When Gerard “Jerry” Inzerillo was growing up in a two-room apartment with four siblings and his hard-working parents, he had much more room to roam on the streets of Brooklyn, New York, home. But when the other kids were playing baseball in the local sandlot, Jerry was sneaking on to the subway and riding into Manhattan where he was attracted to the lobbies of the fancy hotels like The Plaza and Waldorf because people looked and dressed nice. “I got the bug as a boy because I just loved the festivity of a lobby,” says today’s CEO of the Diriyah Gate Development Authority, a US$40 billion-plus giga-project based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, aimed at restoring and reimagining the ancestral home of the original Saudi state. “And I loved the fact that people were nice to one another and it was genteel. Even the bellmen were nice in those days.”
Within a few years, on May 2, 1967, to be exact, at age 13, after a local judge helped him with ID papers that would get him a job, he started working as many as 50 hours a week as a pickup banquet bus boy. He pulled his first shift that night at The Gotham Hotel on 55th Street back in Manhattan (today The Peninsula), working 12 hours for US$15.90 plus tips. It marked the start of Inzerillo grabbing at his lifeline away from the neighborhood streets.
Even today, when you talk to Jerry, he refers to his hospitality roots. When he tours a hotel as vice chairman of the Forbes Travel Guide, one of his first stops is the kitchen to shake hands with the line staff, for he is humbled to this day for all the hotel industry has given to him. So, when he was chosen by the readers of HOTELS as the 2021 Corporate Hotelier of the World award winner, Inzerillo first talks about how this is going to resonate with all the bus boys. “This is a blue-collar winner this year. This is a victory for the workers, and it’s a victory for the ops people,” he says.
Career path
It has been a long and storied career for Inzerillo, now 67, who still refers to himself as an innkeeper, starting as a bus boy, finding his way to the UNLV hotel school, getting a night timekeeper’s job at the Flamingo in Vegas with one of his original mentors, the hotel’s GM Xavier Lividini, another Italian gentleman from New York. By the time Inzerillo was 19, he was the night manager making US$19,000 and hanging out backstage with the likes of Frank Sinatra, running errands for him during the day, all the while finishing his bachelor’s degree with honors.
By 1976, he landed back in New York at the Statler Hilton as executive assistant manager to help manage the Democratic convention soon coming to the hotel. After succeeding with the big convention, he was promoted to Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau, and two years later he got a call from Four Seasons Isadore Sharp to become GM of the brand’s property in Houston under another of the company’s legendary leaders, Wolf Hengst. Inzerillo went on to open the first Four Seasons resort property in Dallas and by 1987, he was heading back to New York to work with Steve Rubbell and Ian Schrager to develop what would soon become Morgans Hotel Group.
A pivotal moment in Inzerillo’s career came in June 1990, when still with Morgans, he was asked by New York’s mayor to coordinate the visit of Nelson Mandela, who had just left prison in South Africa. “Mandela and I became really close and he asked me to go other points beyond with him,” Inzerillo reflects. That took him back to South Africa, where four years later he led Mandela’s inauguration. It was also the start of a 21-year run with hotelier Sol Kerzner, starting at the fabled Sun City in South Africa and then the development of Atlantis on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, which opened in 1994.
After a number of twists and turns, including the further creation of the One&Only brand and the tragic 2006 death of Sol’s son Butch, Inzerillo left Kerzner to take care of his ailing father in New York. He became CEO of IMG Artists for two years, then rehabilitated the Forbes Travel Guide (he remains vice chairman) for five years, before HRH The Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia called to lure Inzerillo to his current role in Riyadh.
“Every time I got promoted, I was humbled because every promotion I got was way over my pay grade,” reflects Inzerillo. “So, I had to really go within myself and say, ‘You will define the moment. The moment will not define you.’ Now, there’s a great Japanese proverb, one of my favorites, especially for a street kid, like I am, and that is: ‘Get knocked down six times, get up seven.’ So, when I got big promotions, I always said, ‘I have to be thankful to everybody around me’ and that’s humbling. And then you double down and if you think you can work 100%, you find 101%. But you have to be propelled by gratitude, and gratitude is humbling.”
While always gracious and humble, the street kid is also street wise. “This is my philosophy for 54 years,” Inzerillo says. “Gather the best ingredients. Take the time to bake the best cake. Cut the cake in eight equal pieces, and make everybody believe they got the biggest piece.”
He also likes to describe himself as a “servant leader,” adding in the next breath, “What genius came up with the word subservient? Because you serve, you’re below someone? In my world, service is nobility. So, you teach the people around you, not by talking, but by doing and proving service is noble. Give – don’t worry what you receive.”
