A hotel business that is built around stays has now adopted ‘STAY’ as the core value of the hotel’s management team.
Cairns Harbourside Hotel became independently managed at the start of the year, with a new General Manager and management team at the helm, moving away from the generic global branding of the past two decades and focusing on providing genuinely local service and character based on the theme of ‘Stay Tropical’.
The hotel launched a series of consumer packages based on the ‘Stay’ tagline, and so when General Manager Glen Macdonald established a Leadership Group team to drive the new direction for the hotel, they decided to make the external messaging central to the internal messaging as well.
The core values of the hotel are now built around S.T.A.Y:
STAY SAFE: Do everything with safety at the forefront. Safety is everyone’s responsibility through safe work practices, strategies and behaviours.
STAY TOGETHER: We stay connected to each other through collaboration and connected to our community through service.
STAY ADAPTABLE: We are diverse and inclusive, adapting to different cultures, environments, customers, and situations.
STAY YES: It’s our mindset. We proactively find solutions, within situations, providing a positive outcome for all.
Cairns Harbourside Hotel General Manager, Glen Macdonald said that while the innovation wasn’t rocket science, it was definitely a refreshing change.
“So often culture and values are dictated to hotels from headquarters thousands of miles away, and it’s easy for the messaging to get lost in translation,” said Mr Macdonald.
“What is appropriate for a city of five million in Europe, America or Asia might not be as appropriate in a laid-back tropical environment such as Cairns.
“As a fresh management team at the hotel after two decades of global management, we had the advantage of starting from scratch. Given that STAY became our external messaging platform, when the team came up with the idea of applying that internally, I thought it was perfect.
“We put so much emphasis on ‘local’ through the produce we use in our kitchen, and our use of local art and design, so why shouldn’t we adopt a set of home-grown core values as well?
“It is very refreshing and reflects how the hotel has changed from its previous global persona to its distinctly local and tropical personality today. Judging by feedback, both guests and the team appreciate the new vibe.”
