Interview by Rosanna Caira
Rosanna Caira: What inspired you to work in the hotel industry and what has your trajectory looked like?
Andy Loges: I was a bellman in a hotel while going to college for criminology, with the aim to be a police officer. Since I was a kid, I wanted to be a police officer. And I just loved [working in the hotel]; I loved the people, I loved what I did, I had fun. The pivot point from law enforcement to hospitality was when I met the GM, and decided that’s the job I want one day, that’s what I want to be and I never looked back. I’ve been very fortunate to work with amazing people. Obviously, like many of us, my start was grassroots — I started as a bellman, I was a doorman and also a night auditor for a couple years before moving to the rooms side and then food and beverage. I’ve been a director of Catering and a director of Food and Beverage. My first GM role was in Richmond, B.C., at the Richmond Inn & Conference Centre for about four years and from there I moved to the Toronto Marriott Bloor Yorkville and the last 14 years I’ve been with Hilton.
RC: What have the past two years looked like for you personally and professionally since the pandemic ended?
AL: Horrible. Put it this way, I had hair before the pandemic. The uncertainty was the most challenging part — you’re open, you’re not open — [it] made it difficult to deal with your team, from the few that you had, running a skeleton crew with five per cent occupancy, to the ones that you had to let go. And then the staff that were in the wings waiting to come back but you didn’t have answers. My most difficult conversations were with team members who would reach out every couple months and say, ‘well, what am I coming back?’ and you didn’t have the answer.
On a personal level, it was extremely stressful being honest with them. People appreciate honesty, even if it’s not what they want to hear. They want to know that you’ll tell them what you know, even if you can’t promise them anything. You have to do the best you can, because you have to live with yourself, and that’s how I got through it.
RC: What are your expectations for the next year vis a vis travel forecasts and business expectations?
AL: We came out of it extremely strong. We were locked down Q1 of 2022 but by Q4 of 2022, we were doing amazing business. And not just the rooms, but the catering business, the restaurants — everybody was starting to come back. Then 2023 was a good year, although a bit more challenging for Hilton Toronto as we were going through a massive renovation at the time, but it was still a very good year. Future wise, we’re focused on what we’re always focused on and that’s the business, leisure and group business. We have huge expectations for this year and feel very positive about it.
RC: You recently completed a major renovation of the hotel. Tell us about the project and how it’s transformed your hotel?
AL: In 2022 we started renovating 374 of our 600 guestrooms. We finished that project in May of 2023. So now all 600 guestrooms have been renovated. That was the last piece of it. The big projects this past year were our newly opened Frenchy Bar et Brasserie and a full lobby renovation.
RC: F&B is always a challenging area and your new restaurant promises to help solve some of those challenges. Tell us about Frenchy and what made you change your focus from Tundra, a Canadian restaurant to now a French brasserie.
AL: We started working towards a new restaurant concept in 2019, but had to shelve that during COVID. In August of 2022, ownership decided to re-look at it so we tweaked the design a little bit. We did partner with some people to produce this.
Tundra was created in 2000, so it’s 24 years old. It was given a facelift in 2012, but now it was time for a change. We investigated what’s around the hotel before we landed on this concept for Frenchy. There was a collaboration of a lot of individuals and people to do this. It’s not a stuffy French restaurant; this is sophisticated, open, fun and a little edgy — a ‘don’t-take-yourself-too-seriously’ kind of French restaurant — just great food and a welcoming place to meet. It’s open for breakfast, lunch and dinner and we’ll be doing a Sunday brunch. We offer Happy Hour, DJs two days a week and a band a couple days a week. We engage the full lobby experience, so when you walk into our lobby, you want to go to that bar.
RC: Who did you work with on this project and how has feedback been so far. Do you have an outside company running the F&B?
AL: DesignAgency helped us create the whole project. We used Scale Hospitality, which are amazing partners, to design the restaurant portion of it and work with our teams and help us with the branding. I’m very proud of the collaboration of the three, and with the hotel team. Our consultants are still active, but this is run by the hotel and the talented F&B team at the hotel. We’ve kept Scale on to help us continue that legacy.
