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.

And in Hospitality, a year is not simply a year. It is a peak season that will not return. It is a budget prepared, executed or missed. It is a pricing strategy. It is talent hired and talent lost. It is preventive maintenance completed or deferred. It is investments approved or postponed. It is commercial agreements, reputation, positioning, relationships with guests, agencies and suppliers. It is hundreds of small decisions that leave an operational legacy for the following financial year. Hotel time has a memory.

This is why I have always had some reservations when, in a recruitment process, a candidate’s experience is reduced to asking how many years they have previously held the same role. Clearly, years matter. It would be absurd to argue otherwise. Accumulated experience provides perspective, judgement and, above all, something no manual can fully teach: having seen enough problems to recognise some of them before they explode. But tenure in a role and depth of experience are not necessarily the same thing.

After many years working around hotels, teams, budgets, guests and owners, I am increasingly less interested in asking simply how long have you been a General Manager? and far more interested in asking what have you actually had to manage during that time? Because managing stability is not the same as building it. Taking over a perfectly organised hotel is not the same as bringing order to one that is not. Nor is implementing a strategy defined by a corporate structure the same as having to create one from a blank sheet of paper. And certainly, holding the title of General Manager is not the same as having truly had to fulfil the role.

The issue is not years of experience, but what happened during those years

In executive recruitment, we resort far too easily to a convenient metric: years.

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Five years as a General Manager.

Ten years as a General Manager.

Fifteen years as a General Manager.

The number is reassuring because it appears objective. Yet it has much the same problem as certain hotel KPIs when viewed in isolation: without context, they can say very little.

An occupancy rate of 90% may be outstanding or disastrous, depending on the ADR achieved, distribution costs, profitability, market conditions and prevailing demand. Exactly the same applies to professional experience.

Ten years may represent ten exceptionally intense years of learning, transformation and decision-making. But they may also be, to exaggerate deliberately, the same year repeated ten times.

The difference is enormous.

The academic study on leadership competencies in Hospitality that I consulted is particularly interesting in this respect. The competencies considered relevant include business, cognitive and interpersonal capabilities, personal values and strategic competencies, with communication also identified as one of the core capabilities. This reinforces something I observe constantly: leading complex organisations requires a far broader combination of skills than simply having previously held a particular role.

And a hotel is precisely that: an extraordinarily complex organisation.

The literature on hotel operations reminds us that anyone managing a hotel must simultaneously understand rooms, food and beverage, front- and back-office operations, quality, people, costs, revenue and profitability. In addition, the hotel product has one particularly unforgiving characteristic: a room we do not sell today cannot be stored and sold tomorrow. This requires continuous decision-making and makes business judgement an essential part of the role.

This is why, when I assess executive experience, I find questions such as these far more revealing:

• What situation did you find when you arrived? I am not interested merely in the size or category of the property. I want to understand the starting point. Someone who inherited a stable, profitable, well-positioned organisation with an excellent executive team has had a radically different experience from someone who had to rebuild a deteriorating operation.
• What problems did you have to solve? Problems are an outstanding management university. Labour conflicts, budget variances, reputational decline, falling demand, product issues, F&B crises, excessive turnover, loss of commercial accounts or tensions with ownership teach lessons that rarely appear in a job description.
• Which decisions were genuinely yours? I consider this point fundamental. Two people can hold exactly the same job title and have entirely different degrees of autonomy. One may have had authority over budgets, pricing, recruitment, investments, commercial strategy and organisation. The other may have implemented decisions made several levels above them. The role was the same; the experience was not.
• What team did you have to build? Inheriting an excellent executive committee and retaining it has merit. Building one from scratch requires a different set of capabilities. Re-engaging a demotivated team requires others. Reducing turnover, developing middle managers and getting departments that have historically been at odds to begin collaborating reveals far more about a person than the length of their contract.
• What changed during your tenure? This is probably one of my favourite questions. Not what did you do?, but what changed? Activity and results are not synonymous either. We can hold many meetings, design procedures, hire consultants and fill presentations with upward arrows. The hotel, rather impolitely, will still reveal its results afterwards.

This brings us to another distinction I consider fundamental: maintenance experience versus transformation experience.

Both are necessary.

There are excellent professionals who specialise in managing mature organisations, maintaining exceptionally high standards and optimising established businesses. It is a highly valuable capability. But there are other business moments when a hotel needs transformation: an opening, repositioning, turnaround, professionalisation, cultural change, reputational recovery or team rebuilding.

