Love at first sight

“I remembered vividly when I was a young boy, and my father took me to the Dusit Thani hotel in Bangkok. How nice it was! We had such very good service. That’s when I decided I wanted to be in the industry.” To that end he gained a degree in administration, majoring in hotel management, at Ramkhamhaeng University. After graduation, he started off in the food and beverage department and gradually worked his way up.

The Royal Approach

Mom Tri’s Boathouse hotel on Kata Beach

Khun Dan was nervous when the property’s owner, the Harvard-trained architect Mom Tri, asked him to run Mom Tri’s Villa Royale; at the time he was working as No 2 at the nearby Mom Tri’s Boathouse hotel. His main worry was whether he could live up to Mom Tri’s expectations, and not fail him.

“Mom Tri asked me what the word ‘Royale’ meant to me,” Khun Dan recalls. And that was where it all started. Khun Dan explained that he felt the hotel’s watchword should be simple: that guests should be treated like princes and princesses. “It is important to make them feel special,” he says; he does not subscribe to the philosophy that says hotel guests like to be treated casually. What is more appropriate, he believes, is the warm respect for superiors that comes naturally to Thais. “We deliver service according to the guest’s needs,” he adds, stressing, “Hotel policy is never as important as doing anything in our power to meet their needs.”

One thing Khun Dan says he has learned from working at the top end of the industry is that real VIPs are usually very pleasant, down-to-earth people. The demanding ones are the people who hang around the VIPs. That’s not a surprise, he adds. His own personality, he says, has been improved by working in hotels. “I used to have a very hot temper. I’ve cooled down a lot and opened myself up, too. I think that, to be a success in hotel work, you need to be like a half-empty glass that can always be topped up. The fact is, no one knows everything. This job has taught me to listen more to other people’s opinions. In this way I can see the world in a wider perspective.”

Young, enthusiastic and flexible

Adisak “Dan” Pitukrojjananont

Choosing the right staff for the new hotel was a crucial job, and Khun Dan sat with the personnel manager, interviewing applicants himself. “We were looking for people who were service-minded and understood how important that was for such a hotel. We have more than 90 staff to look after just 27 rooms, from which you can see that we really mean to deliver the best possible service to our guests,” he adds.

The hotel ended up being staffed mostly with fresh young people, some only just out of college, others coming from businesses totally unrelated to hotel work. “I find it’s better this way. We want to work with people we can train. We don’t care about their experience; in fact, sometimes too much experience can get in a way [of learning]. “I find younger people are more willing to learn new things, which is very important to us. The way we run the hotel, we have only a few departments, so our staff have to be able to do many things without hesitation. They can be porters or waiters, or anything, depending on the situation. They have to be multi-functional,” he explains.

The GM’s duties

Kata Noi Beach

Khun Dan is the kind of GM who puts 100% of his energy into his work. If he feels he is ignorant about some aspect of hotel work, he takes a training course. “Before we opened Mom’s Tri’s Spa Royale, I had no idea about running spas as a business, so I took a class in how to do it professionally. I learned how to give massages, and about massage oils, spa products and stuff like that,” he says. He also learned, he says, that not everyone can be trained as a masseur. Massage, he says, is a mix of technique and art, and not everyone is an artist.

As hotel GM, Khun Dan is also in charge of marketing, which keeps him busy. “I just came back from Australia and a month from now I’ll be in Shanghai; we have a lot of customers who work there.”
On the road trip such as this, he has to be ready to answer certain questions – particularly about the security of Phuket. “It’s hard sometimes to make people understand that our island is fine and is a long way from the problems in the South, down next to the Malaysian border. On my trip to Australia, I could see that the local agencies were really concerned about this issue. On a map of the world, it all looks so close but in reality it is 10 hours’ drive away.”

The green hotel

In the Villa Royale garden

Before we leave Mom Tri’s Villa Royale, we can’t help remarking on how green the hotel’s surroundings are. Khun Dan explains that when the property was built, a great deal of thought and effort was put into ensuring that as few trees as possible fell under the axe. Khun Dan says, “Mom Tri once remarked that some of these trees were here before us, so who were we to cut them?”.

The hotel makes great efforts, too, to reduce the use of manufactured chemicals. Fruits and vegetables served to guests are all organically grown and only natural fertilizers are used in the hotel garden. “The same applies to any sprays to get rid of bugs or other unwanted animals; we use only sprays made of natural substances. We want to make sure that younger guests running around in our garden are safe from strong chemicals,” Khun Dan says.

Princes and princesses, after all, must be protected from all harm.

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