Giancarlo Carniani
Our revenue management program had ceiling upgrades for every type of rooms, and then we saw that constantly was selling the whole year at the ceiling. So, one day, I told my revenue manager to let it free.
Sebastien Leitner
Hi there. I’m Sebastien Leitner, and welcome to The Turndown, a new podcast for hoteliers hosted by Cloudbeds. I’m so excited to have you meet Giancarlo. He’s one of our recent guests on the podcast. He’s a hotelier that I’ve met a few years ago at an industry conference out of all places. We stayed in contact over the years, and he’s invited me to speak at one of his conferences.
He’s a general manager of three hotels in beautiful Florence. The podcast is about what’s keeping him up at night. And I think it’s a theme that not only him, but others are struggling with around the world. And you’ll hear him talk about the different variations of the different issues around labor, recruitment, training, you know, even competitiveness, making sure that the pay or the compensation is fair. So there’s a lot of challenges about recruitment right now in hospitality.
Giancarlo, welcome to The Turndown. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’m really excited about this conversation. As the general manager of two Florence hotels, I’d like for you to tell me maybe as an opening question, what is keeping you up at night?
Giancarlo Carniani
What is keeping me up at night? Well, many things, of course. I try to sleep at night, first of all, I keep my thoughts out of it because, you know, when the thoughts are coming into your brain at night, it means that your life is not going to be too good. But let’s say the short term of stuff is still keeping me awake at night because obviously it’s a huge problem still. Let’s say maybe a little better than last year, but it’s still the big issue now in the hospitality business to find those people.
Sebastien Leitner
So, you’re actively looking for staff right now, I assume. How many vacancies do you have?
Giancarlo Carniani
I still have, let me see, about ten persons, which I’m still looking at. I mean, some have tried to help them and they were not good, I mean, so it’s the turnover, it’s crazy. I just saw my contracts of last year. We had, during the season in the three hotels, about one hundred and seventy people working, and last year, I turned to sign three fifty contracts, which is almost double for every position. And some of the person that I have are working for this company since many years, like I do. But new staff, it’s a real big, big problem.
Sebastien Leitner
So it’s really difficult to recruit and then to keep? These sort of the both?
Giancarlo Carniani
Both, both. Let’s say, in hospitality are so hungry about staff that they are offering better condition, better contracts to some of my good staff, and I have to say, since last year, three persons very good at my staff have left me, but there was nothing to do. I mean, they had an offer which I could not match. Then, yes, everyone is still looking for good staff, so, well, the only good thing is that it’s not only your problem. When you are in the hotel, it seems that you have a lot of problems. You say, well, the others are okay.
Then I go around and visit the other hotels, and I see that the problem is everywhere. Staff not well prepared. Last night, I was in a very big and fancy hotel having drinks, and there were only two in a room which was in needing of at least five person to work. There was only two, and I waited forty five minutes to get a drink. So, it’s keeping me awake at night sometimes, but let’s say, we are moving on.
Sebastien Leitner
So you’ve been in this industry forever, right? Well, not forever, but for a long time. You have great experiences. Is this how can we solve this? Or will we be able to solve this? Is this about, you know, education? Is this about making the hospitality industry attractive again? How do we fill the positions long term?
Giancarlo Carniani
Both. Both. I have to say, as you know, I have started an education academy here in Florence last year, but because this problem was already there before COVID, I mean, then it had exploded during COVID, but it was something that was already happening. People were leaving this job. I need to win, that we need to make some efforts through education to let see people how many different and incredible work they can do in hospitality, because, I mean, now everyone is thinking about, oh, I’m going to work on the weekends, and then the wages are not so good, and I’m going to do a waiter, which I’ve done when I started, of course, and even the dishwasher when I started. That is not a problem.
But let’s say, and people, it’s demanding and demanding. Sometimes when I do the interview, I need to sell the person which is in front of me the place to work. I really need to sell, show them that which there are a lot of opportunities. They can work in digital. They can work for social media for the hotel. They can do sales. I don’t know, I mean, it’s rare to find a good end for me in food and beverage. Many, many positions which people does not have a real correct vision what’s behind the scenes in working in hospitality, which should be, can do a lot of things, and not only the things that they will teach.
