Our CEO of “Select Hotels” invited us to write a review on Glassdoor so here it is… His intentions were to brainwash/scare us into writing a positive review so that it will benefit us at the property level. He went on to say that positive reviews will attract applicants to our hotels, thus making our jobs easier. Now there may be truth to that however we as a company are ignoring the bigger problem which is the negative culture at White Lodging. We understand that WL needs positive reviews to make our company “appear” to be a great place to work. We also know that investors use this tool to make decisions on partnering with new companies. Dave, I am not sure what offended me more; the fact that you think we are so dumb that we would not recognize your transparent attempt to scare us into writing positive reviews or the fact that you are struggling to change the negative culture that the top execs created. It is time to make some changes; get some fresh blood in upper management, “redeploy” the old white guys and get some diversity at the corporate level. Don’t tell us we are happy. Saying that isn’t going to make it true. We talk about genuine care… pfft. What a joke. There is genuine care for sure at the property level but certainly not coming from the corporate office. Dave also discussed our pulse survey results and said he was shocked on how low some of the hotels participation levels were. He said he decided to take the “high road” and “recognize” the hotels that had good participation. Dave, you are so out of touch with the field and honestly, in your position, I can understand that. However, since you are not involved with hotels at a property level, then maybe you should reserve your comments until you try to understand WHY some of these hotels ON DAY 3 (and two of those days the operation teams were at a town hall conference) had a low participation. Have you considered that maybe staffing levels were a challenge? Maybe, just maybe some of the GM’s and Ops managers were too busy cleaning rooms to have time to get the staff to take a survey. I mean, we are in the hospitality industry and our guests come first, correct? Well how can we make that happen if a hotel has no clean rooms to check in our guests? Every time Dave speaks, I become more and more disappointed with our leadership at the corporate level. You are not in touch with the field, again, at your level, I get it. Maybe then you just keep your negative comments disguised as motivation to yourself. Don’t complain about how hard your job is because as a CEO you had to cover a region with no RVP. Please let me remind you that when WL got rid of half our portfolio, you used that opportunity to get rid of some excellent RVP’s for personal reasons. You are well compensated and no one feels sorry for you because you had to send out a few extra emails to a region that had no leader.
