Opening a hotel can be like opening a can of worms; problems can arise quickly and unexpectedly. To ensure the process goes smoothly, some hoteliers have traditions in place to prepare for the opening of their hotels.

Four hoteliers from around the U.S. shared their strategies and traditions for hotel openings.

As a New Orleans native, there’s nothing more personal to Brian Englehart than cooking up his personal crawfish recipe.

Prior to each hotel opening, Englehart, general manager of Maison de La Luz in New Orleans, prepares 80 pounds of his crawfish for his entire staff. He said everybody who attends a crawfish boil feels like a part of it even if they came in knowing no one.

“You can get into long and soul-searching discussions and arguments around here about who makes better crawfish, so it’s a very personal thing,” he said. “The most important room in a house in the state of Louisiana or New Orleans is certainly the kitchen, by far, by a longshot. Just to be able to sit around the table and eat crawfish and just talk or have a beer, it just … makes a sense of community.”

It’s gotten even more personal for Englehart as his now 21-year-old son helps out with the cooking process. He said it's now a tradition for his son to argue with him over who prepares the better crawfish dish.

Englehart said the faster you cool down a crawfish, the better it absorbs spices. For his recipe, he pours two bags of ice into the boil pot to cool it down and then adds lemons, so it absorbs the lemon taste. Total prep time is about 2 1/2 hours and then one hour to cook.

The purpose of the crawfish dinner is to get the whole staff acclimated not only with the Louisiana culture, but to learn of the expectations of what an intimate service feels like so they can replicate it at the hotel, he said.

“Food is part of the culture here — really deep-set part of the culture — and so it’s important to me to make sure that everyone on my team is invested in one another and understand that through that gathering,” Englehart said.

The old saying “look good, feel good” can explain Anton Moore’s fashion choices on a hotel's opening day.

Moore, general manager of Gansevoort Meatpacking NYC hotel in New York, dons a turquoise Tom Ford suit jacket at every opening and special event tied to the property. Always a fan of fashion, Moore said working at luxury hotels throughout his career, including the Gansevoort, taught him how it’s important to represent your brand and the chic elements of the property.

“I don’t want to sound like a cliche but … we tailor our stay. One of the best things about wonderful articles of clothing is fine tailoring,” he said. “I also think there’s an experience of wearing something that makes you feel special. You put on an article of clothing that you love and you feel good, and it makes you feel special.”

Before his career in the hotel industry, Moore said he worked in entertainment sales, where he looked after the celebrity who introduced him to Tom Ford’s brand.

“Needless to say, I’ve had to buy them on sale, but it was through my working in the hotel [industry] that I discovered these different brands and my love of fashion, and how the similarities and the parallels can be drawn from creating spaces and experiences,” he said.

Sometimes the best preparation the day before a hotel opening is to not prepare at all.

Sergio Maclean, founder of Mac&Lo Hospitality and operator of Shinola Hotel in Detroit, said he has his hotels go dark the day before an opening — closing all systems down and doing close to no operations, as if it were a holiday.

“The idea is — you train, you train, you train really hard, you push everybody and then everybody's pretty much inside their heads waiting for the moment to go and then you just say, ‘OK, stop. Lay back, absorb everything, relax a little bit. We’ll see you tomorrow; trust that we’ve gone as far as we can go.’ And it always works. It restores people’s emotional stability before an opening,” he said.

Maclean said the idea was formed out of his own personal experiences of being a perfectionist. He compared his first openings to someone driving for the first time after getting a driver’s license, trying hard to not mess up.

“This whole thing about the dark day really started with my own need to let go, to understand the job is done, tomorrow is another day, this is as far as we can get. It’s perfect. It’s perfect in its imperfection,” he said.

Although Maclean said he’s had the same amount of success with openings at the beginning of his career compared to now, the amount of work and pressure has decreased tremendously due to his reformed mindset.

It wasn’t until his third or fourth opening that Maclean learned he could operate in a more effortless way if he gave himself the mental space for it.

“I really have to work very hard at letting go — letting go of my fears, letting go of my insecurities, letting go of my ideal perception of where we could be because at the end of the day, you are only where you are now. It’s a very zen exercise for me,” Maclean said.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, Peter Yeung could publish a novel in a week.

Yeung, managing director of Walker Hotel Tribeca and Greenwich Village, wanted to be an artist and art curator when he was an art history minor in college. In his role in the hotel industry, he grabs inspiration from his past dream job and draws sketches to communicate to staffers. It’s become a tradition to sketch out a floor plan before opening a hotel, he said.

“I communicate better using pictures than I do using words, so it becomes very natural to me and it’s kind of my thing now,” Yeung said.

The tradition stretches beyond Yeung now; his two daughters, ages 6 and 9, come with him to a new property and he has them draw a picture of the hotel. He said it serves as a memory for them to remember the hotels when they get older, but it also serves as inspiration for him, as he pins their art up in his office and looks at it when he gets stressed.

On a day-to-day basis, Yeung said his hotels use drawings and pictures in general to ensure the operations go as smoothly as possible. If there’s a room renovation, he’ll draw out the room and show the construction crew where to put everything. The staff prints out pictures of VIPs so they can identify them clearly.

“Sometimes, reading it and where things go, how things flow, a thought process — in a physical environment such as a hotel, it is much more brilliantly communicated through pictures,” he said.

For an opening to go as smoothly as possible, Yeung said it’s important to communicate with all staff members to let them know the expectations, standards and culture of the hotel. He said getting everyone involved in the decision-making process — such as allowing dishwashers to decide where dishes go and front-desk agents to decide where printers go — makes everyone feel like a part of the opening.

Through his openings, Yeung said he’s learned “to plan that things won’t go to plan.” It’s a less stressful environment when everyone from the top down is prepared for an alteration to the initial plan when the doors open.

Most importantly, Yeung said he had to learn that something not going to plan doesn’t make him or his team a failure.

“The failure portion comes in the fact that you’ve allowed yourself to get disappointed instead of coming up with a better plan and coming up with a new plan,” Yeung said. “That’s what makes a superhero, that’s what makes a leader, that’s what makes someone stronger.”

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