Even the schools are not teaching well. They don’t give the vision of this job, really don’t do, and then we will need to improve the cost of labor. I was following a few things during ITB, a few conferences during ITB, and the way provision in which probably the cost of labor will rise twenty percent in the next few years, and I do agree with that, because now if you want a good waiter, you have to pay well. And the opposite was people will need twenty percent of their time back, so they can have the same wages, but maybe having a short week and working only four days, which is something that I found really interesting. I mean, there’s a few hotels in Germany which are testing this new way, and it’s interesting.
Sebastien Leitner
That sounds interesting. So going away from five days over time, you know, ten hours a day working, but through a shorter work week, and then be able to have as a waiter maybe more personal time and, you know, growth opportunities.
Giancarlo Carniani
Yeah. Or chef, I mean, chef, they stay many, many hours inside the kitchen, which is it’s a tough job, I mean, to stay there for long and not see the daylight or people, even if now the new way is to have open kitchens everywhere, but in many of the hotels that I know, the traditional one here in Italy is still a tough job.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reversely, so we talked about what are the things that keep you up at night. I’m curious what makes you sleep easily.
Giancarlo Carniani
Well, in this year, it has made me sleep easily. The faces of the young people that they have started my academy this year, because we were really able with, it’s a short class. Obviously, we are a startup. It’s the first year. They are a small group, but we really tested with them a new way of teaching and doing training, and for the very first moment, I say, well, you are already working for hospitality, and they were so happy.
Were so happy with it, we find teachers that were coming all from the industry, so no one coming from, I mean, a few, with only a few technical units where really professional teacher in like accounting and some other things, but then we took a lot of people from the industry, and which is a tough job, because then if you have just one person following a class, it’s easier, right, to do teaching. If you take one unit, like, let’s say, marketing or digital or design or leadership, and you bring to the class many different people, it’s very difficult for us to put together the whole picture.
But when we are able to do it and we were able to do it, the student gets a lot in return, a lot in return because they saw people which they are telling the whole picture from different aspects, so they were really happy. They worked on real cases. We have been around all the hotels and following cases all around, and yeah, their faces make me happy. They had finished exactly last week, the first year, and now they are doing their internships all around Italy, and I’m very happy for them.
Sebastien Leitner
And are they going back to school in the fall?
Giancarlo Carniani
They’re going back to school for the second year this fall, and then they have a third year in Switzerland because we closed a deal with Hotel Institute of Montreux because, I mean, it’s funny, but in Italy, tourism, which is the thirteen percent of our GDP, it has not a proper university, let’s say. So there’s no Cornell, there’s no Lausanne here in Italy. Nothing like that. So we decided not to follow the public path of getting a graduation, because I want to do it faster, and so we signed a deal with this hotel in Montreux, so they’re going there for their third year, they graduate there, and then they leave for the world.
Because can you imagine that about shortening of staff, this year at the recruitment day of that school, each student has six offers in average, six offers to go wherever they want in the world, Dubai, Singapore, New York, London. I mean, you graduate, you sit and you have six offers to go wherever you want.
Sebastien Leitner
That is amazing. I should go back into hospitality. Should go back and become a hotel manager. That is fantastic. That’s awesome. Well, that’s good to hear. And congratulations on the successful program. Sounds like you have a fantastic group. Are you launching a new class next year as well, like in the fall?
Giancarlo Carniani
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re launching the, I mean, the guys, they’re coming, the students are coming back for the second year, and then they have a new one, which I hope to have more people because of them. Then when you’re a startup, you need, when you need some idea, everyone is looking at you like that. Then the project has started, we hopefully we will have the double of the people we have this year at least.
Sebastien Leitner
Well, congratulations. Now, I’m very curious on how you start your day in the morning. Right? Think about your morning routine. Think about the things you did this morning, for instance. How do you start? I have an expectation that you have at least one cappuccino, but I could be completely wrong.
