staff training and what I’d call a soft opening in the restaurant. I invited all the other hotels to bring their staff along for dinner, they could have a three-course meal and my staff could then wait on them and get the understanding of service again, because it was all new front of house staff that were in that area. That went really well because then we got feedback from them… I couldn’t get a better training process than what I did. “Stepping into the role and the fact that there was no food and beverage for so long, it meant I could concentrate on the hotel team and get to know the hotel, get to know the accommodation, the chalets, the staff that work there, the processes and everything. I probably got three months of very intensive involvement with that team that they’ve probably never seen before. “Staff morale up here is brilliant, they’ve all just chipped in and they love the fact that I’ve been involved and wanting to know. It was the same thing
with Guest Services, I was able to get in there. It was very satisfying leading into the opening and has been very satisfying since. We’ve just been ticking along really well, we opened just prior to the Victorian and Tasmanian school holidays, so we got a great start to the season. There’s been lots of great feedback on booking.com and Google and so forth, all of that has been really brilliant for us.” While the next few months will see less foot traffic to the region, the downtime allows Stuart to attend to “maintenance” jobs before the 23-24 summer season rolls in. It might have been a rocky start to his tenure, but he wouldn’t change a thing. “I’m just very grateful to the local businesses that helped us out, we’re very grateful to the Wilmont fire brigade for getting up here and while that fire did start to lick up into the roof, had it have been 20 more minutes of fire we would have gone like kindling. I’m enormously grateful for that.”
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