The subject of this week’s Industry Icons is the Managing Director of Exclusive Hotels and Venues, Danny Pecorelli.
Danny Pecorelli was awarded the 2014 Hotelier of the Year; his hotel group, Exclusive Hotels and Venues, was voted the AAs most eco-friendly hotels in 2015; and earlier this month, he was awarded an honorary degree from the Edge Hotel School at the University of Essex. These accolades and awards are in recognition for the hard work and significant achievement for a man driven by a passion for food and hospitality.
Danny is a second-generation hotelier who took on and developed the family business into a hotel group that can collectively boast four Michelin stars, twenty hotel quality stars (all four are 5-star hotels) and numerous quality rosettes.
He is a hotelier to his very core. He recognises that achieving success is more than just delivering the bottom line. He realises success comes through having a vision, developing a culture of service and recognising the value of the essential resource of the hotelier – the staff.
The accolades and awards are not by pure chance – they are recognition from the industry and by the industry, that the individual has made a real contribution to the industry and achieved something special. These achievements have taken 34 years to mature and are a result of a deeply felt and long-held belief not just in the business of hospitality, but the art, culture and ethos of “being hospitable”. This comes from an overriding passion and philosophy that puts hospitality at its core.
As Danny puts it, Exclusive Hotels and Venues is almost an “anti-brand”. It doesn’t have the brand recognition or the defined process brand standards of the major international chains. What it does have however are “values” that characterise all of the hotels and that are also a reflection of Danny himself. Those values are the soft brand standards of Exclusive Hotels where the culture of service permeates the fabric of the business and most obviously demonstrated by the staff.
Danny tells the story of how at one of the hotels where they had a number of bicycles available for the use of guests, one of the gardeners saw that a group of guests who were planning on using the bicycles, were going to be disappointed as the group were bigger by one than the number of bikes available. He asked the guests just to wait a few minutes and he would fix it…. He fixed it by getting his own bicycle!
It is this focus on being hospitable and caring for people that is found in the way that the company looks after its own. With a culture where individuals are treated as individuals, given opportunities for development and growth and feel that they are genuinely being cared for, they pass on that emotional attachment and behaviour by way that they look after the guests.
Danny sees the recruitment, development and retention of talent as being both key to success as well as the biggest challenge as a hotelier. In what are likely to be fairly turbulent and challenging times over the next few years in the UK, investing in the key assets of the business, its people, will become even more critical. Recruiting apprenticeships and trainees are only part of the story, it is taking the opportunity to develop all staff that in turn encourages the culture of wanting to belong and delivering great service experiences.
The hospitality industry in the UK has always suffered as being an industry that is not highly valued as a aspirational professional career by the politicians, the education system nor the public. In part, this could be the rather fragmented nature of the industry or it could be more deeply rooted in the social and economic structures of society. As Danny would put it, it is even more important in this time of uncertainty and tougher business landscape to be able to have some joined up thinking in promoting the value of the industry and the very significant career opportunities it can provide. It is clearly no accident that Exclusive Hotels has also been recognised as being one of the “Best Places to Work in Hospitality”.
Danny is a very strong believer in professional vocational education and training, through creating the Exclusive Chefs Academy for aspiring young chefs, working with local colleges and being a very positive supporter and patron of the Edge Hotel School. He was one of the first hotel school patrons and demonstrated his belief in the concept and idea by sponsoring a room in Wivenhoe House Hotel, giving his own time in presenting masterclasses, providing scholarships and mentoring students. The reason and rationale for his award of an honorary degree is clear and is not an end in and of itself, Danny will continue to be a strong advocate for the Edge Hotel School, the industry and its future coupled with the success of Exclusive Hotels and Venues.