Giancarlo Carniani
No. You’re right. You understand what you do? I’m having a cappuccino every morning, but I don’t know where I’m going to land in the morning. So I have three hotels to follow, so no one of the staff knows where I’m going to have breakfast in the morning, but I do every morning have breakfast in one of our breakfast rooms.
So, there’s two moments which I like in my day, which is morning and then before I leave, where I’ll stay with the clients, I’ll see the clients’ faces, I’ll talk to the clients, and see what they think. Usually, breakfast is a great moment to talk with the clients, because it’s the start of their day, so you can give them some suggestions, you can tell them to go to the concierge and do this and do that. And there’s very, it’s a moment where hotels should sell more things during breakfast. Clients are relaxed having breakfast. They’re not in a hurry when they are for leisure, and Florence is a leisure city mainly. So I can talk to them, and you could sell many things at breakfast.
Sebastien Leitner
So this morning, you went to one of your hotels. Which one?
Giancarlo Carniani
I did have breakfast at the Moulineaux, which is the only seasonal hotel that we have, has opened only one week ago, so obviously I have a lot of new staff, so I had to check that everything was running properly, and that the breakfast standard were up where we want to reach. And it was an interesting morning, interesting morning. I found many things which were not as perfect as I wanted to be, so we had a meeting after breakfast. I stayed there the whole morning, by the way, because it is every year, having so much new staff, obviously, being a seasonal hotel, it means that except the F and B manager and the front office manager, they are all new. So, you need to be there more than the others at the moment.
Sebastien Leitner
Absolutely true. What is a common myth about your job?
Giancarlo Carniani
The common myth about our job? Bad or good myth? Either, either. Bad myth is, oh, well, you are going to work in hospitality, so it’s something boring, and you’re going to do the waiter, and that’s it. Like a servant, like they have this vision, many, many of the people.
The myth is that the hotels are doing a lot of money. Everywhere they are doing a lot of money, which is not a reality. I mean, obviously it could be a good business, but it’s a business, so you have to be careful. I mean, I have, in my career, I have managed hotels which were easy to sell, and some others were not easy at all to sell, so I know exactly what does it mean to be careful with the cost. But the myth, especially the politicians, they have this myth that the hotels are doing a lot of money. And then they see people around the city and they say, oh, now in Florence, they have increased our city tax. They have almost doubled it. Can you imagine the city tax after two years of COVID, where, yes, we are doing well this year. I don’t want to say we are doing bad, but we’re coming from two years of nothing.
Sebastien Leitner
It’s still tough. We need a period to restart our business back as it was. When I spoke to you last year, you mentioned that your summer was fantastic, your occupancies were high, your ADRs were high. You had a fantastic summer, if I’m not mistaken. Are you expecting something similar this year?
Giancarlo Carniani
It’s even better this year. I mean, sometimes it’s, I was seeing the forecast this morning, and seems that everyone wants to come to Italy now. We have such a strong demand, really such a strong demand. It’s a bounce that we didn’t expect. I mean, it started last year in fall. We saw things changing in August, September last year, but this year, it’s really strong.
I have to, I can tell you that my average rate now is in this hotel where I’m sitting now, which is the central one and the more important of the three hotels, is the average rate that Five Stars used to have in twenty nineteen. So we have increased, and sometimes, I’m really seeing reservations entering at some rates that I say, I never expected to sell this room at those rates.
Which makes me not sleep because sometimes I say I’m going to have a lot of problems about reputation because if you pay a thousand euros for one room in my hotels here, well, it’s a very, very nice hotel, but a thousand euros was what you were paying in the Four Seasons about two years ago, and now you’re paying for this hotel. And we had, I can tell you this, we had a ceiling, our revenue management program had ceiling of rates for every type of rooms, and then we saw that constantly was selling the whole year at the ceiling.
