Filling Empty Rooms

The evenings can get lonely in the lobby of downtown Los Angeles’ Wilshire Grand Hotel & Centre nowadays.

Gone are many of the Asian tourists, conventioneers and U.S. business travelers who ordinarily fill the hotel’s guest rooms. The ranks of employees, including front desk clerks, bellmen and concierges, have thinned too.

The Wilshire Grand, like so many big-city hotels across the country, is suffering through a crisis in the U.S. travel business. On the slowest nights since Sept. 11, nearly three-quarters of its guest rooms have been empty.

“It’s eerie,” said Marcia Webster, a cocktail waitress who has served drinks at the hotel for two decades. “It feels deserted.”

Yet like any determined business enterprise in tough times, the Wilshire Grand is battling back, providing a real-time case study of how a business and its employees respond to adversity.

General manager John Stoddard has plotted to snatch customers from competitors while slashing costs, largely by cutting the hours or jobs of as many as 285 workers.

Veteran salesman Brad Eng is gently prodding national trade associations and other potential clients to start thinking again about booking conventions in Los Angeles.

Espresso bar attendant Liliana Cruz keeps up a cheerful front, but quietly worries about whether she will be one of the next employees laid off.

Along with the rest of a staff still numbering slightly more than 600, Stoddard, Eng and Cruz are part of a formidable business. The Wilshire Grand, occupying a full city block along Figueroa between 7th and Wilshire, has 900 rooms, four restaurants and more than 50,000 square feet of meeting space. It is second in size only to the Westin Bonaventure among downtown’s hotels, and its complex also includes 160,000 square feet of office space.

But as one of eight major downtown hotels vying for lucrative conventions and business meetings, it faces intense competition. That’s particularly true since the terrorist attacks, which aggravated an existing slump in travel.

“When there’s no demand, everyone goes after everyone else’s business. It’s a free-for-all right now,” said Brian F. Fitzgerald, general manager of the Westin Bonaventure.

Nationally, business at major big-city hotels like the Wilshire Grand has partly recovered in recent weeks. Still, according to the most recent figures from Smith Travel Research, a Tennessee-based firm, the occupancy rate at these hotels for the second week of October was 63.3%, down from a 76.5% rate in the same period last year.

The situation is even tougher in downtown Los Angeles. Although the Wilshire Grand has fared better than some nearby rivals and will snare business from a big Microsoft conference downtown this week, the hotel expects an occupancy rate of only 48% for the month. A year ago, it was a strong 75%.

Known as the Hotel Statler when it opened in 1952, the site now called the Wilshire Grand later became a Hilton and the Omni Los Angeles. Since 1989, the hotel has been owned by the South Korean conglomerate Hanjin, through its Korean Air Lines unit.

Under Korean Air, the Wilshire Grand has spent heavily on renovations, $10 million in the last four years alone. The look of the boxy 15-story complex has been freshened with gold-letter signs, teal awnings and a light, two-tone paint job.

Avoiding Layoff but Working a New Shift

Liliana Cruz just barely held on to her job at the Wilshire Grand when the layoffs struck late last month.

But with only five years at the hotel, all as a server and cashier at the espresso bar, Cruz lacked the seniority to keep her prized 6-a.m.-to-2-p.m. shift. A higher-seniority worker who lost his job at one of the hotel’s restaurants claimed Cruz’s position and schedule, under the “bumping rights” clause of the union contract.

Cruz, at 35 a slender woman with a beaming smile, was moved to a 3:30-to-11:30-p.m. shift--a schedule that means she can’t be home in the evenings to help her children with their homework, but a job all the same.

“It’s very sad,” she said. “Some people have been working here 25 years, and now they have just four hours. Some work graveyard” shifts. She has doubts about whether her new position will last. “It’s so slow,” said Cruz, who has seen hours pass without a customer coming by for a coffee. “There’s nobody here.”

Jobs at relatively high-paying hotels often are a major steppingstone for low-skill immigrant workers, and Cruz’s job was no exception. Cruz, who came to this country from Guatemala 17 years ago, previously worked at or around the minimum wage at a curtain factory and a pizzeria.

At the Wilshire Grand, Cruz earns nearly $10 an hour and receives vacation time and health and dental benefits. In good times on the day shift, she also received tips totaling $20 to $50 a day.

When Cruz started the job, she said it seemed that “you were in the right place. You felt security.”

“They pay you good; they feed you; they wash your uniform,” she said. “For me, it was good. I loved it.”

Cruz is not critical of the hotel’s top management. She described Stoddard as “a very nice person” who made a point of personally greeting her and shaking her hand when she started work at the hotel. Although he authorized the layoffs, Cruz said, “there’s nothing he can do because there’s no business.”

