In July 2024, AlphaTalks, an interview series from Alphadroid, published a ten-minute conversation with Vaishakh Surendran, then General Manager of Ramada Chennai. He answered four questions every hotel owner meets sooner or later: how to treat guests, how to keep staff, what keeping them costs, and what the next generation of general managers needs to know. This page summarises what he said. The full video is below.
The video loads from YouTube only when you click, and YouTube may then set cookies. See our cookie notice. Watch on YouTube. Source: AlphaTalks Ep. 3, Alphadroid, YouTube, 19 July 2024 (10 min 21 s).
Asked how a hotel handles high-profile guests, he said every guest should be treated as a VIP, whoever they are and wherever they come from. The old split between VIP and regular guests matters less now, he said, because guests judge a stay by value for money: what they paid against what they received. He has looked after senior officials, ambassadors, film personalities and politicians, and still saw no reason to give regular guests a lower standard.
After Covid, he said, many hotel staff found other sources of income, and some started their own businesses, so people now have more options than a hotel job. His answer was basic: fair pay, proper working conditions and a work-life balance. He keeps an open-door policy, so anyone from senior managers to trainees can talk to him, and he treats trainees as individuals, because they are the industry’s future. He added that he learns from younger colleagues, who arrive well informed and comfortable with technology.
He gave an example from a previous property in an industrial area, far from where most staff lived. Keeping people there meant extra spending on housing and transport. Women on the team were housed in apartments in the city, and the hotel ran pick-up and drop for a large share of the workforce, using dedicated cars from early morning to late evening. He said the spend was well above what a normal operation would carry, but on safety and basic living conditions, penny-pinching is the wrong call, and it pays back. He gives the exact figures in the video.
For an owner, the useful point is that the cost of keeping people does not sit in one line. It shows up in housing and transport as well as pay, and a monthly owner report should show it.
Be a jack of all trades. Do not stay in one department: work across as many as you can, and understand finance, engineering, HR and technology as well as rooms and food and beverage. Morning meetings, he said, are a good place to watch how others handle problems. In a hotel with a young team, the general manager is often the most experienced person in the building, and the owner relies on that person to take charge when something goes wrong.
He said human interaction still matters, but technology is the way forward, and he advised embracing AI tools rather than running from them. He mentioned a short online course he took on using AI features in PowerPoint, and named Canva and ChatGPT as tools that make daily work easier.
Read the longer interview with Vaishakh Surendran on this site, or see the seven numbers every owner should review and why RevPAR is not the metric your hotel needs for how Veritas reviews hotel performance.