My Most Significant Achievement As a Hotel General Manager

After graduated in February 2016, I returned to my hometown and started helping my parents with their businesses. I was appointed as the hotel General Manager and my first project was to upgrade my parents’ non-star hotel to a three-star hotel.

To upgrade and re-open the hotel were complex projects. There are certain rules, requirements and procedures that must be followed to gain three-star status such as the number and size of the rooms, facilities in each room, security systems, food and beverage outlet facilities and standard operating procedures for all departments. Since I was inexperienced and have never led a team before, I learned through reading books and articles about management, hotel and tourism. After gaining basic knowledge about hotel and restaurant management, I established a comprehensive plan, schedule and checklist before the re-opening of the hotel.

The next step I did was to select and recruit the department managers according to the needs and conditions. Then I made checklists of tasks that must be accomplished by department managers. I closely monitored the execution of each task to make sure it was performed according to the plan, budget and requirement until the re-opening event.

After the re-opening activities, our hotel was assessed by auditors. They assessed the hotel compliance with the standard criteria from Indonesia Tourism Ministry. I led the team through this assessment and we strived to achieve our goal. As the result, we met the criteria and the hotel was classified as a three-star hotel.

I am very grateful for this achievement and consider it as an important and memorable experience because it was my first big project and first achievement as a young General Manager. It also gave me confidence to continue my work and set bigger goals for myself and for the organization.