Staying ahead of the market

Top, the warmly lit executive lounge, and above, the presidential suite, decorated in classical European style, with a window view of the bustling business area of the city. Provided to China Daily

Hotel profile | Shanghai

Innovation is what keeps Hilton Shanghai holds its own, 20 years on.

Hilton Shanghai is more than a landmark in the city's former French Concession. As the first international hotel to open in Shanghai more than 20 years ago, the hotel has a special connection to the city.

"There is one underlying quality to this hotel, which is a key advantage over most of our competitors. That's people," says Guy Hutchinson, the hotel's general manager.

Hutchinson says that the magic of Hilton is its people, while many others in the hospitality industry have become obsessed with furniture and design.

"Those things are important, but you don't feel emotional about them. You feel emotional about people," he says.

The hotel currently has 380 staff members with more than 15 years of service experience, which Hutchinson believes makes a huge difference from the hotel's competitors.

"You cannot measure or put a price on the quality of the team. It has huge value," he says.

Because of the importance that the hotel attaches to its people, it has made great efforts to an employer of choice.

One of the highlights of these efforts is the Hilton University, an online learning program with more than 200 courses. Any employee with a learning license can access the "university" and learn everything from accounting to presentation skills and job related techniques, each with a certification. Now the hotel has 110 active learners in the courses.

"When salary hits a certain level, other things become important," Hutchinson says.

According to Hutchinson, the hotel's employee turnover at the end of last year was about 3 percent, while the market was probably more than 20 percent.

Although the hotel has a history of more than 20 years, it always strives to stay fresh and ahead of the market.

To do that, Hutchinson has a personal blog, which has attracted 28,000 followers within 18 months. The hotel is also among the first to own an official microblog account.

"For me, it's very important to stay in touch. I want my customers to know me. If they know and understand my values for the business, they'll know that we are a genuine business," he says.

In order to better communicate with customers, he says the blog has to be in Chinese, interactive and not too commercial.

What's more, Hutchinson believes it's important to re-invest in the community that has sustained their business for such a long time.

The hotel has been working with Shanghai Sunrise, a charity foundation which sponsors children to receive a proper education, for 15 years. "Education empowers people to make a better life for themselves," he says.

Each year, the hotel supports up to seven children by bringing them to the hotel and providing them with some paid work on weekends and during summer holidays. Additionally, each of them has a mentor from the hotel's leadership team to meet and talk with them regularly.

"Writing a check is not exercising your social responsibility, so we try to get as close to them as possible to support them in their life," says Hutchinson, who is also on the foundation's board of directors this year.

As part of its social responsibility campaign, the hotel also launched its environmental moon cake program last year.

"We read in an article that in Shanghai 9 million mooncake boxes are sold every year. Somebody actually calculated that if you put all the boxes together, you could build the Jinmao Tower," he says.

The packaging of the mooncake box all comes from certified recycled materials and is also 100 percent recyclable. For each box bought from the hotel, a fixed amount of money goes to a WWF re-forestation project, so the box actually replaces itself in nature. In fact, the sales of mooncakes doubled from the previous year.

"People often think that if you do something environmentally friendly, it will cost you more money, or it won't be beautiful. What we were trying to do was to have a win-win to show you can do business in a responsible manner, but this does not have to cost you more money," he says.

Hutchinson believes that the combination of these factors has made the hotel stand out in a city like Shanghai, which offers an increasingly wider selection of five-star hotels.

"You won't remember the color of the carpet two weeks after you leave the hotel, but you will remember how the hotel made you feel," he says.