else could he explain all the coincidences that preceded his 2004 appointment as managing director of the legendary Badrutt’s Palace hotel? To him, the landmark property in idyllic St. Moritz, Switzerland, is the place the 2009 Independent Hotelier of the World was always meant to be.
Relaxing in the hotel’s lavish Hans Badrutt Suite on the very September day his 19-year-old daughter, Rebecca, enrolled at his alma mater, École hôtelière de Lausanne, Wiedemann recalls the scene 13 years earlier. On Christmas holiday in his native Switzerland, the family passed through St. Moritz, stopping to marvel at the elegant hotel where the very concept of the modern alpine resort was supposedly invented in 1865. Young Rebecca, donning figure skates, took to the frozen lake that abuts the hotel and declared the scene “heaven.”
That was actually the second time the Wiedemanns had visited St. Moritz. The first trip, in 1989, came at the behest of wife Martha, who as a child in Singapore read magazine accounts of the hotel’s glamour and became enchanted with its mystique—but Wiedemann decided not to stop. “I knew at the time the afternoon tea cost as much as a week of petrol, so I didn’t stop. I just said, ‘It’s up there,’” he says, chuckling at the memory.
Those are fun coincidences easily explained, but it is the portraits of Hans Badrutt, who owned and ran the hotel from 1904 to 1953, that make Wiedemann’s claims of fate a bit eerie. Hans Badrutt is Wiedemann’s doppelganger, so much so that guests often tell him they prefer the wire-rimmed glasses worn in the portraits to the pair he currently wears, not realizing that the paintings are of someone else.
“As you can see, it’s weird—I look like this guy,” he says, staring at one of the several portraits that may as well be a mirror. “The circumstances are really weird.” Hans Badrutt died the same year Wiedemann was born.
Weirdness aside, the circumstances leading up to Wiedemann’s appointment at Badrutt’s also tell the tale of a principled hotelier who took a bold stand for what he believed in, risking his career in the process.
Before joining Badrutt’s, the 56-year-old Wiedemann spent eight years at the helm of another of Switzerland’s grande dame hotels, Le Montreux Palace. Though he was often credited with breathing new life into the property and bringing it into the modern era of hospitality, it was there that he nearly left the industry for good.
In 2001, SAirGroup sold its hotel portfolio, which included Le Montreux, to what was then Singapore-based Raffles International. The move caught Wiedemann by surprise, and the ensuing day-to-day micromanagement by Raffles offended him in a way, especially considering the largely laissez-faire management style of SAirGroup. As Wiedemann tells it, budgets were trimmed, staff were let go, guest service suffered and the imposition of Asian-style hotelkeeping served to wipe away the legendary Swiss hospitality for which the property had become famous.
The final insult came with the announcement that the hotel would be henceforth known as Raffles Le Montreux Palace (it has since swapped the Raffles name for Fairmont). To Wiedemann, this had the effect of virtually sucking out the hotel’s very soul.
“He didn’t want to identify with it becoming part of a group when it was such an individual property,” Martha says. “He thought it should stay individual.”
Wiedemann was vocal in his disdain for Le Montreux’s new direction, and his clashes with Raffles were well known in European hotel industry circles and even garnered a bit of local press. “He was so sure what he thought the industry should be, and he fought for it,” Martha says. “He didn’t fight for his job; he fought for the luxury hotels and the way they are. He said he’d rather lose his job than accept what the industry was becoming.”
Martha thought her husband would walk away from hotelkeeping at any moment.
And then, in late 2003, Hansjürg Badrutt came calling. This was actually the second time the son of longtime owner Hans Badrutt would appeal to Wiedemann to come run his hotel in the Swiss Alps. The first time was shortly after Le Montreux was sold, a period during which Badrutt’s Palace was under management by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts; given his troubles with Raffles, Wiedemann declined that offer, as he was in no mood to deal with yet another corporate brand.
But by 2003, Badrutt’s had returned to being an independent property, and Hansjürg again appealed to Wiedemann to run his hotel. This time he leapt at the opportunity.
Wiedemann feels entirely at ease at the 159-key Badrutt’s Palace, which is a convenient thing, since he owns the place. At least, he will own it sooner or later.
In 2007, Hansjürg and his wife, Anikó, offered to bequeath their controlling 66% stake in Badrutt’s Palace to Wiedemann, provided he agreed to ensure its continuation as a hotel. That the childless couple trusts him to carry on the Badrutt family legacy is the greatest honor he could imagine.
Martha was in shock for several days after being told of the offer, and she was only half-kidding when she told him he must have misunderstood. He agreed to the deal without hesitation, even though he jokes that he is no longer allowed to retire. “If Hans could do this until the end of his days, he would do that anyway,” Martha says. “He loves it. He would do this forever.”