If Cruz can’t keep drawing 40 hours a week, she said she will look elsewhere to find work that will cover her bills. She and her husband have two sons, ages 6 and 14, and they bought a house about 18 months ago in Lynwood. “I have to have a job,” she said.

Finding New Ways to Talk to Clients

With his silky voice and easy charm, Brad Eng, 48, comes across as a natural salesman. In fact, he is one of the star sales managers the Wilshire Grand depends on to bring in lucrative national conventions and other business meetings.

But these days, Eng is finding it hard to get past the chitchat to start talking deals.

Many of the meeting planners representing Eng’s usual clients--business trade associations based in or near the Washington area, along with federal agencies--aren’t yet interested in even thinking about holding conventions in Los Angeles or anywhere else far from home.

“People are delaying their decisions. Now they have to wait to discuss it at the next meeting,” he said.

Still, that doesn’t stop him from making call after call to his 250 to 300 regular accounts. Lately, Eng has softened his sales pitch a notch, to take into account the nation’s somber mood. He often tries to open up the conversation with, “How are you coping?”

If prospective clients want details about the hotel, Eng emphasizes that the Wilshire Grand is well laid-out for conventions, with more than 50,000 square feet of meeting space on a single floor. He mentions that it’s next to the 7+Fig shopping mall, down the block from Macy’s Plaza, and is closer than any other major convention hotel to Staples Center and the Los Angeles Convention Center.

He doesn’t say much about decor and atmosphere. The utilitarian public areas lack the flourish of downtown’s Biltmore, with its dark woods and marble. But the hotel is clean and well-maintained. A South Pacific-themed tiki bar that opened in time for last year’s Democratic National Convention--the Wilshire Grand served as headquarters--has been a hit.

A native of Long Island, N.Y., Eng graduated from Temple University with a degree in communications and worked as a radio news reporter and anchor for 10 years. After growing weary of the radio business, he decided to try hotel sales. He worked for chains in Pittsburgh, Long Beach and St. Louis before being recruited by the Wilshire Grand, his first independent hotel, in 1998.

Eng says he doesn’t need a lot of “pumping up” to do his job well. Lately he has relied on self-discipline to keep focused and avoid despairing over the downturn in the hotel business. Still, he conceded, “Sales are slow, and you feel like you’re partly responsible.”

Manager Has Seen Bad Times Before

John Stoddard, the top manager at the Wilshire Grand, has spent 28 years moving up through the ranks of the hotel industry.

But as a young man, he didn’t have a clue about what career he would pursue. It took a stint in Vietnam with the Marines and jobs as a logger and a merchant seaman before he decided to head to Washington State University for a degree in hotel administration.

In the years since, he has worked at hotels in Seattle, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe and Chicago. Stoddard came to Los Angeles to run the Wilshire Grand in January 1998 and now has one of the longest tenures among the general managers of the city’s big downtown hotels.

At 56, Stoddard is a folksy, soft-spoken man who enjoys chatting with his employees and who signs birthday cards for everyone on staff, half or more of whom are Latino or Asian immigrants. He acted quickly after Sept. 11 to cut the payroll--including furloughing 45 workers and reducing the hours of as many as 240 others--but says the process has been painful. “We’re laying off friends of ours,” he said.

Soon, though, Stoddard expects to bring back some of those laid off. On Oct. 29, the hotel plans to reopen Cardini, an Italian restaurant that was shut for lack of business after the terrorist attacks. Stoddard’s thinking is that his hotel’s four restaurants long have been a strong draw for downtown businesspeople along with conventioneers, and now that competitors appear to be cutting back on their food service, the Wilshire Grand can gain ground. “It’s created an opportunity for us,” Stoddard said.

Likewise, while cutting elsewhere, Stoddard over the last month has hired two sales managers to try to bring in more conventions. Those hires bring the sales force to 11.

One of the new hires will focus on a market that the hotel never pursued very aggressively before: Southern California. Because big hotels tend to make the vast majority of their profit on room reservations, they typically devote their attention to large conventions that bring out-of-town guests who fill lots of rooms.

But Stoddard’s hunch is that regional meetings could provide plenty of new business. Companies cutting back on national meetings will compensate by holding more regional gatherings, he reasons. It may not fill the rooms, but at least the restaurants and banquet rooms will be busy.

Stoddard has weathered bad times before. He was the resident manager of a Marriott in San Francisco that opened the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and he stayed with the hotel as it recovered from its rocky start.

He knows it could take a long time for the Wilshire Grand to make a full comeback. In the meantime, Stoddard said the hotel is financially secure and that even in September it managed through cost-cutting to squeeze out a small operating profit.

Although more calls are coming in again to book reservations for coming months, the pickup isn’t enough to comfort Stoddard.

“We’ve got a lot of business on the books for the first six months of next year,” he said. “The question is, how much of it is going to show up?”