July 6, 2021 | By Graeme Kemlo
Melbourne’s longest-serving hotel general manager until he retired from Crown Promenade Melbourne a couple of months ago, Greg Moore says the industry needs to understand how to appeal to the next generation of hoteliers post-COVID.
He is concerned that parents talking to children about to leave school might wonder if the hospitality business is sustainable in the long term, given how it has suffered through lockdowns that badly affected both their leisure and business revenues, in turn causing staff stand-downs and layoffs.
Moore spent 27 years with Crown Resorts.
“I was blessed by the nature and the size of the place and had about four careers under one roof,” he says.
He initially joined the group as a consultant, then became Director of Training and set up their training college. In 1997 the Asian stock market crashed, and he moved to HR to help establish reward and recognition systems. In 2000 he joined the project office to manage design and development of Promenade, Crown’s dedicated conference hotel and conference centre. He then spent 17 years as General Manager of Promenade plus three and a half years as GM of Crown Metropol.
He is still passionate about the industry he first encountered years before as a dishwasher in a family-run Bendigo hotel. And he believes the next generation need “a passion for service”. His decision to retire was based on the idea that “it is better to pay attention to the ‘best before’ date rather than the ‘use by’”.
A few years ago he suggested to a room full of meeting planners and PCOs that change was afoot with his observation that “once upon a time you would never get a job in a five-star hotel if you had a visible tattoo, but now it seems compulsory to have ink”.
Having seen thousands of staff go through his hotels and mentored many over the past decade, he says the current millennial generation of managers are doing a great job.
“You can spot the ones who have the passion,” he says, adding that once HR would initially test for a candidate’s IQ, then later they tested for EQ (emotional intelligence) and they now need to score well at DQ – “to be skilled in data analytics, which now drives everything”.
After a couple of months’ reflection on his future, Moore is likely to return to a consulting role to help organisations understand the changing nature of leadership and management in a post-COVID world. And he will take the time to share his passion by mentoring some of the newest generation of leaders.