The Park Lane hotel: competitive advantage hidden in core values

Darrel Cartwright, General Manager of The Park Lane Jakarta talks about the Park Lane hotel.

What are the core concepts that you speak about?

Being a good leader, there are a couple of points. One, being a good leader, you have to have the courage to drive change. Also, the willingness to stick with and driving this change against animosity. Having the courage, having the concepts and having the feel.

One of the things that is instrumental in these core concepts, is all the other hotels will say exactly the same thing. We focus on customer experience, the guests are number one. They are the cornerstone of everything we do.

If we look at the product, be it another five star hotel or us, we are all going to have exactly the same product. We are going to have 250, 300 thread count cotton. We are going to have flat screen TV’s. We are going to have internet. We are going to have amenities. We are going to have tea and coffee. We are going to have all of these things in the rooms. We are going to have hot and cold water. We think one of the things that people miss, is that people, the human race, we are really looking at experiences.

We can really dilute this down to a simpler form. If we ask 99.5 percent of the human population “What did you eat two weeks ago?”. Nobody will remember, and this is a cognitive function of our brain. We have short-term memory. But what happens is, if two weeks ago you went to a restaurant, you may not remember the food, the taste, the texture, the warmth, the cold. But if you had a very interesting experience with a serving person, they complimented you, you felt very important or special, or vice-versa, you had a very negative experience, you will remember that.

But if we ask you “what did you eat on that day two weeks ago”, you may not remember, but you will remember the experience. What we like to do is build on the human behaviour and what people want. It is really about building experience, because the 300 thread count linens, that will be forgotten in a week or two weeks. If you ask somebody who stayed in a five-star hotel two weeks ago, “what was the colour of the room?” They probably cannot tell you.

So what the Park Lane Jakarta really does, is we focus on experience. We like to build experience. And how we build experience, we start at the grassroots, and the grassroots are very simple. If we look at all people, be them rich or poor, no matter what religion, we try to mange with something called- our core concept is the concept of love. And if you manage people from the heart and you understand how to motivate people from the heart, what happens is, people join with you and they come on board from the heart.

And when delivering experiences, if it comes from the heart, it becomes memorable. If it is just, people are doing what they need to do because this is their job and they are taking home a salary, it becomes very one-dimensional, and it also becomes very easy to forget. So we believe at the core concept, manage the team by love. If they feel that love and they feel part of a family or something greater than ourselves, that experience is then translated through time and space at an emotional level, and an engagement level with the guests that we create experience.