The EFQM Model is particularly useful in understanding this difference because it connects purpose, vision and strategy, culture and leadership, stakeholder engagement, sustainable value creation, performance and transformation with strategic and operational results. In other words, managing well is not simply about keeping the machine running; it involves connecting direction, execution and results.

This should have an immediate consequence for recruitment.

We should not be looking for the General Manager with the most experience. We should be looking for the General Manager whose experience is most relevant to the business problem we need to solve.

It sounds like a semantic distinction.

It is not.

It is probably one of the most important distinctions in the entire process.

If I am opening a hotel, I will probably place enormous value on having previously been involved in genuine openings. If I need to reposition a property, I will look for evidence of previous repositioning projects. If there is a serious profitability issue, I will need to understand that person’s ability to interpret the business and act on revenue, costs and productivity. If the principal problem is cultural, their track record in building teams will carry enormous weight.

Because every hotel needs a different General Manager depending on the business stage it is going through.

The mistake arises when we first design a generic profile —fifteen years of experience, five as a General Manager, languages, a certain educational background— and then try to fit people into it.

I would reverse the process.

I would first diagnose the hotel in depth.

Then I would define the transformation it needs over the next three years.

And only then would I look for the person whose career demonstrates that they have solved reasonably similar problems.

Hotel strategy has spent decades studying precisely the need to align the environment, resources, structure, competencies, leadership, culture and execution. The Handbook of Hospitality Strategic Management, for example, devotes specific sections to resource allocation, strategic human resources, strategy execution, leadership, organisational culture and innovation. The lesson I take from this is simple: General Management cannot be analysed separately from the business system it will be required to lead.

And here we come to an issue that is likely to be somewhat more uncomfortable.

We should also assess the scale of risk that person has managed.

I am not referring only to financial scale.

I am referring to complexity.

Number of employees. In-house food and beverage. Events. Wellness. Conventions. Seasonality. Dependence on intermediaries. Multiple source markets. Family or institutional ownership. Independent hotel or corporate structure. Investment capacity. Debt. Labour disputes. Level of autonomy. Reputational demands.

Two 100-room hotels may represent entirely different management experiences.

This also explains why I consider it dangerous to recruit solely on apparent similarity.

“We are looking for someone from a five-star hotel.”

Fine.

But which five-star hotel?

Urban or resort?

Independent or chain-operated?

With 40 employees or 300?

With in-house food and beverage?

With major events?

With commercial autonomy?

With its own budget?

With ownership present every day?

In growth or in crisis?

With a brand capable of generating demand, or having to build its positioning virtually from scratch?

Once we begin asking these questions, we discover that the stars on the façade explain far less about management complexity than we tend to imagine.

We should also ask about failures.

Especially about those.

At this point, I have considerably more confidence in someone who can explain a mistaken decision precisely, the consequences it had and what subsequently changed in their decision-making approach, than in a candidate whose career apparently consists of an uninterrupted succession of successes.

Because that may mean one of two things.

That we are dealing with an extraordinary professional.

Or that we have not yet asked enough questions.

Experience is not simply about accumulating successes. It is about developing judgement.

And judgement emerges when a person has made decisions, observed their consequences, corrected mistakes and incorporated that learning into subsequent decisions.

This is why I would distinguish between four different dimensions of experience:

1. Chronological experience. How many years a person has worked.
2. Functional experience. Which responsibilities they have genuinely performed.
3. Contextual experience. The types of organisations, markets and situations in which they have exercised those responsibilities.
4. Transformational experience. Which problems they solved and which results changed as a consequence of the decisions they made.

All four matter.

But for General Management positions, the last two usually tell me far more than the first.

There is also another issue that rarely receives sufficient attention in an interview: the ability to understand the whole business.

Revenue Management offers an excellent example. A specialist manual reminds us that a genuine revenue culture requires General Management, Sales and Reservations to share a vision and objectives, that decisions be grounded in knowledge, and that the organisation understands metrics such as RevPAR and the reasons for accepting or rejecting particular business.

That is exactly what General Management is.

Not knowing how to perform every function personally, but understanding all of them well enough to ensure they work towards the same outcome.

Because the General Manager does not need to be the hotel’s best revenue manager, best chef, best salesperson, best finance professional or best Executive Housekeeper.

In fact, if they are, perhaps we should be concerned about how we selected everyone else.

What they do need is to understand how a decision in one department affects the others.

An indiscriminate reduction in staffing may temporarily improve labour costs while simultaneously damaging guest experience, reputation and commercial capacity.

An aggressive pricing policy may increase occupancy while destroying ADR.

A spectacular investment may improve the product without generating a return.