RC: As part of your major renovation, how have your hotel rooms changed. How are today’s design trends fuelling changes in the guestrooms?
AL: They’ve become airier, the furniture pieces are not as large and the rooms overall are sophisticated and beautiful. Your desk chair is comfortable and the desk is not large. It’s kind of like a home-away- from-home. People do a lot of work in their guestrooms so the lighting is super important. The technology is important that you put in the guestrooms today — it’s all those details.
RC: What do you think today’s guests are looking for in their hotel experience. Has the post-pandemic guest changed at all?
AL: I think they still want the same things. After the pandemic, we thought the world was going to change. We weren’t going to clean rooms; we were going to do things differently; we weren’t going to serve guests in restaurants; we’re going to do takeout with plastic forks and knives. But that’s not what people want. If anything, the pandemic has taught us we’re resilient and that the need to meet, to travel, to visit, to have experiences is stronger than ever. We went through SARS; we went through 911; we’ve gone through all these and there was so much uncertainty. But as soon as we got out of it, we’re stronger because we realized that there’s such a demand and a desire to travel. For today’s traveller, expectations have increased because the prices have increased so there’s an expectation that you’re getting a better experience.
RC: During the last few years, we’ve all had to re-assess our priorities of what’s truly important. Do you think the pandemic has given hoteliers a new appreciation of employee welfare, benefits, equality, health, work/life balance, sustainability?
AL: We’re in the people business, so hopefully we’ve always had that at the forefront and had those discussions. But has the pandemic made us change the way we think about these issues? Absolutely. We’re looking more at flexible hours, [and] the blurred line between your professional life and your home life. As an industry, we have to be a lot more flexible. Pre-pandemic, we probably looked at people that work from home and asking “are you really working today?” I don’t think we have that bias anymore.
We need to have different policies and procedures in place, but it’s also not as simple as that, to make rules for a hotel that operates 24/7. What works for some departments and individuals, might not work for ones that have to be boots on the ground. It has to be on a case-by-case basis.
RC: How would you rate your hotels efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion?
AL: It’s at the heart of everything we do. When it comes to recruiting initiatives, we partner with local groups that are outside of our traditional hospitality pool of talent, such as Covenant House, or Tent Partnership for Refugees or WoodGreen. We have a very diverse group of just over 300 employees at the hotel and we encourage team members to include everybody in their culture and share their culture. For example, we have an engineer that’s been with us for 25 years celebrating Eid with team members. He comes and celebrates and breaks bread, and has a lunch for all team members in the hotel. And it is just an amazing thing to see and share cultures. It’s just so heartwarming when you do something like that.
RC: What role does sustainability play in your hotel operation and what special initiatives do you promote in this area?
AL: As a brand, we’re trying to reduce our carbon footprint by 50 per cent by 2030 and reduce water use by 50 per cent by 2030 — this is on a more global side. At the property level, we have a system called LightStay that tracks our progress. We create goals for saving energy and water. This is also something we can use to speak to our customers. For example, we can actually track and plug into the system and tell you that your conference has this carbon footprint but this is what we can do to change the carbon footprint that your event is going to have. So, it’s more than just lip service and is going to continually evolve and become a focus going forward.
RC: Do you believe the industry can come out of the crisis and chaos of the past four years to create a better and healthier industry?
AL: I think we came out of this stronger than ever and we seem to do that every time something massive happens. We now have to re-examine our operations in areas such as work-life balance and people’s expectations of what a job is. Those are pretty important issues we’re going to have to navigate through and decide how to manage going forward because I doubt that’s going to go away with our younger generation entering the workforce. So, we have some work to do. But I think we’re in a good position.
RC: What is the greatest change you anticipate for your business moving forward?
AL: I’d like to say we were open minded; we need to be more open minded and maybe look at options when it comes to strategies around people, putting them in positions that maybe they’ve never been in. Also, we’re having more dialogue about issues we would never have had before and I think that’s an amazing thing because that also generates passion from those individuals that might want to move around in their roles. We put people in silos before and I feel like we’ve like knocked the silos down now.