Not Anti-Brand
Despite his past protestations, Wiedemann insists he has nothing against branded hotels in general or corporate hotel executives. After all, he came up through the ranks of Hilton International, getting his first big break in 1980 as a regional food and beverage analyst responsible for Melbourne and Perth, Australia. He still has many friends with Hilton and other corporate hotel companies, and he acknowledges the important role that branded hotels play in tourism.
But his passion for independent hotelkeeping burns intensely. It is a topic to which he returns time and again when discussing his hospitality philosophy. “I have the highest respect for everyone in this industry,” he says. “But these old palaces, they have a soul, and they can’t be duplicated—and they shouldn’t be. These hotels are so linked to the local culture that you have to be careful with it.
“It’s my personal belief that you cannot generalize the service. The service cannot be duplicated somewhere else.”
Rosewood did a fine job running Badrutt’s Palace from an asset management standpoint, Wiedemann says. But he maintains that the hotel somehow lacked soul during those years—that elusive, intangible je ne sais quoi that the truly legendary hotels radiate.
“Our luxury is this unique atmosphere that we have and that cannot be created overnight,” Wiedemann says. He believes that such atmospheric soul comes in part from the operational nimbleness of not having to answer to a corporation. “If we want to do something here, we do it,” he says. “And if we screw it up, fine—we’ll fix it.”
If he has screwed up in the past, good luck getting Wiedemann to share some examples. Ask him about his regrets in life or what he wishes he had done differently, and he meets the question with a blank stare and a shrug. “I’m not somebody who dwells.”
Nor is he somebody who says things without meaning them. When things get tough—when most people would say everything is OK even while knowing in their hearts that is a lie—Martha says her husband invariably speaks the truth, for better or worse.
“Hans, as a father and a husband, is a man of his word, and I admire that,” she says. “He would never say he was going to do something and not do it, and that’s a hard thing.”
Love Borne Of Hospitality
Wiedemann met the India-born Martha in 1986, while he was working as F&B manager at the Ansett Hotel in Perth and she was the equivalent of a contemporary spa director at the nearby Observation City Resort Hotel. The couple bonded over a love of the service industry and over the tribulations of being foreigners in a faraway land. These days, Martha is the wellness advisor at Badrutt’s Palace.
She actually was the one who proposed marriage. Wiedemann, aware that the life of a hotelier is full of uncertainty and instability—at least until the day a hotel is bequeathed, anyway—made sure she understood what she was getting into. “You don’t want to marry me,” he told her. “You have to marry the hotel, too.” But she was willing.
After spending five years in his first general manager job for Bond Hotels on Australia’s Gold Coast, the couple in 1991 moved to Beijing to manage the 600-key China Resources Hotel. They hated the communist country’s closed culture, and two years later they returned to Australia, where Wiedemann was named managing director of five properties for Daikyo Hotels, Resorts & Cruises. His father’s death spurred the family’s return to Switzerland, in 1995, to help his mother.
Both of his parents were doctors in his hometown of Basel, and from them he inherited the genuine desire to serve others. A career in medicine was never in the cards, though. “The responsibility with medicine I didn’t really like,” Wiedemann says, flashing a wry grin. “You have a party at 2 or 3 in the morning and then you have to operate on someone the next day—that wasn’t really my cup of tea.”
Instead, Wiedemann discovered hospitality as a way to serve others while still enjoying the occasional night out. He remembers when he first caught the hospitality “virus,” as he calls it. “My grandfather once had a cocktail party at home and didn’t have enough service staff, so I said I’d do it. And I said, ‘Wow, this is fun!’ That was the moment.”
He held several line-level positions in hotel F&B and restaurants as a young adult in Basel before attending hotel school. After graduating from Lausanne in 1975, he took an internship at Feldberger Hof in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. But just as the hotel was seemingly poised to offer him a full-time guest service position, he left for Australia. He had no job lined up, but he knew he would need to learn English if he ever wanted to become a successful hotelier.
Wiedemann learned plenty more than just English during his decade down under. It was his first extended period away from Western Europe, and he was fascinated by the multicultural inclusiveness of Australia—people from so many places with myriad customs and ways of life, all coexisting harmoniously. It is a lesson he keeps with him every day as he walks the hallowed halls of Badrutt’s Palace.
“In all those various countries, there are different ways of skinning a cat,” he says, metaphorically. “In the end of the day, we’re all human beings and we all function the same way. You don’t have to always do like others do, but you have to understand and respect.”