So, one day I told my revenue manager to let it free and say, okay, we will have to see what the market is going to pay, because if I cut off the ceiling, and it has arrived to some rates which are really embarrassing sometimes, because we have such a strong demand. I mean, you cannot find a room now from June to October, you cannot find a room here in Florence, really, not find any. You have to go outside the city center, and never happened, not even in the best year that I’ve seen in my career, something like that.
I don’t know if it’s going to stay or at a certain moment it will end, but I should say that twenty twenty four will be the same if nothing happened in Ukraine or Russia or something like that. It’s going to be the same. Mostly are Americans, but we are seeing now a few Asians coming back, a lot more from the Far East, so Arabia and whatever.
Sebastien Leitner
That was going to be my next question. What changes in travel behavior or pattern have you seen? Because now you see a lot more customers traveling than last year and the year before. Are these new customers that have never made it to Florence? Are these new nationalities, new types of travelers?
Giancarlo Carniani
Some new nationalities, some new nationalities. And then the other things that we have seen, they stay more. Probably they are going to, I talked to some of them, our average stay in Florence was two days and a half and was already good. Now it’s more than three days, and some of the months, it’s more than four days, which is something I found really interesting.
And I talked to some of these people, and they say they’re going to stay more in Europe, so if they’re coming from the States, they’re going to stay really more, so they stay two weeks, three weeks. It’s like after COVID, I’m going to do the trip of my life, and that’s it. And so I’ll stay and I’ll visit as more cities as I can, and I’ll stay there more. So, I’m not doing like the Japanese in the eighties that they were able to do three cities in forty eight hours. So the trip has become certainly longer, really longer, and you see that people are doing that.
Sebastien Leitner
Is Florence a destination that is the reason to travel, or is Florence a destination on an itinerary within Rome, within other cities?
Giancarlo Carniani
No. Florence is the destination to travel. It was, I mean, during COVID, was at the top of many classifications done by tourism magazines. Conde Nast was voted the most desirable city to travel, so it’s really a destination.
And another trend that I’m seeing by talking to these guests is that they are discovering new destinations in Italy. For example, I mean, if you take the tourists from the US, tourists from the US were going to the art cities, so they were going to Rome, Florence, and Venice. Then the other place they were going was the Sorrento and Amalfi Coast and Capri, Lake Como. They discovered the Cinque Terre a few years ago. Now many of them, they’re going to Apulia, they’re going to the Dolomites.
I was this year in the mountains on vacation, which usually is full of Germans, and I was amazed to see how many Americans were going there and say, Americans here? I never saw them. So they are exploring more, doing more destinations, staying more, which is really quite interesting. It’s something with, it’s a big change, really.
Sebastien Leitner
Sounds like I have to plan my trip to Florence in November because I won’t get accommodation before that, which is fantastic. Let’s talk about Milan. I know you’re going to be in Milan soon.
Giancarlo Carniani
Yeah, yeah, you have to. I mean, you can find accommodation even in those periods, but I expect rates to be high. And I’ll tell you another thing which I was talking with some of the leaders actually last week. Milan, which is known as the corporate city for Italy, it always been like that, Milan was corporate. It has become a leisure destination. So it used to be empty during the weekends, and used to be empty since July and August, and now all the other players are telling me it has completely changed, and now it’s more leisure destination than corporate, which is amazing. And so there’s a lot of investment now going on in Milan.
Sebastien Leitner
We have to look back. I mean, it’s sort of, we talk a lot about pre pandemic, post pandemic. You’ve gone through a difficult moment in the pandemic in Florence itself, in Italy. You were sort of the epicenter of the pandemic to a certain extent. Right? Travel was impacted. I’m curious on your perspective personally, what did you learn from this experience? What are some of the things that you’ve, you know, maybe has changed your perspective?
Giancarlo Carniani
Oh, well, it has changed all my perspective. I mean, my whole life has changed since in those two years, I mean. Personally, professional and my personal life has changed. So that day, I remember exactly the day where I closed the three hotels was the eleventh of March twenty twenty. So we kept it open for a while, even if COVID was already here in two weeks, because we were still having guests which were not finding the way to come back home, and then when every single guest has left the hotel, I closed the three at once.
