If ever there was a man in the zone, it is Robert Cook. Effervescent with pride, his achievements are admirable and his vision is unique. Who else would even consider converting an old prison / castle into a hotel? With the birth of Malmaison Oxford, it would appear that no building is safe, and with the advent of space travel, Richard Branson should look no further than Robert Cook to build his first hotel. Prior to addressing a Deloitte conference at The Dorchester, Cook spoke to me about the history of the group, why it is working so well and the plans for the future.
Despite the plethora of information promoting your other sites within Mal Oxford, noteveryone appreciates the size of the group and that you have another brand. A potted history if you please…
“Malmaison started in 1994 with Malmaison Edinburgh, when we bought the old seamen’s mission with 28 bedrooms. Three weeks later, we opened Malmaison in Glasgow.
“Funnily enough, 4 weeks after that and 500 miles south, Robin Hudson started Hotel du Vin with exactly the same philosophy – highly design-led with excellent food and beverages. But it was a different product, being more of a boutique style hotel. Both brands were significantly different from the ‘cookie cutter, boring blancmange’ approach that was prevalent in the market.
“Both brands had a philosophy of a lot more for less – a great value proposition to the customer. It was almost destiny that one day these two brands should become one.”
At what stage were you aware of each other?
“After about 6 months, when both brands were getting lots of press and critical acclaim. It made sense that when I came back to Malmaison and sorted out the brand, the best way to expand the brand, which I saw as the only option, was to buy our biggest competitor, Hotel du Vin.”
So how did it unfold for you with Malmaison?
“I started as the opening General Manager of the first Malmaison in England in Newcastle. I then became Operations Director and subsequently the company was sold to Wyndham Hospitality of America back in 1999. I left the business and went with the founder of Malmaison, Ken McCulloch, to form a new company called The Columbus Group. I was Managing Director of The Columbus Group and Dakota Hotels with our biggest celebrity investor being Scottish racing driver, David Coulthard. After four years, during which time I opened The Columbus in Monte Carlo and developed the first Dakota, Malmaison’s owner, Michael Bibbring of Marylebone Warwick Balfour Group Plc (Wyndham sold to MWB), invited me to come back and be Chief Executive of Malmaison. For eighteen months, MWB had given management of Malmaison to SAS Radisson, which I think was a disaster.
“Later in 2004, we purchased Hotel du Vin and then began to sort out the ‘housekeeping’, address Hotel du Vin’s whole ‘tone of voice’, its market expression. We totally revitalised the product and the service delivery. There is no doubt that 2004 was a significant year for myself, Malmaison and Hotel du Vin.
“By purchasing Hotel du Vin, we were able to expand our joint brand quickly and effectively. Hotel du Vin was a fit with Malmaison as it had a totally different geographical profile, being southern weighted as opposed to Mal’s northern bias.”
Did it ever occur to you to merge Hotel du Vin into Malmaison and just re-brand the sites to increase the presence of Malmaison?
“We always wanted to keep it separate and we will never change Hotel du Vin, there is absolutely no need. We then had a healthy Malmaison brand in the North (including Edinburgh, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Glasgow) and effectively a southern Hotel du Vin brand (ncluding Tunbridge Wells, Winchester, Bristol and Brighton). It made a lot of sense to buy Hotel du Vin and put them together.”
The marketing for both Mal and Hotel du Vin seems to be totally separate. Is this part of the strategy to help develop the two brands?
“It is. The only joint campaign we have ever run for both brands was the ‘2gether’ campaign. This was because the way the Mal ‘fan base’ and the HDV ‘fan base’ wanted to be communicated to, and had always been communicated to historically, was diffrent. We used web, e-media, and viral e-mails for Mal, but HDV customers preferred direct mailing, the wine weekends and the Ecole du Vin, the wine school in Birmingham. The demographics of the two fan bases were also different – Hotel du Vin’s being about 10 years older than Mal’s – and we had to acknowledge that.
