Langham CEO Leser finds his clarity

Stefan Leser doesn’t connect easily with today’s platitudes such as “we’ll get through COVID and come out stronger.” He doesn’t believe it.

“We’re not getting out of this stronger, let’s be clear,” said the CEO of Hong Kong-based luxury hotel group Langham Hospitality Group. But what the pandemic might do, he said, is offer more clarity about what’s important and provide an opportunity to review tactics. At the end of the day, a confident Leser said, this opportunity to self-assess can add value to the consumer experience.

What the pandemic also does, from Leser’s perspective, is create a moment to reset. “Strengths are surfacing more – weaknesses, as well,” said the 30-year travel industry executive who joined Langham in May 2018 after being CEO at Jumeriah International. “When you’re in full flight, when you’re 95% occupied, you don’t do those evaluation exercises because you don’t have the attention from your people and you don’t have the capacity.”

But for the still relatively small 23-hotel Langham portfolio, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hong Kong’s Great Eagle Holdings, Leser said an honest and effective reset is feasible because of its size.

COVID-19 takeaways

With as many as 30 hotels in the pipeline for its core Langham and Cordis brands, as well as a growing stable of residences, Leser said there’s a greater need to be prepared for disruptions such as COVID-19.

“There is this, ‘I should have been prepared for a renovation, for a refurbishment, for whatever. I just could push the button and execute it right now because there is no revenue being displaced. I wish I would have been ready,’” he said. “That’s one of the key takeaways – that even if you’re not ready to execute tomorrow that you progress planning to a point that if eventualities come up, business disruptions like this one, that you’re ready to use the time.”

Another takeaway for Leser is making sure the team doesn’t focus on things it cannot influence or change.

“You have amplifiers of crises and you have moderators of crises, and you need the people that basically help a team to cope with situations and not ones that say again and again, ‘Oh wow, have you heard what happened yesterday.’ Those are the ones that you need to make sure you isolate and don’t drive the team crazy. At times like these, you get to know the characters acting in certain ways.”

Looking at the bigger picture, Leser said the industry needs to do a better job of selling itself and its ability to manage through stress and uncertainty. That inherent stress resistance, he said, has led to some incredibly creative thinking in the moment.

“That is something we need to celebrate when this is all over,” he said. “We’re maybe not the first-line responders, but we’re somewhat the second-line responders in terms of taking care of people when they’re in places where they didn’t think they would end up… We are in the high care business, and this is something with which I don’t think we’re doing a good enough sales job, a good enough lobbying job. If I look at where the funding goes, we’re not loud enough.”

Not a home office guy

More personally, like so many other industry executives, Leser is traveling less, and while he is quite calm, the action seeker is not necessarily thriving in a home office environment.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a great home office guy,” he joked. “I need the interaction – that’s something that surfaced for me quite clearly. I may not be disciplined enough to sit there and work through documents like a lawyer. I want to get things done, interact with people and make sure that I’m understood.”

Nonetheless, he starts early in the morning with calls or conversations with New Zealand, and by evening he might be talking to executives at the Chicago property. “Yes, the day has stretched out further. It has become a little bit normal that there is always something going on. There is always a conversation.”

The pandemic has made it a greater priority to stay connected with friends, and Leser has become a part of a weekly call with a group of friends and contemporaries from around the world.

“It is deeper and more thorough from a connections perspective,” he said. “When you used to say ‘how are you,’ nobody was really that interested, and that has changed. This question has become a lot more meaningful, and maybe listening and observing is also more important.”

China saves the day

Of the 23 Langham hotels open today, half of which are in China, Leser said performance is on the upswing mainly because some Chinese properties are actually beating budgets. Shanghai and Beijing hotels in October were running between 70% and 80% occupancies with good rates, he said, adding that almost all the business is domestic and predominantly leisure in nature. Even Hong Kong is ekeing out a profit with creative F&B initiatives driving local business.

He predicts that when the rest of the world is ready to travel more, business will bounce back in a similar nature with pent-up demand for leisure driving performance. Leser, however, is not bullish about Q1 2021, again with the exception of China, and hopes travel bubbles that include Hong Kong will help there.

“My hope is fueled out of the experience that I’ve seen firsthand in our business in China,” Leser said. “I don’t talk about a ‘new normal’ because it’s simply just a recovery pattern that we don’t know. But we will be much better off than at the moment, and then we will deal with new demands [on operations]. We will deal with new travel patterns and business sources. These are things we will be very happy about considering today’s stress.”

In the meantime, Langham is gearing up to open four hotels in the next six months, including two in China, a flagship in Jakarta with an attached residence, and the Langham in Boston, which has undergone a massive renovation. The following year will mark the opening of a Langham with residences in Australia’s Gold Coast.

More recently, Langham opened a residence in Munich, which couldn’t have come at a better time, according to Leser, because of the big increase in demand for private, high-end luxury travel.

In fact, Europe is very high on the Langham’s agenda and it just announced a 138-key resort in Venice for 2023 that it will own and operate. The group is also looking closely in Tuscany.

“We have to address the key cities in Europe, as well as high-end resort components,” Leser said. “Then it’s the key luxury destinations, and it might be through investment partnerships… We’re not slowing down.”

How quickly will existing owners in Europe want to get deals done? “There might be owners that still hang on to price assumptions, or value assumptions that might not be there,” Leser observed. “But also, I’ve seen a lot more realistic expectations that will help us to jointly buy or chip in some equity with owners that wants to have an operator that has skin in the game.”

When asked what his message to contemporaries is today, Leser falls back to the idea of how hoteliers are so experienced at dealing with adversity.

“This preparedness, this character is here and will be with us when it’s over,” he said. “And from that aspect, I’m not worried about my colleagues. I’m not worried about our industry. We will be adapting and doing fine, and, yes, there will be hardships. While you’re in it, though, you might not see that famous light, but it’s definitely there… Don’t lose faith in yourself because you are a lot better prepared for everything that comes in that crisis than any other industry out there.”

To make sure he heeds his own messages, Leser will call on his inner competitiveness. “When I was in a sports situation I would say, ‘OK, I’m dealing with this headwind, but I’m still going to deliver on the plans that we’ve set out.’ I’m not going to let us derail that. I may even use this moment as an accelerator in certain aspects of the business rather than concentrating on where you have to go slower. So, that’s the fighting spirit I like.”