Hiring a Hotel General Manager: When Ten Years of Experience Can Mean Everything—or Almost Nothing
Hiring a hotel General Manager based solely on years in the role can be one of the costliest mistakes in hospitality. Meaningful experience is not just about tenure, but about the complexity of the hotels managed, the challenges addressed, the level of autonomy exercised, the teams built and the transformations delivered.
A poor executive hire can consume virtually an entire operating cycle through search, onboarding, diagnosis, recognition of the mismatch, replacement and a new transition. In hospitality, one year means a season, a budget, commercial strategy, recruitment, investment, maintenance, reputation and market positioning.
The key question, therefore, should not only be, “How many years have you been a General Manager?” but the far more revealing question: “What have you actually had to lead during those years?”
Some business decisions can be corrected relatively quickly. A sales campaign that is not working can be adjusted. A poorly designed rate can be corrected. A supplier can be replaced. Even a misguided investment, however painful, can be redirected. But making the wrong choice when appointing a hotel General Manager belongs to a different category of mistakes. Not only because of its financial cost, but because of something far harder to recover: time.
Let us imagine a situation that is far less exceptional than we might like to admit. An owner takes four or five months to find a new General Manager. Then another five or six months are needed to realise that the chosen person is not quite working out. Doubts arise, difficult conversations follow, attempts are made to turn the situation around, and finally comes the decision to replace them. Then another search begins, another selection process and another transition. By the time someone new is genuinely able to take control of the business, almost an entire management cycle may have been consumed.
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