“We realised that the two brands were so totally different and had such strong sites that we could expand both brands independently. We raised £105 million and brought in Royal Bank of Scotland as an equity partner, and we are now in the process of adding a further 10 hotels to the business, which range from a Mal in Reading and in Aberdeen to a Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, York, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and Glasgow. So we are now taking Hotel du Vin to the North of the country where it had never been before. We are almost competing on our own doorstep, but there is a big enough market in Newcastle and Edinburgh to sustain a new hotel. There are a lot of hotels in the areas that Hotel du Vin is moving to where the product is poor. The room inventory is quite distressed.
“The best thing about buying Hotel du Vin personally was that I had seen how someone had interpreted Malmaison should be and ruined it, or were ruining it, so in that respect it was a case of what not to do with Hotel du Vin. We were extremely respectful of Hotel du Vin when we purchased it, and we are to this day and will continue to be so. The bottom line is that we haven’t gone out to deliberately change the world, and that has been the success of bringing the two brands together.“
You talk about Mal Oxford as your flagship. Has the success of Oxford helped convince you that anything is possible?
“With the success of the Oxford prison, the association of Mal and Hotel du Vin really cemented the conception that we were the brands that dared to be different. How many people will convert old prison cells into hotel bedrooms ? It almost throws down the gauntlet to attract “tricky” buildings to be converted into hotels. The other knock-on effect of Oxford is that developers look upon Malmaison as bringing a lot of kudos to their site. Mal is almost seen as a worthwhile loss leader for them and is viewed as an anchor for the site. Obviously Mal are benefiting from developers approaching us to become involved, which inevitably makes the negotiation process a lot easier.
“Newcastle was, before Oxford, the only real conversion, being an existing building on thequayside. It was really our only “unusual” project. After the brand had been quiet for a few years, Oxford reignited the passion for taking sleepy old buildings and making something of them.
“That strategy has linked well with buying some well-known hotels which had gone off the map. For example, when Devonshire Gardens in Glasgow (which was once known as THE hotel in the UK, if not Europe, in the late 80s and early 90s) came on the market, it was a great way for us to promote and sell and make people aware of the Hotel du Vin name. So we have re-branded the hotel, invested in it and reopened it as Hotel du Vin, 1 Devonshire Gardens. That has been a great platform for us to launch the Hotel du Vin brand in the north of the country.”
There must be benefits of running two brands, despite on the face of it running them as separate entities?
“The main advantages of bringing two brands together are better procurement and cross-fertilisation of the databases. When you are growing a business like mine, it necessitates a high attention to detail and is very personable. You know the characters in it, a very ‘mama and papa type’ company. However, the biggest advantage of buying a new company was that we ‘bought’ 250 new employees, almost disciples to the brand of Hotel du Vin, like we had disciples to the brand of Malmaison.
“The overriding plus about that is that when you put two brands together, young people with ambition enable you to grow quicker. And we probably spend, time-wise, 30% of our time working on the development of our people and people development issues, what I call the “people jigsaw”. Because that is the biggest issue this industry has, never mind Mal and Hotel du Vin; a massive lack of talent. And we are very lucky as we can ‘grow our own’ – we are of a size where we can grow organically now, and at the same time we will grow the people in our business at the same speed.”
Is there a lot of staff cross-over between the two brands?
“Quite a lot, more now than ever before. With the new opening in Liverpool, in January 2007, the management are a 50/50 mix of Hotel du Vin and Mal and there are a lot more Mal people working at Hotel du Vin and vice-versa. So that’s good and that’s exciting and that sees opportunity, and I think Mike Warren was the first to ‘jump the fence’ by leaving Hotel du Vin Birmingham to join Mal Oxford. Mike led the way, a trail blazer if you like, from Hotel du Vin to Mal. That was a great help for me, as he was General Manager and he was spreading the gospel that the two brands were, in many ways, very similar. So now we have droves of people working between both brands, and it has been good for Mike because he has now become Regional Director for Hotel du Vin.”
I presume it is a great way of freshening your staff up if they get stale, simply by switching brands.