That philosophy comes into play not just as it relates to interacting with guests from all around the globe, but also in Wiedemann’s dealings with his hotel staff. He empowers his employees by encouraging them to think for themselves, to make decisions on the fly and to trust their instincts when it comes to pleasing guests. His motto: “Just do. Be human.”
Wiedemann tries to give his staff every opportunity to succeed, trusting them with the benefit of the doubt and asking only their best effort in return. If they fail despite trying, he puts the blame on himself for placing them in the wrong positions.
When an employee inevitably makes a mistake, Wiedemann is quick to forgive. “Everyone makes mistakes. When you make a mistake, hopefully you won’t do it a second time,” he says. Be willing to take chances, he tells them. “A bad decision is better than none.”
To err is to learn, Wiedemann believes, a lesson he credits to the man he considers his role model, the late Alfred Blaser, his boss during a 1971 apprenticeship at Schloss Binningen, Basel. “He always let me do,” Wiedemann says. “He let me try out new things. He let me accelerate in what I was trying to do.”
A Natural-Born Hotelier
Hansjürg Badrutt has seen a number of managing directors come and go from his hotel. What sets the ever-jolly Wiedemann apart, he says, is that he genuinely likes people. “A lot of other hotelkeepers know their job very well, but they don’t like people,” Hansjürg says. “He’s very guest-oriented. He knows everybody. They all come to him and they have confidence in him.”
Wiedemann’s right-hand man, Yves Gardiol, worked with Wiedemann at Le Montreux and followed him to Badrutt’s to become the hotel’s vice director. He says Wiedemann’s proactive management style and his overarching dedication to customer service are what make him an elite hotelier. “It’s not [his primary objective] to make a profit—the profit is coming if the guest is satisfied,” Gardiol says. “If you want to be in the luxe hotel segment, the guest comes first.”
Martha says her husband is a natural hotelier, having a knack and instinct for exceptional service that goes beyond anything that can be learned or observed. “Outside the business, I understand him completely,” she says. “But I’m constantly trying to understand this knowing of service.”
In some ways, the dual Aussie-Swiss citizen is a walking enigma. Wiedemann is obsessed with giving guests the perfect stay, but he readily concedes that perfection is impossible. He lives and works in one of the most opulent buildings in the world, but has little interest in experiencing or acquiring material luxury for himself. He expresses pride at having been voted Independent Hotelier of the World by his industry colleagues, but then insists that he does not care if he is well liked or respected.
And then he utters this head-turning statement, practically sacrilegious from a hotelier: “The guest is not always right.”
Quick to clarify, he says he would do most anything to make a guest happy, but that sometimes… well, sometimes the guest is simply wrong. If someone on his staff is being berated by a guest, wrongly, Wiedemann will say so.
“When our staff gets massacred, I’m sorry—there comes a time when I say, ‘I don’t mind if you stay somewhere down the road.’” That approach generates staff loyalty and contentedness, but it is primarily intended as a service to the other guests. Boorish behavior by one guest can make for a miserable stay for everyone else, after all.
Such unpleasant guests are fortunately rare. Most of the time, Wiedemann instructs his staff to give guests whatever they fancy, giving serious consideration to even seemingly ridiculous requests.
In 1989, during his stint as a Bond Hotels general manager, he commissioned a wall sign that hung in his office with the words, “Yes We Can.” Whenever a client would make a special request, however outlandish, Wiedemann would smile and point to the sign. He jokes that U.S. President Barack Obama owes him royalties for the phrase, which became Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan.
In his time away from hotelkeeping—and there is plenty of it, as Badrutt’s Palace and most of the rest of St. Moritz close down for five months every year—Wiedemann likes to tour the European countryside on one of his two classic Harley-Davidson motorcycles. He and his 24-year-old son, Raphael, once rode 3,500 km (2,175 miles) on a five-day whirlwind road trip, and he routinely adds 10,000 km (6,214 miles) or more to the bikes’ odometers each year, making sales calls in far-flung locales and visiting frequent guests to personally thank them for their continued patronage.
Motorcycling recharges him and helps clear his mind. “It’s very much the opposite of what the job brings me,” he says. “Here, I’m surrounded by 500 to 1,000 people; on the road, it’s just me.”
He purposely stays in hotels of all sorts when on the road—even the occasional budget motel—and is constantly picking up new ideas that way. “It’s funny how much I learn in a lower-class hotel, because that’s where the friendliness comes through,” he says. “I don’t just learn in the 7-star hotels. You learn a lot in the lower-class hotels.”
No matter what the surroundings, great service is great service. That Wiedemann gets to provide his in a legendary palace in the Alps is mere icing on his cake.
No related content found.
