Wink Hotels CEO Michael Piro has gone from never working in a hotel to meeting every local Vietnamese coffee producer to source product and bringing a new pillow home each night to test for comfort.
While he has a consultant to guide him, Piro is learning every aspect of the business – without the engrained stigmas and clichés that can limit new thinking and approaches to hotelkeeping. However, he has opened some restaurants in Vietnam over the past few years and learned some invaluable hospitality lessons, especially when it comes to team building.
With the brand’s debut set for March in Ho Chi Minh City, he has grown his corporate Wink team to about 50 and is putting a lot of effort into hiring the right people at the unit level.
“You can put some neon chairs in a hotel lobby, or graffiti paintings on the wall, and you can slightly adapt your SOP for what music is allowed to be played,” he said. “But if you don’t get the right people and you don’t know how to develop those people or create the environment in which those people can be genuine about their service, I think you struggle to execute in this particular segment.”
Piro firmly believes if team attitude doesn’t match the brand ethos, execution and the guest experience are really weak. “Too many people in the lifestyle category just thinking about design, but not about the people.”
Piro said his development team studied the CitizenM model carefully and realized how much time it spends developing people. So when Wink held its casting event to hire the team for its first property, it looked at personalities and measured on how they engage. And because the Wink model calls for less staffing, they need to hire more of the right people with the right attitude more than a pre-existing hospitality skill set.
When it comes to customer relations, Piro thinks the old way of maximizing consumer touchpoints is on its way out. “At least when you’re talking about the next-gen consumers,” he added. “We’re used to being on our phone, everything is one click away and the last thing I want is for someone to talk to me 12 times between getting out of a taxi, getting off an airplane and getting to my room…. It doesn’t mean people want no touchpoints; they want meaningful touchpoints.”
The Wink model will include contact-free check-in, digital vending and a co-working platform. All the standard hygiene requirements, such as hand sanitizer and staff wearing masks, will be in place. Beyond that, if there are social-distancing regulations, Wink will honor that.
“But in terms of everything else, we’ll be opening and trying to deliver the authentic Wink experience, which we think isn’t adapted to COVID. It already addresses some of the concerns that arise out of that.”