HotelChatter

HotelChatter:
So first things first. There has been another incident of racial profiling at one of your hotels and we know that you want to comment.

Chip Conley:
The incident has some similarities and some differences to what happened at Hotel Vitale. The employee acted absolutely horrible and for that he was terminated. But we have been in the hospitality industry for 20 years, we have over 40 businesses from hotels to restaurants and there is no history or precedent to suggest that we have a discriminatory approach to any individual based on race, sexual orientation or age. Is it frustrating and embarassing to have a situation where a guest has been racially profiled? Yes. But we have 2,500 employees and unfortunately racism and discrimination still exist in America.

HotelChatter:
What type of diversity training did you put in place after these incidents?

Conley:
JDV has always had diversity and sensitivity training where we cover sexual harrassment, race, religion--all broadly. After the Hotel Vitale incident, we began to work with Priority Africa Network, an East Bay company who told us, "Here are things to make you a leader in best practices" when it comes to dealing with racism. So we have anti-racism training, which really goes to the core of the issue. And one of the specialists from PAN have come to the JDV hotels and conducted two sessions.

I know for a fact that over at the Cathedral Hill at the general manager's meetings on Thursday where they discuss revenues and expenses, they also talk about the issues of diversity and sensitivity and how are they handling that.

We also started a Diversity committee at JDV which is a sort of task force where our organization's employees ask "Ok, what are are we doing to be more on the ball with this?"

There's do doubt discrimination exist in Amercia but at one point you have to look and ask are organizations taking appropriate action to ensure it won't happen very often or hopefully, never. You have to have a zero-tolerance policy which is in fact, what we have now. Yet it's impossible that discrimination won't happen again because you cannot predict what one employee will do.

HotelChatter:
Ok moving on. There's talk of expansion here in a recent article about JDV. You say 10 hotels within the next year. Are you worried about too much, too fast, too soon? And how will you preserve the JDV brand?

Conley:
Yes, we're opening up new hotels in Huntington Beach, Long Beach, Santa Cruz, Berkely, Oakland, Sacramento, and four hotels that we currently manage but are renovating and rebranding in the marketplace as a JDV hotel.

People always ask me how come you are not national? How come you aren't opening in NYC, Miami, Dallas, Boston or even Seattle? And I think that's because we are conscious of what JDV is all about. We describe our hotels as hand-crafted and soulful and we want to make sure they are still close to home. So having the hotels in California give us a greater bandwidth to oversee what's happening at each one.

As far as our branding, we are now going to place a JDV Hotel sign on each of our hotels which we never did before so that each hotel could stand out on our own. But we've seen Kimpton Hotels do it and they have done it well. And the truth is, the customer is becoming more familiar with our brand. So now when they stay at a JDV hotel, they will know its JDV from the sign out front to the JDV magazine in the room.

HotelChatter:
Speaking of magazines, your magazine approach to hotels is what you are best known for. But what if you run out of magazines? Like will you have Horse & Hound/Better Gardens hybrid hotel?

Conley:
[Laughing] I can take you to Barnes & Noble right now and show you just how many magazines are out there. In fact, after Advertising Age did an article on the magazine approach, a lot of magazines wrote us to see if we would consider their hotels. Like the publisher's office of Penthouse sent us a letter.

HotelChatter:
Larry Flynt wrote you?

Conley:
Well, no it wasn't Larry. It's the woman who runs something there. But anyways Sports Illustrated wrote us saying us we would love to do a Sports Illustrated hotel with you. So there's a lot of magazines out there. And I really like the hybrid concept. It's complex. And the magazines reflect the cultural landscape and where it's going.

HotelChatter:
Can you tell us about the process of community involvement in your newest hotels, the hotel in Japantown and Citzen in Sacramento, especially in naming them.

Conley:
We had four town halls with the community in Sacramento which wasn't required at all. We had to go through an approval process by the city of course but we decided to sit down with the community and ask them, "What do you think of this hotel?" and "What should this hotel be about?" And the name they came up with wasn't exactly said by one particular indiviudal but it was what we had in mind and the community members agreed.

For our new hotel in Huntington beach we asked 60 employees of Quiksilver (where the company's headquarters are) what they thought the hotel name should be and one of the employees came up with the hotel name that we had chosen as well. I can't tell you that yet but soon.

Anyways, we have always had a history of doing this type of community involvment. We did it in Los Gatos and asked them what type of hotel the Hotel Los Gatos should be and they came up with this mediterranean-style villa.

HotelChatter:
And for JDV, what is this importance of doing this?

Conley:
The process of community involvement in our hotels is not only a great way to promote the hotel and is a good marketing opportunity but it's a way to get support from the community.

And we always give back. Everyone of our hotels has to give $200 per room per year or $40,000 total from the hotel to a variety of nonprofit organizations and local outreach programs.

We have won the National Humanitaraian Hospitality Company of the Year award for our efforts. The biggest thing is that we have raised $3 million for after-school programs with our annual auction where people can bid to throw celebrities in the pool, the Tenderloin After-School Program: Celebrity Pool Toss. We've done this for 14 years at the Phoenix Hotel where celebs are bid on and then tossed in the pool. Gavin Newsom has done it, Charlotte Squibb-Meyer, Willie Brown and yes, even Chip have been thrown in. One time, someone bid $140,000 to have the head of Charles Schwab thrown in.

So it's great because it brings these celebrities to the Tenderloin district where they would probably never go normally and then they just pull out their checkbook and write checks for the community.

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Tags: Chip Conley / JDV Hospitality / Pitch Your Hotel / Hoteliers That Matter / Interviews

by juliana