Checking In : Entirely Female Management Staff Supervises Hotel Renovation Project
Builder John Clement was jolted to see that work had already started when he showed up to bid on a $10-million hotel renovation project near Los Angeles International Airport.
Somebody had ripped out the glass ceiling--that obstacle that keeps women and minorities from rising to the top.
“We walked into a room full of women. There wasn’t a man in sight,” he said. “I was surprised--we’re dealing here with things that are traditionally not in women’s scope of work.”
That was before Clement scoped out the 570-room Continental Plaza Hotel.
There, women call all the shots.
The general manager is a woman. So is the controller, director of marketing and the heads of human resources, public relations, catering, housekeeping, general sales and international sales.
In a field in which women are rarely found in the top job, an all-female front office is unheard of, according to hotel industry leaders. And women being in charge of rebuilding a hotel from the honeymoon suite to the executive suite is unbelievable to some.
“The eyebrows go up--people are surprised,” said Cindy Boulton, 40, who has been the hotel’s general manager for the last year and a half. “Some people are earnest about it. They come right out and say, ‘Geez, women running a project of this magnitude.’ ”
Controller Leila McNab said she shrugs it off when visitors enter her office and tell her, “I’m here to see the controller. Is he in?”
Marketing Director Kynderly Haskins grinned and pointed to herself when executives from a Chicago ad agency asked at the end of a meeting: “Well, who are the decision-makers? Who do we see?”
Officials of the American Hotel & Motel Assn. say they have never heard of a large hotel with an all-woman executive office. And the ethnic mix of the Continental Plaza’s top management is equally unique, said Kathryn Cochran, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based group.
Boulton is white; McNab, human resources chief Linda Vizcaina and housekeeping head Gloria Aleman are Latino; Haskins, Deborah Hedges, catering director Cynthia Brumfield and senior sales manager Ricki Dey are African American. International sales chief Kirsten Jegsen is Danish.
The women say they have learned to shrug off people who mistake them as secretaries, such as the hotel worker who buttonholed Hedges the other day and asked her to run a few envelopes through the postage meter for him. They shrug off the misconceptions too.
“People ask about cat fights. Even my own husband asked how a group of women get anything done,” Hedges said.
Boulton was retained as general manager when the 23-year-old hotel, formerly called the Viscount Travelodge, was purchased six months ago by a Mexican resort company, Grupo Situr.
With orders to turn the place around, her first innovations included free meals and massages for airport workers who normally never set foot in area hotels. She said it is happenstance--not discrimination against males--that led to the makeup of the front office.
She hired the best people she could find, said Boulton, who lives at the hotel with her husband, Tony, and their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Bianca. “I’m not a feminist. In my lifetime I’ve been discriminated against enough to know” that gender bias is wrong.
Boulton speculates that some people misread her name “Cindy” as “Craig” when they show up expecting to see a male in her office. But sometimes even those who know who she is and what she does have trouble reconciling the two.
Such as those in charge of the hotel’s shuttle vans, who were perplexed by a knocking noise coming from one vehicle’s engine. Boulton suggested that an oil additive would remedy it.
“There was this hemming and hawing and finally they brought in a mechanic,” she said. “Two days later they finally put in an additive.”
When a hotel sewer line backed up this year, a plumbing contractor rattled off a long list of complicated equipment needed for the repair and tossed out a $30,000 estimate before Boulton interrupted.
“They were trying to talk over me. They figured I was a woman and couldn’t have any knowledge about sewers. I just asked why do you have to do this and do that. And they said, ‘Well, now that we have thought about it. . . .’ The $30,000 job turned out to be a $12,000 job.”
Teams of subcontractors, electricians and others being interviewed for the renovation project quickly learn that Boulton knows the hotel’s electrical system and which walls have water pipes behind them. Not to mention how to negotiate a contract with tough penalty clauses for work not performed on time.
“To be honest, it was a little bit shocking. That was the initial feeling,” said Ike Monserrat, a Chino Hills contractor who has bid for part of the project. “I’ve never worked like this with women before.”
Clement, vice president of an Irvine-based firm that was picked to be project manager for the work, said any initial fears he may have had quickly disappeared.
“We had our first meeting with the hotel’s architect yesterday,” he said.
