TOP Hoteliers was the first hospitality recruitment and executive search firm to open offices in the People's Republic of China. serving the hospitality industry exclusively  We combine worldwide, international industry knowledge with in-depth understanding of the Greater China Hospitality market to find and recruit quality candidates for all key positions. Our company has earned a reputation for successful placement of talented hospitality executives in a broad range of senior-level and management roles within nearly all international hotel management companies and respected local hotel management companies active in the region, as well as other leading restaurant management companies and other hospitality oriented companies.

Located in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Beijing we are close to our clients and are familiar with their operations, location and style.

Our consultants all come with a hospitality based education, work experience and service attitude background.

Please explore our site to learn more about our values, our processes, our expertise, and what we can offer to you.

Yours sincerely,

  René J.M. Schillings MA Bha  
Managing Director  

TOP Hoteliers June Newsletter.

Further reading on the topics in our newsletter

China’s continued hotel boom and the shortage of qualified staff

While the rest of the world is still licking its wounds from the International Financial Crisis, China seems to be the least effected and the development of new hotels as part of urban redevelopment plans, tourism development in various regions and as plain investment by real estate companies mostly, but many others is going full steam again. For the financial analysts we may leave the worries about a possible bubble to burst sooner or later. As hoteliers we are more concerned that the current growth of hotel properties is not sustained by the availability of managers for all these hotels. The mere building of a hotel in China, finding location, investment and determination to build a hotel is not the bottleneck to further growth. But for the operational excellent operation of hotels, to safeguard guest satisfaction, brand standards as well as the owner’s investment, there is a serious bottleneck in China, and all hotel managers in China are talking about this as one of the most severe issues keeping them busy.

Asia Pacific is leading the recovery in global hotel performance, achieving the strongest revenue per available room (revPAR) growth during the first four months of 2010, up 24.1% to US$83. The region is also leading growth in international tourist arrivals and passenger traffic, so if this trend continues, revPAR may push past the US$100 level at some point this year. If this happens, the region will be achieving the best performances it has ever achieved. At 1,049 projects/292,619 rooms, China continues to represent the lion's share of the Asia Pacific Pipeline, with 59% of all projects and 68% of rooms. China's sustained economic growth makes it a top priority for global hotel companies for both new construction and reflagging opportunities. The increasing spending power and mobility of the domestic population has also caught the attention of local, domestic Chinese hotel companies being formed almost weekly, or if already existing, expanding with development programs for more properties in new locations. he World Tourism Organisation recently predicted that China will overtake France to become the world's largest tourist destination by 2015."

Yet the industry as a whole is facing challenges to retain its talents and is fighting a war to attract the best hoteliers for their own hotels. According to a new CareerBuilder survey, thirty percent of hospitality employers are concerned about losing their high-performing workers in the second quarter, while nearly half (46 percent) of hospitality workers, the highest among industries surveyed, said it is likely they will start looking for a new job when the economy picks up. The China Daily reported recently that 30 – 50% of the expatriates in China do not complete their contracts. The problem however is not the lack of expatriates wanting to work in China. It is often a matter of ill-prepared hoteliers that are placed in work situations unfamiliar to them, for lack of careful selection and not taking the qualifications required for working in the current Chinese environment into account when hiring managers focus too much on functional previous experience of a candidate but are themselves perhaps unaware of the challenges such experienced managers may face in the day-to-day work situation in China. But expatriates represent perhaps less than 2% of the hoteliers in China. The real shortage is for local Chinese hoteliers. We have often reported that qualified Chinese hoteliers are available, but simply too few for each and every hotel in China and for each and every department to be its head. The reasons for this shortage have been address in previous newsletters.

