Mark Hughes

Rooms Division Manager at the Hyatt Regency Albuquerque, Heritage Hotels and Resorts

Albuquerque, New Mexico

We loved Mark's amazing motivation idea for his team (see that here) and we decided to have a chat with the maverick.

Tell us about your journey. How did it all start?

I grew up traveling a lot as a child as my father worked as an ex-patriot and I lived overseas in Egypt and Kuwait for 11 years of my childhood. Later on at the University of Denver, once I heard about Hotel Restaurant Tourism Management I knew this was something I wanted to do because I loved traveling and meeting people from all over the world! Since then, I have been able to travel to over 75 countries around the world and my wife and I still place a large importance on continuing to travel and explore the world whenever we have a chance.

What do you think it takes to succeed in this industry?

To succeed in the hotel industry you need to be able to be open to learn processes and make connections with people, both guests, and staff. It also doesn’t hurt to be willing to work long hours and roll up your sleeves.

What are the attributes you look for while selecting or hiring?

I look for someone that is passionate and self-motivated, the rest are things we can teach them and they can learn.

What according to you can trainees do while they are training at hotels to make it a win-win for them & the hotel/unit?

Go the extra mile to introduce themselves to other associates and staff, don’t wait for others to do so. Especially as an intern or trainee, it’s important to step out of your shell and be willing to ask others for help and assistance to break down barriers.

Tell us a little about your average day

My average day begins with reading about 20 emails in the morning from last night’s staff, coming into the property and checking over how many credits and staff I have in housekeeping to make sure rooms are assigned for the day and joining our pre-shift meeting to communicate with the team. I will do a walkthrough of the lobby and touch base with the front office team to find out what follow up is needed from the night before. After a quick check of payroll to check on missed punched, I will check on our property management system and guest service order system (HOTSOS) to see how our request is looking. We have a property stand-up meeting to give and hear updates from the other departments.

The rest of my day might consist of doing supply inventories, placing purchase orders, doing guest room and lobby inspections, responding to guest inquiries or complaints, checking on occupancies and blocking for upcoming nights, reading through group resumes to plan for upcoming groups, checking on linen levels and placing requests, attending a conference call and plenty of meetings, work on scheduling for the upcoming period, processing payroll, approving purchase orders placed by my team, and run various reports on quality control. Then we start it all again the next day.

How do keep abreast of all that is happening in hospitality?

Working at a Hyatt Regency, our corporate offices do a great job of keeping us abreast of updates as a company and things to be aware of. I also stay connected on linked in and try to network with others in the industry that I have kept in contact with over the years.

Two reasons why this industry is awesome!

Its great because you get to have a hand in developing and advancing other people’s careers and see them grow right in front of your eyes. It’s amazing to be a part of that and I consider this the true reason why I come to work each day, to help make a difference. Also, the discounted room rates when I go on vacation are awesome too!

Two things you would like to change in the industry.

I would like to see a more positive feedback loop, unfortunately so much of what I am involved with is back-end follow up of the small percentage of guests that had an issue, but it takes up such a large part of my day (from trip advisor comments,

Medallia guest service surveys, voicemails about lost and found, or that ever anxious feeling you get when someone asks to speak to the manager and your curiosity piques to wonder what it might be what happened. With so much technology at our fingertips and so many systems and applications interfacing together at the speed of a click, it’s hard to stay in the moment and focus on delivering great service or connecting with co-workers as often as I should, and I regret this. It is also very hard to disconnect from it and decompress, even on a day off, as we are all still so connected with text and email communication and it’s so tempting to check work email every hour or even few minutes, which I think detracts from the true heart of hospitality, which is connecting with people.

Tell us about these unique celebratory events that you devise for your team. How did the ideas come to you, why do you do it?

The idea for the pie in the face just came to me as I was thinking of a fun way to provide an incentive for the team. I remember seeing movies of dunk tanks and always thought that would be a fun challenge but didn’t have a dunk tank and that might have been expensive to organize, so thought pies would be fun and relatively inexpensive to buy some tins, whip cream, and toppings that way people could build their own.

Honestly, I think most hotel managers ARE open to fun, but sometimes just don’t think about it or necessarily have the time to organize it amidst their full work-loads.

I didn’t think to get approval, as it started as something that just my immediate team would participate in (Housekeeping, Front Desk, Valet Parking, Laundry, and PBX) but then all of a sudden turned into more of a hotel-wide activity. It was hard to get a count of exactly how many employees were there, especially as my vision was blurred, but I would say around 50 people were there. I did reassure my General Manager that I would not file a worker’s compensation report though!