“Of course – there are some people who see no difference, some who work in one and want to go back – it’s ‘horses for courses’. But as management, we can see that some of the decisions made have been wrong, and people admit that and want to go back and that’s equally important to us.
“The good thing is that we now have 10 hotels being built, 5 new hotels next year and 5 the year after, and I can put my hand on my heart and say that I know the management of those 10 hotels next year are coming from within the existing business. Not many hotel companies can say that. There will be one or two that we don’t promote from within, but it’s important to get fresh ideas and fresh eyes. It’s a winning formula.“
How do you see the fit of Mal and Hotel du Vin in the Hotel industry generally? I spoke with a hotelier recently who said that he thought the days of the mass produced, box hotels, where every room is the same, were numbered. Do you agree that the more specialist and interesting hotels will come to the fore?
“Definitely. I think people’s lives are changing. People are becoming a lot more discerning. People have a lot more taste. I think that at home they have become a lot more aspirational in terms of design. Every city has an Ikea or a Habitat – our homes are becoming a lot more design-led. People are looking for and expecting a lot more, so that their time away from home, which is almost always begrudged, must be at least half enjoyable. There is therefore a commensurate rise in the expectations of hotels.
“Quite frankly, the Holiday Inns and Hiltons of this world are boxes and people don’t want to live in a box; they want something different, and that is a challenge for us to keep pushing elements of Mal’s design and Hotel du Vin’s design forward. That is the exciting part of this business as you have to be continually striving to stay ahead of the game. Unless someone at Hilton or Holiday Inn puts their hand in their pocket and completely changes their business, then they are going to have real problems.”
If you are putting your key staff in a Mal overnight, it must increase productivity.
“Of course – that is the key point of difference with Hotel du Vin and Mal hotels. Although design is important and so are great buildings, having great staff who are willing to offer great hospitality is where we have to be at. The staff we have make the whole experience worthwhile, and we know businesses continue to use us because their employees enjoy the whole experience, which can only be good for their business. It is very disappointing when you go to a hotel which is meant to be fantastic but you leave disappointed because someone has taken your eyes out financially and you had an “OK” experience.
“The success of Hotel du Vin and Mal is that we don’t rip you off, and you leave feeling you have had value for money, stayed in luxury and above all, you have been treated correctly. Yes, you can go to a Le Manoir and get a better meal, no question, but you can’t do that every day of the week and that’s who we are targeting, the every day user.”
So what is the long, long term view?
“Our current plan takes us to 2009. I am already looking for new properties for both Hotel du Vin and Mal. Hotel du Vin certainly has “legs” for further expansion in the UK – you could add another 10 without thinking too hard in areas such as Durham, Exeter, Chichester, Bath, Worcester, Gloucester, Poole – places like that lend themselves very easily to Hotel du Vins. Mal is a little bit harder, as you can only really go to the big cities and we are in them all. However, I wouldn’t say no to another Mal in London, diametrically opposite to where we are in Clerkenwell, for example somewhere in the West End would be fantastic. I’d also like to see Malmaison go to Dublin, so there is plenty within the not too distant shores of the UK for us to go to.”
What is your long term personal ambition?
“I would love to take Mal into the States, but one step at a time, as we have got to focus on the job in hand and I think certainly we will get it up to 30 hotels in the UK before we start thinking about further afield.”
Would you consider mainland Europe?
“Having spent 4 years in Monaco and worked with the French unions and the Italian unions, I have been, quite frankly, put off. Running hotels is difficult enough, so to have difficult people to deal with en masse has left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s a personal thing, but I think Malmaison would be a huge success in America. I think you could drop two or three Malmaisons into New York and seriously give W Hotels a run for their money. I honestly think we could do that and why not “bring it on”.
We are not frightened of a challenge now. Mal and HDV have got a real strut about them now. We are very confident, we’re not arrogant – we’re very confident that we can do more. We certainly have a very strong management team here to do that right the way through, wherever that may take us.”
B4 would like to thank Robert Cook for his time and also wish Mike Warren every success in his new role as Regional Director of Hotel du Vin. |
