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Hand Picked Hotels is a collection of 14 architecturally stunning hotels up and down the UK. These fine country retreats have their own individual identities, and were built to ensure that they deliver maximum pleasure to guests. The hotels offer the highest level of comfort and have superb settings in Britain’s most beautiful countryside. Started in 2001 the group is privately owned by Julia and Guy Hands.
The company has undergone significant changes to reposition itself in the luxury high end of the country house market, and has spent £35 million on improving the hotels. All the hotels are either four-star hotels or three red star hotels. The company has a broad business base, with weddings providing a huge market, as well as the leisure market and catering for conferences.
Food and beverage turnover makes up over 50 per cent of the group’s turnover, so it is important to get it right. The company has recently heavily invested in kitchen renovation to support this area. Some of the buildings date back to the 18th century and had had no investment in their kitchens prior to Hand Picked Hotels, meaning the chefs had to work in unsatisfactory conditions. Gregor Ritchie, the operations director for Hand Picked Hotels, comments on the investment: “The kitchens are hugely efficient now.
We’ve introduced new cooking methods to assist the chefs. Where necessary we’ve installed two separate kitchens, one to cater for fine dining and restaurant food and the other for banqueting, whereas before they were all running off one hotplate. One tiny hot plate four foot long for a kitchen that turns over £2 million in food is not really conducive to the working practices. Now the kitchens are safer, they are more environmentally friendly, they are much more efficient and they’ve got a lot of durability now.
The kitchens have been designed in conjunction with English Heritage. The chefs helped plan them with the kitchen designers so they’re very practical and well laid out now. A good working environment also helps you keep staff. So kitchens are pretty important to us.”
Each hotel has two rosettes for its cooking and Norton House in Edinburgh has three. Gregor discusses the benefits of having the rosettes: “It gives us a competitive advantage, our food offering is exceptionally consistent because we’ve got some very good chefs. It also benefits us with the recruitment and retention of staff as people aspire to work within that kind of environment. The important thing that we promote in our kitchens amongst the chefs is that they have got the autonomy to do their own menus in their style.
The only prescriptive missive from HQ is that we maintain a safe working environment, as health and safety standards are paramount, and also the food cost of sales. There’s a business being run here, so it’s not just about spending lots of money to get two rosettes, it’s about controlling the cost element of it and making it fit the business plan.
We want three rosettes in every hotel and we’ll be pushing the chefs to get that. We recruited two Michelin starred chefs in the past couple of years, they’ve previously held Michelins for seven years apiece, so they’re going to be working hard this year to get back up there because their Michelin doesn’t walk with them.
“In repositioning our hotels we’ve had to reach out to a new client base. The people that we’re attracting will pay but they expect the best food, they expect the best bedroom, they want the 42” plasma screen in their bedroom. They want to see a fine dining restaurant that’s got fantastic service and very good food and they don’t want the prescriptive menus that you’ll get in a lot of corporate hotels.
Brain friendly food is worked into conference menus so that we’re not giving stodgy puddings and food that makes people sleepy, it’s food that keeps the brain active for the course of the day. Our conference organisers like our approach. Even down to the little homemade chocolate chip cookies, the fudge cake and the ice cream that we make for the morning and afternoon tea breaks, all of that’s done in house. These are the little things that make a huge difference to making sure that we retain our clients.”
Gregor continues: “Our workforce is paramount to the success of the company. If we don’t have that workforce understanding the delivery to the client we wouldn’t get success. The right culture within the staff environment is critical. Before we changed any curtain or any carpet, we worked for a year on the culture of the organisation so that the staff understood what we were going to do.
The staff contributed, we did road shows round the country in every hotel to ask the staff what they thought would make this hotel much better, and the ideas that they’ve come out with we’ve put into a group initiative so the staff drive the business.”
Hand Picked Hotels currently holds the AA Hotel Group of the Year Award. Gregor says: “This is terrific because it’s a real tick in the box for the group and all the work that’s gone into it. It demonstrates that we’ve got a consistent product in all aspects of what we do and that’s what we aspire to. It’s taken three years to get there and we’re really pleased about it – a lot of hard work from all the staff in every hotel made the difference so it’s a real team award.”
The group has also won the Business Forum Excellence Award. It is the first time the British Hotel Association has ever awarded this particular award which was for management practices throughout each hotel. Hand Picked Hotels runs its hotels on an entrepreneurial footing which it calls unit based entrepreneurial management.
Gregor comments: “Our management is consistent but there are characters and personalities within the hotels and within the kitchens that have got to do their own thing. That’s such a fresh approach. If you look at all our statistics business has improved year on year, with disruption from refurbishment, even with 9/11, even with SARS, we’ve bucked the trend. We’ve kept our KPIs moving ahead.”
Gregor talks about the company’s plans for the future: “We’re going to be adding more bedrooms to some of the hotels, expanding the portfolio through existing properties as well as the acquisition of new properties.
We want all the hotels to be red stars or five stars in the future, we want all the hotels to improve in their rosette status, and we want to retain staff and retain our clients. Each one of those goals or objectives has got a plan behind it.” FC
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