Few hoteliers can say they have delivered a TEDx Talk, but Bill Walshe, the head of the Viceroy Hotel Group, will soon be one of them.
On June 7, the boy from Limerick will stand up in front of the audience to deliver a talk at the TEDx Wilmington Lust for Life: Adventure Travel & Hospitality event. He will be among other hoteliers invited to give 18-minute talks, but it marks an interesting turning point – a time when “innkeepers” as he is fond to call them, get philosophical about the world of hotels.
“The theme I hope to get across is one of ‘pride before profit’ and I hope the talk will be one which will have an influence on the future generation of hoteliers,” says Walshe during the group’s recent annual UK roadshow. “When I look around at colleagues, I feel I am always the person with the most meaningless title in the room – ‘the chief of the executives’. But I always try and rebrand myself as ‘chief pride officer’. We are here to make customers and staff feel proud.”
Of course the more obvious story during his recent visit – which also included a party for 175 travel industry guests at London’s Playboy – was the opening of the eye-catching 477-room Viceroy Palm Dubai, which even in a shiny place like Dubai, looks especially shiny.
The group’s 14th hotel is one of superlatives of course – an architectural marvel, it’s home to the ‘largest freestanding glass structure in world’; ‘the longest pool in UAE’; and was also the location for a launch event for the Ferrari 812 Superfast, which was craned onto the top of the glass structure. So far, so bling.
Then there’s the other recent news – the slightly obscure addition of a Serbian ski resort with 120 rooms, set to open at Viceroy Kopaonik in 2018, set within the nation’s largest mountain range.
“It will be our second ski hotel – look what happened with Snowmass,” he recalls. “It was not the best known of Aspen’s mountain resorts, but now it’s been hugely elevated. We have taken it to the stage where it is a destination in its own right. We can do that for Serbia too – there are tens of millions of people within a three-hour drive of the hotel.”
TTG Media