Inzerillo next argues, “Who came up with the word subordinate? Because you work with people that are below you? Who came up with that one? You’re equal in your desire to please and to create joy and festivity. So, I take exception to subservience and subordinates. One of the best traits of a leader is to be the head servant.”
“Jerry truly represents what’s hard to find these days – passion for our guests, inspiration for our young leaders, and the unwavering commitment to excellence,” says Alan Fuerstman, founder, chairman and CEO of Montage International, Laguna Beach, California. “Jerry is a charismatic and dynamic leader whose unbridled enthusiasm for the art of innkeeping is unparalleled.”
Adds his long-time Four Seasons colleague Hengst, today a strategic advisor for Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas, “Jerry is, using one word, brilliant – a man for all seasons who understands the human condition. He has empathy and cares for those who work for him and with him. He has a level of energy unparalleled, always thinking how to make things better for his constituents. A true professional and a superb representative of our industry. I have had the pleasure to work with him and have known him since he was a very young man and knew then that there was no limit to his ambitions.”
Learns along the way
Inzerillo likes to point to his early years in Las Vegas as an “aha moment” because he learned about the viability of combining the hotel business with entertainment, a principal he continued to apply throughout his career, especially with Morgans and Kerzner. “In the ‘70s, when major brands started coming in – Hilton, Marriott, Accor – they broke themselves off into a singular industry, off into its own solar system,” Inzerillo recalls. “That bothered me because hotels should be a part of the entertainment world, too.”
When he opened the Four Seasons in Houston, for example, Inzerillo hired sales people who strictly focused on bringing in the touring rock and roll bands and “devastated the Hyatt Regency there. We wiped them out with pop culture.”
At the Morgans and Royalton hotels in New York City, music videos and films were often lured to shoot there to create properties that were animated and dynamic. They extracted the energy of a nightclub and put it in the lobby with great bartenders and pretty servers in sexy outfits. “Film, music, fashion, photography – we really brought it together and that was the beginning of the modern era of hipper boutique hotels,” Inzerillo says.
As for missteps, at first Inzerillo says he had none, but upon further reflection adds he had to eat his pride a few times too often, especially when it came to working with bigger-than-life personalities like Ian Schrager and Sol Kerzner.
“There were times in my career where I’d get home, take a shower – poor kids learn to take showers at night as it’s the only time we can get into the bathroom – and say to myself, ‘this is not who you are,’” Inzerillo says. “But I knew how to take an assignment and just out of sheer will and perseverance, see it through. But if I had to do it again, I probably would have drawn the Mandela line of dignity earlier and face that consequence.”
That recollection also leads Inzerillo to offer advice to the next generation of hotel leaders. “I tell my people all the time, the moral high ground is never expedient, but it always works,” he says. “You must make your way through those energy vampires because they will provoke you to be the person you are meant to be. And the bigger the shadow, the bigger the person you are. So, when there’s a big shadow cast on you, don’t let the shadow intimidate you. Measure yourself against it and continue doing what Isadore Sharp says about trying to live ‘The Golden Rule’ and leading by example. And I believe all the pieces fall into place. If I didn’t believe that, I don’t think we could serve the way we do.”
He also suggests not to worry too much about outcomes as they happen automatically. “You don’t have to worry about rewards. You don’t have to worry about salary. You don’t have to worry about promotions. If you serve with your people – and they know that you believe in them and they believe in you – and you serve your guests, you’ll build relationships and the outcomes will take care of themselves.”
The only criteria to a career path, according to Inzerillo, is dedication. “If the guests you serve take your energy, you could probably have a good season, maybe two. But if the guests you serve, including your team, are the source of your energy, you will never run out.”
Be fearless, Inzerillo adds, “but it takes a long time to earn that. It takes a long time. It takes a long time to exhale.”
When asked about retirement, Inzerillo, who still has “the eye of the tiger,” says he is in no hurry. “But if I were to stop, I’m very happy to stop. I have no problem with that. The business will no longer define me and that’s empowering and enlightening because what I will choose to do is elective and no longer dependent on my image of myself. So, I hope in the years to come, that I can serve and empower.”
He wants to stick around to make sure the industry stays healthy, retains its self-esteem and makes sure that everyone looks after each other. He talks about governments working closer together to further travel and tourism and perhaps serve as council to the likes of the WTTC, UNWTO, USTA. “We’ll see. I don’t worry because the big man has it figured out more than me.”