by editor’s office, ch
Mister Klaus, Kempinski Hotel Bristol Berlin, which is under your management, is one of the first “Leading” hotels in Germany. You said recently that being a member of this marketing association had resulted in prestige, but little profit. Has the annual membership fee of USD85,000 ever paid off?
Uwe Klaus: “The membership needs to be viewed from different angles throughout the years, of course. Firstly, the fee has developed over many years. Secondly, the Berlin market has, of course, seen drastic change. We used to be the first and only LHW hotel in town and thus enjoyed the according prestige and booking volumes. By now, both the number of LHW hotels and the presence of luxury brands have risen rapidly, meaning that the Bristol has become just one of many LHW – or luxury – hotels in the capital. Obviously, that brings with it a distribution of the booking volume of LHW’s certainly prestigious, yet rather limited clientele. As such, we have noticed in our cost-benefit analyses of recent years that the booking volumes generated through LHW did in no way or form justify the at times very high expenses.”
You described LHW’s approach to the quality check of your hotel as “unprofessional” – what happened?
“We had agreed in extensive, personal talks with the former LHW Board under the highly professional management of CEO Paul McManus and his COO Wolf Ebeling to suspend the LHW checks on a short-term basis during the massive reconstruction phase of the Bristol. An absolutely fair move in my eyes, since we had informed the LHW Board in detail about time, volume and quality of pending and already finished reconstruction measures – such as the complete renovation of the meetings area. Unfortunately, this agreement was not kept after the change in management. We were not even informed about a change in the agreement, or the conducted quality check, until after the exclusion had already been decided upon. I consider such treatment of an establishment as renowned as the Bristol, being a shareholder and founding member of LHW Europe, absolutely outrageous.”
The entire interview in German can be found at www.tophotel.de.
