Being the general manager of two hotels at the same time isn't a first for Skip Adams.
He currently oversees day-to-day operations at The Tennessean and the soon-to-open Marriott Knoxville Downtown, formerly the Holiday Inn World's Fair Park. They are neighboring properties acquired by Rockbridge in 2019. Aimbridge Hospitality, where Adams has worked for the last 10 years, operates both hotels.
Interviewed as part of an HNN series focused on hotel general managers, Adams reflected on what it takes to balance the guests' needs and operations at two properties simultaneously. Earlier in his career, he served as general manager of the Embassy Suites New Orleans Convention Center and The Lofts Club Tower, both in New Orleans.
"It's exactly what you would imagine it to be from a daily check-in perspective," he said. "You just do it all twice."
That means coming in each morning and walking through both hotels' front office operations, going through the food-and-beverage and banquet departments and then meeting with the sales teams.
"You engage with your customers and staff on the way," he said.
While many operations are the same at different hotels, Adams' current role is a little different. Each day he moves between The Tennessean, a luxury independent hotel, and the Marriott Knoxville Downtown, a branded hotel.
The goal to managing both a branded hotel and an independent hotel is to understand each hotel's clients and their expectations, he said.
Guests have distinct expectations based on the type of property, and while some are different, he said they're more alike than they are different.
"Everybody wants a clean room with a comfortable bed. Everybody wants a warm staff. Everybody wants quality," he said.
Can you talk more about The Tennessean versus the Marriott Knoxville Downtown?
The Tennessean is the only luxury hotel in the city of Knoxville. Any discerning guest who requires a luxury experience certainly walks in expecting world-class luxury, because they consume that in other markets.
We use Forbes standards at The Tennessean. We train off Forbes standards there, and then next door at the Marriott, we train with the Marriott standards and some of the Aimbridge standards.
Some of it's brick-and-mortar things that are different. At The Tennessean, we serve our [old fashioned cocktail] in Baccarat crystal, which obviously wouldn't be appropriate at the Marriott.
It requires having a really good understanding of the consumer willing to pay the rate at your hotel.
With more COVID-19 vaccines rolling out and more people starting to think about and plan travel, how are you preparing for more demand at your hotels?
I think the one thing everybody agreed on when this first happened was we have to figure out a way to bring the staff back.
For a lot of staff, their jobs just went away. Obviously, different people handled that in different ways, but at the end of the day, there [was less business].
The solution to that is more business, and that gets the staff back in creating income for their families. It gets our owners in a positive cash-flow situation.
We rolled out partnerships with WELL Health and Safety rating to get our health rating ... they have an additional rating system called Share Care that we were verified through. And then Aimbridge quickly rolled out an eight-point program that internally certified our practices to make sure we were following all the appropriate guidelines. We let our staff and guests know pretty quickly.
I think that's helped us. We've actually had pretty good performance here. We've certainly outperformed our competitive set.
Where do your hotels stand today in terms of staffing and demand?
We have about 90% of the staff back now, and I think that getting them back, getting them comfortable working with the measures we all had to take, was a huge step in [recovering], because when the staff looks comfortable and engaging with guests every day on how we're cleaning rooms and they're comfortable with our safety precautions ... the guests pick up on that and it makes them feel at ease, too.
We're starting to get back to normal. We're already starting to sell out weekends, and we were over 50% occupancy the past month at The Tennessean.
Groups are coming back. Contracts are going back to normal. I can see it moving.