Staff retention starts with smart recruitment

As a recruitment company we fare well by staff turnover and vacancies arising due to hoteliers moving on, hotel openings that require complete teams, and to a certain extent the stream of hoteliers leaving the industry needing to be replaced with ever new arriving graduates. As a result of the recent crisis, many expatriate left China in the past 2 years and not all of them are coming back, as they have found jobs elsewhere. After all, a recruitment firm does not create experienced staff out of nothing. We recruit them from existing hotels, for those who send their resumes to us will be asked about jobs we have with other hotels. However as a serious provider to the industry, and with a very deep understanding of China, we encourage our clients to be smart and more far-sighted about hiring the right people, to ensure stability in the teams and to avoid gaps and upheaval due to frequent changes of managers. In the current situation in China, hiring the right person for a job is less a matter of the functional ability and technical skills, based on previous jobs held and/or particular brand background, but more so a combination of assessing the ability of a candidate to first handle the requirements of the job but secondly and more importantly to be prepared and experienced with the work situation, as defined by a variety of factors, such as location, the composition of the whole management team, the history of the hotel as a business and as a good employer, the relations to owners and the level of sophistication of the local market and the local staff in relation to the brand/product. Employers would in a normal market situation have the luxury of selecting the best available candidate weighing in all factors. However we see that with the rapid growth of some hotel chains haste makes waste. On the other hand we can see hotels whose management is not fully aware of the shortage of talents is sitting in an ivory tower believing that the best talents will flock to their hotel and do not seriously consider good alternatives. A recruitment company is an intermediary to guide this process. The hiring of the right department heads is not an every day task for the General Manager, or the HR Director. For a recruitment company it is our daily work and what’s more, we can relate each and every position in a hotel that is vacant to the whole spectrum of issues related to the state of the industry, throughout the whole country.

Chinese hotel owners changing with the times ?

A most often reported issue and frustration by hotel managers in China is their relation with the hotel owner and to streamline their needs, desires and targets with the other needs of the hotel management company, the staff and the guests. The inability to work with the owners has cost many an experienced hotel manager to loose his job, or other staff to walk away, and the reputation of the owner can even be a warning sign for prospective candidates not to consider a job opportunity with a hotel. Whereas we recognize that much of this difficulty to relate to hotel owners in China is caused by the relative inexperience of these owners of owning and operating hotels, part of the blame must also be allocated to the hotel management companies who are too eager to sign up for more hotel projects and, driven by the need of expansion, often sacrifice due diligence, brand standards, even their own employees for the sake of getting a management contract and/or holding on to it. As China develops as a modern nation, so does the experience and behavior of the hotel owners. A part of this development towards a more efficient economy has led the Central Government to step in to avoid rampant development, wastage of resources and monster projects that are not economically viable. . In January 2010, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China issued a notice that, starting from 2010; hotels that are not part of the primary businesses from central state-owned enterprises must be divested to other organizations. This means that the many State-Owned-Enterprises (SOE’s) for who 1 or more hotels is just a part of their diversified package of investments, but not part of a structured venture into tourism or more specific hotel management as a core business will be forced to hand over their assets to other SOE’s who already have formed a defined hotel management company to create more efficiency when state funds are allocated to SOE’s who need funds to operate their business. This will see a concentration of hotel assets in the hands of fewer SOE’s, the four key criteria being; majoring in tourism; having their own hotel brand, having a professional hotel management team; and having a development strategy for their hotel segment. Although these SOE’s may still be far away from matching the worldwide hotel chains in how they operate, manage and make profit from hotels, this is a positive development that will see a more focused policy by the ‘new’ owners. SOE’s that own more hotels and have serious interest in the tourism industry as a whole will benefit from synergy and be able to compare notes on various hotels’ performance. As existing management contracts on these hotels will not expire when ownership passes from one SOE to the other, these more specialized hotel owning SOE owning various hotels managed by different hotel management companies will also review how different management companies manage their assets, and compare notes. And whilst one can not compare apples to pears, the hotel management companies will face some serious challenges to their way of management. This new policy by the Central Government however is restricted to purely SOE’s and does not include the many private companies. Although lines between SOE’s and private owned companies are sometimes blurred, managing and owning hotels is already for long time no longer the privilege of the state. Since the reforms in 1984 private hotel ownership is possible in China, and especially since 2000 – 2005 many successful private entrepreneurs in China have ventured into owning and managing hotels as part of their investments. For the majority of these private owners, owning a hotel is something new, and the ways to operate a hotel and to make profit (if that is the objective) may hugely differ from their previous experiences in business.

René J.M. Schillings - June 2010