A promotion may fill rooms and reduce GOP.

A change in the food and beverage concept may improve reputation while worsening productivity.

Management is precisely about understanding those interdependencies.

And this is where years help, naturally.

But they help when they have been filled with decisions.

This is why I would also question some excessively lengthy recruitment processes. Prudence is essential when hiring for a role of this responsibility, but there comes a point at which prudence begins to turn into indecision.

Five interviews.

Assessment centre.

Another interview.

Presentation.

Interview with ownership.

Interview with the board.

References.

Another conversation.

And in the meantime, the hotel continues to operate.

The intention is to reduce the risk of making the wrong appointment, but paradoxically we may be creating another risk: the cost of a vacant General Management position.

Because an absent General Manager also makes decisions.

They simply make them through omission.

Investments are delayed. Recruitment is postponed. Structures that may need changing are retained. Middle managers begin operating with greater uncertainty. Some commercial decisions are made provisionally. Others are not made at all.

And temporary arrangements have a surprising ability to become permanent.

The literature on hotel satisfaction also insists on something fundamental: a hotel is a deeply human business, where satisfaction depends to a great extent on the attitudes and performance of teams, and where recruitment, training, evaluation and service culture directly shape the guest experience.

This is why a prolonged management transition affects far more than the organisational chart.

It affects organisational behaviour.

And this is where, for me, the true cost of a poor appointment emerges.

It is not merely the salary paid to the wrong person.

It is the opportunity cost of decisions that were not made, those that were made incorrectly, and those that whoever arrives next will have to undo.

Sometimes there is even a fourth, more expensive category: the good decisions that should have been made twelve months earlier.

In Hospitality, twelve months can be an eternity.

Because when the new General Manager arrives, they will probably inherit a budget they did not design, a workforce they did not select, commercial agreements they did not negotiate, investments they did not approve and perhaps a reputation that has already changed.

Then the diagnostic process begins.

Again.

And we may discover that we have devoted almost an entire financial year to finding, testing, replacing and finding again the person who was meant to lead that very year.

This is why, if I had to offer some practical recommendations to owners, boards and professionals responsible for appointing a General Manager, they would be these:

• Define the business problem first, and the profile afterwards. Do not simply look for a “good General Manager”. Ask what the hotel must achieve over the next 24 or 36 months, and what capabilities that mission requires.
• Replace some career-history questions with questions about decisions. “How many years did you manage that hotel?” provides information. “What was the main problem when you arrived, what did you decide to do, and what result did you achieve?” provides much more.
• Assess context, not merely category. Rooms, turnover, operational complexity, seasonality, workforce, autonomy, ownership model, food and beverage, positioning and financial situation explain an experience better than the number of stars.
• Look for evidence of building. Teams created, processes implemented, products repositioned, profitability recovered, reputation improved, costs reorganised or new markets developed.
• Ask what went wrong. Mistakes reveal maturity when the person can analyse them without seeking external blame.
• Verify their ability to read the business across functions. Sales, operations, people, marketing, revenue, finance and guest experience are not separate compartments.
• Value diagnostic speed. An experienced professional does not necessarily decide faster, but will usually identify sooner which information is needed to make the right decision.
• Do not confuse stability with a lack of ambition. There are career stages in which composure, judgement and the ability to build sustainable organisations contribute far more value than a permanent obsession with the next promotion.
• Nor should you confuse mobility with talent. Constantly changing companies may have provided immense diversity of experience, or it may have prevented someone from seeing the long-term consequences of their own decisions. You need to establish which of those occurred.
• And measure the cost of time. Every additional month in the process must be justified, because the hotel continues competing while we select the person who must lead it.

After years of observing hotels and people, I still believe that experience matters enormously. Probably more than ever. But precisely for that reason, we should stop measuring it in such a poor way as counting years.

When you take part in appointing a General Manager, try to reconstruct the candidate’s professional story rather than merely reading the closing credits. Ask what they found, what they decided, what changed, what went wrong, what they learned and what they left working when they departed. That is where genuine experience usually emerges.

And if you are the one aspiring to a position at this level, my advice would be exactly the same in reverse: do not explain only where you have worked. Explain what you learned to manage. Talk about decisions, context, people, challenges and results. A good CV lists responsibilities; a solid career enables people to understand the judgement acquired behind them.

Because appointing a General Manager should not be about finding someone who can prove they have already been a General Manager. It should be about finding someone capable of quickly understanding what this hotel needs, at this moment, with this team, in this market and with this ownership. And getting it right the first time matters far more than it seems: money can be recovered; the season we have just lost cannot.