And by chance, in that period, I was president of the Florentine Hotelier Association, so everyone was phoning me also. I had to take care of all my staff. I was put away from my family because I had travel and I had contact with one of the hotels who had already been hit by COVID, so I had to stay away from my family. Every single hotelier was phoning me and asking for advice, and nobody was, for some reason, taking care of me.
I was taking care of everyone that day. I closed the hotel, and then I came back to my apartment alone here in Florence, where I stayed closed, obviously, for three weeks without exit, and then at six o’clock at night, one of the other hoteliers phoned me and thanked me for what I had done for the association, and I can tell you without any problem, I started crying for at least two hours. I never cry. I never cry. Really, I never cry, and I cried for two hours that day.
And yeah, that I will remember forever, but it’s a lesson that everything can change in a minute. It was a very strange period because Italy was the second country hit after China, so it was considered an Italian problem. And I spoke because, as you know, being one member of Focusrite, they interviewed me in that period. I made an interview which was broadcasted everywhere. Bloomberg called me, like a reporter from the frontlines. And every hotelier from around the world was writing to me and giving me thanks for what I was going through.
And I remember an hotelier from China sent me a box of masks, which we could not find here. That’s fantastic. An hotelier of China sent me a box of masks and said, okay, save it for your staff. Really incredible.
Sebastien Leitner
Wow. We will never forget. We have not to forget what was that. We have not to forget. And I think as an industry, we took everything for granted until the world stopped turning. It made us rethink, I guess, our personal choices, our life choices, but also our business decisions at times. I’m curious, you know, if you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? I assume your answer is Florence, but, you know, because it’s such an amazing place, but I’m still curious about this.
Giancarlo Carniani
Well, I have a preference, I don’t know how it is now because it’s London. I mean, I feel home in London. I’ve worked there. It’s a city which I like more than anywhere in the world. So I would like to live in London.
Sebastien Leitner
I can relate to that. I can relate to that. I’ve lived twice in London, different times and worked in hospitality in London, so I can relate to that. It’s a great place. I feel home there.
Giancarlo Carniani
Many people will say the seaside or something. No. I would like to be in London, even if I would like to live there for a while now and see how it’s doing with Brexit, which seems to be a problem for them.
Sebastien Leitner
Before we close, and I know education is a big passion of yours, I want to ask you, what is one piece of advice you would give to someone starting out in this industry?
Giancarlo Carniani
Well, it’s such a beautiful industry, first of all, because when I was creating the program of the academy, I realized how many things you need to know to work in hospitality. How many? You need to speak languages. You need to know economy. You need to know very well human resources. Then you need digital, you need design. Many, many different things, so it gives you this job, gives you such a big background that you can work for any industry.
What I say to my students now, it’s alright, you’re learning to work in hospitality, but after this you can work really everywhere. I mean, your baggage of knowledge is so big by doing this work, you know you have the possibility to meet millions of people, which I did in my career. I have a lot of friends around the world, which will happen. You can travel. It’s a great job if you take it and you say, yes, I want to do a career there.
And so the advice is study hospitality. You know what? I’ll tell you one last thing. I was rereading the Steve Jobs biography, because I’ve read it after he died, and then it was on my shelf there, and then you forget about it. And in these days, I don’t know why, I took it back and say, I want to read again what he did, how it was, etcetera, and there was one thing that was missing, that I had missed. When he was preparing the Apple store, he sent all the employees to the training of Ritz Carlton. So he said, alright, you have to be trained by Ritz Carlton to work in an Apple store. And he sent them all there. And so, you see, hospitality is everywhere. It’s really everywhere.
Sebastien Leitner
Hospitality, the school for life and for successful business, so it sounds like. Giancarlo, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your thoughts, your insights, your experiences, and the stories you shared today. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it.
Giancarlo Carniani
Yeah. Thank you.
Sebastien Leitner
To all of you, thank you for listening to The Turndown. Don’t forget to subscribe and tune in next week as we discover new exciting guests.
