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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Personal Touch the Driving Force of Family-Run Hotels

James Crank asks whether the staff at most hotels would be willing to drive sick guests to the store to pick up medicine. His staff at The Beverly Garland Holiday Inn would. Owners of family-run hotels, such as Crank’s North Hollywood establishment and the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys, say more personalized service and increased management flexibility are what keep them in business. “You will reach a manager or owner if you have a complaint,” said Crank, who owns the hotel that was developed by his father and named after his actress mother. “We will offer you incredible intimacy and elegance and personal touch.” While the hotel is part of the Holiday Inn chain, Crank said it strays from it in many aspects. Instead of being stacked in a tall tower, the rooms are spread out across the hotel campus. The hotel has a wall of old photographs of Beverly Garland and another wall that features a Los Angeles cityscape. A poolside fireplace has also been added. But even with those differences, Crank said the more personal service is the selling point. The Airtel Plaza Hotel’s owner and general manager Jim Dunn, who developed his hotel with family members in the 1980s, has a similar take about what attracts customers. “We don’t have the worldwide presence of a Hilton or a Sheraton or a Marriott,” said 65-year-old Dunn. “(But) we have personalized customer loyalty. We have flexibility to respond very quickly to guests’ needs and desires. That would be versus a large chain that has to get a series of approvals from division and regional managers.” The family link Crank remembers helping his father paint numbers on the hotel room doors as a child. His first job was sweeping the hotel’s parking lot and scraping gum off the sidewalk. “This hotel has been woven into our family history from a very young age,” he said. Crank’s father developed the hotel, which opened in 1971, to operate as part of the Howard Johnson hotel chain. However, he later broke away and turned the hotel independent, naming it after his wife. Eventually, financial struggles led him to join with the Holiday Inn chain. Crank assumed ownership following the deaths of his parents. In the case of the Airtel Plaza Hotel, Dunn developed the site with his father and other relatives as a real estate venture. He now runs the operation on his own with assistance from his son, who has worked at the hotel for eight years. Another family-run hotel is the Westlake Village Inn. The 42-year-old hotel that sits on 17 acres of land is owned by John Notter, whose son-in-law is president of the hotel’s holding company, Westlake Properties, Inc. A different atmosphere Bert Seneca, general manager at The Beverly Garland Holiday Inn and former general manager at the Airtel Plaza Hotel, has firsthand experience with family-based hotels. “The dynamic of having family here is that they’re in touch with their employees,” he said of Crank’s hotel. “They know their housekeeper (and) they know the bellman … They understand how their decisions impact those lives.” At The Beverly Garland Holiday Inn, the hotel was able to absorb some of the employees’ rising medical costs, Seneca said. Dunn said his hotel also has a positive track record with its staff. The average length of employment for his staff members is seven years, which is a long time for an industry that experiences high turnover, he said. At least three of his employees have been with the hotel for a minimum of 25 years, he added. Westlake Village Inn is known for its long-term employees as well, said Amy Commans, who has been general manager at the hotel for 20 years. But even with the perks of being a family-based hotel, smaller establishments also have to deal with certain limitations in resources in comparison to corporate-run hotels. “(Larger hotels) have a lot of resources to seek those opportunities or vet those opportunities out,” said Kenn Phillips, the Valley Economic Alliance’s vice president of workforce initiative, adding that the funds can be spread to multiple locations at once. Cranks said fiscal balance has been the key for overcoming such limitations. “We played it very conservative,” said Crank, whose hotel completed a major renovation project last year, even in the midst of the recession. “We had very little debt. We were not spending above our means. We were really able to sail through this.” As for community interaction, Phillips dubbed family-run hotels are being more active. The Beverly Garland Inn encourages employees to perform local volunteer work, he said. In February, the Airtel Plaza Hotel won the Valley Economic Alliance’s “Economic Engine” award for its monetary and service contributions to the community. “We do probably more than our share of community activities because I was born in the San Fernando Valley,” Dunn said. “I still have a lot of faith in the Valley that continues to be the home and workplace of a lot of people.”

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