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A Self-Made Career
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With his reputation as the "grand old man" of hospitality in Asia – definitely no emphasis on "old" – preceding him, Gerhard Zimmer relates his life with quiet, youthful relish, enjoying every twist and turn on the path that took him from a village of 450 people in Germany to being general manager of hotels in Asia that employ just as many people in the F&B department alone.

Born after WWII in Leutershausen in Germany of a mother who had obtained professional training as a chef, Zimmer learned his proficient culinary skills literally at his mother’s apron strings, allowing him to enter naturally into a "kind of career path", as he puts it, to hospitality.

At age 14, he began an apprenticeship to become a chef in a well-reputed hotel in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. The 130-room Hotel Eisenhut, often frequented by dignitaries and celebrities, was run by an outstanding woman fabled for her hospitality and affectionately known as "la patronesse". Despite the success of her hotel, she continued to personally arrange the flowers in the hotel and set high standards for good taste in decoration and service. She was an important role model for young Zimmer who, to this day pursues her model and knows how to woo his personnel, associates and public with gentle charm, warmth and a sharp eye for gracious detail.

Turning a painful incident when he cut his finger in the kitchen to his advantage, Zimmer found himself briefly transferred to the role of page boy while his finger healed. There, he had the opportunity to observe and work with the hotel manager, a concierge who spoke nine languages and a fastidious maître d’ who checked his staff’s fingernails and grooming before each service. Experiencing a kind of epiphany, Zimmer decided then and there that one day he would be a hotel manager – a living dream that he would realize over a long period of years dedicated to learning the ropes by working in larger hotels and then international chains, all the while studying when time permitted and collecting excellent role models. While working at Munich’s Vier Jahreszeiten, which at that time was owned and managed by the famous Walterspiel family, he voiced his desire to move to Switzerland and, sure enough, Mr. Walterspiel himself recommended Zimmer to the Gauer family which ran the Shweizerhof in Bern.

By age 18, he had moved to Switzerland where he worked for five years in the kitchens of such prestigious hotels as the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich, the Kulm in Arosa and the Carlton in St. Moritz. Everywhere, he was encouraged by employers who recognized his talents.

Adventure Calls

In 1969, Zimmer jumped at the chance to work for Hilton International, still as a chef, in Bangkok at a time when only two chains – Hilton and InterContinental – were trolling international markets. From this platform, he moved rapidly to becoming assistant manager at the Hong Kong Hilton and then F&B manager at the Manila and Guam Hiltons.

Above all, he remembers his "sandwich year in Katmandu, Nepal, as a fabulous adventure. The Hotel de l’Annapurna, then managed then by Hilton International, was then the exclusive caterer for the Nepalese royal palace, affording Zimmer the chance to meet King Mirendra and play tennis with his son, the future King Birendra. Struck by this decidedly joss-deprived royal house, Zimmer relates that King Mirendra tried to avoid the family curse – death at age 52 due to a congenital heart condition – by skipping his 52nd birthday, but fate intervened underhandedly and he was killed in a hunting accident in his 52nd year. His son, King Birendra was shot by his own son in 2001 – bad karma that Zimmer regrets for the Nepalese royal family which had left him with such colorful memories.

Leaving Guam and Hilton International to accommodate his young family, he accepted a job as F&B director at the 500-room Manila Sheraton. With eight restaurants and huge banquet facilities, the 480-people F&B staff alone was larger than the village where he was born. When his parents visited him in 1980, Zimmer remembered the old German saying his father had used with him as a child to keep him in line, "If you don’t behave, I’ll send you to the land where pepper grows!” which apparently has strong scare impact in Germany that doesn’t exactly cross cultural borders. But Zimmer remembered and said to his father, "It’s not so bad, this land where pepper grows", thus finally gaining the approval of his father who had been skeptical about his son following an international career path.

In 1981, Zimmer moved his family to Singapore where he became resident manager of the Sheraton, but he was soon selected to go back in Guam to open a new hotel the Pacific Star Hotel. Since the project was delayed, he ended up as assistant director of operations of Sheraton for Asia. During this period, he finally had the time and influence to gain some academic credentials. He attended Cornell University summer school and their 3-month executive program and took advantage of that trip to the U.S.A. to study hotels in Canada, in New England and in the Southwest of the US.

Returning to Europe via Italy in 1985, he recruited an Italian restaurant team from Rome, complete with chef and personnel, to cater two weeks of promotional activities in Manila sponsored by Imelda Marcos.

Before long, he was back in Guam, to open the Pacific Star Hotel in 1987. On this mission, he learned more than he’d bargained for about "island mentality" when his celebrity status wound up having him working around the clock at such activities as chairman of the Guam Visitors’ Bureau, and on the Governors Task force for Tourism, on top of his day job of managing the 440-room hotel. Under his initiative, Guam diversified its tourist base by marketing not only to the Japanese but also the Korean and Taiwanese markets.

But luck and the trade winds were in his favor in 1990 when he was transferred to Bali to open first the Sheraton Laguna Nusa Dua Beach Resort Hotel. He avidly followed an intensive period of hotel development on Bali, which saw the addition of 4500 hotel rooms opening at the same time in the space of less than six month. The Gulf War in 1991 was not good for the tourism business anywhere and especially in Bali where occupancies in this now over-supplied destination where at an all time low. Zimmer realized it was time to make a move.

Accor goes to China

Just as Zimmer was preparing to move his family back to Manila to accommodate the educational needs of his children, he received an offer from the Groupe Accor – a newcomer to the Asian hospitality market – to open the first Sofitel in China, the Hotel Sofitel Hyland Shanghai. There was no way that Gerhard Zimmer, by now an old hand at opening hotels in Asia, was going to pass up that opportunity!

On April 1, 1992, Zimmer arrived in Shanghai with two suitcases, was greeted by a Chinese Accor representative who spoke good English and drove him to a Novotel in the suburbs where he would live for the next nine months until the hotel opening.

The Sofitel Hyland on Nanjing Road site was still heavily under construction but Zimmer was impressed with the relative good order on the site of what would soon be the only 105-meter tall high rise building with a striking glass curtain wall in the Huang Pu District of Shanghai. This old part of Shanghai close to the famous Bund had some of the tallest buildings anywhere in the 1930. One of them was the famous Park Hotel with its 87 meters height.

Prior to his arrival, the interior designer had dropped the project and the building owners had decided to undertake it themselves. At first, Zimmer felt some resistance to his intervention but he also learned that the Chinese delivered what they said they would deliver.

And he also learned rapidly that he had to do things their way. Yet he was also able to impart significant Western "values" such as the notion of a budget for marketing and PR, which the locals had no concept of when he arrived. (Why would you invite journalists for a free meal or visit?) He saw that they were avid to learn and sought copies of all written documents so that they could study and learn from them. He willingly helped them when he could.

Because he would have to hire numerous staff, he was sent by the authorities to a day-long seminar to learn the moral values required to hire people in China. On his own, he studied local law and culture, and was repeatedly helped in his acculturation process by the Chinese Accor representative.

Several months before the hotel was finished and at the insistence of the property owners, the hotel’s first event – a kind of completion party – took place in the Lounge on the 30th floor in the presence of the mayor and many government officials as well as the Japanese Joint Venture Owner.

Opening Sofitel Shanghai

The official opening of the Sofitel Hyland in central Shanghai took place on January 16, 1993. From the start, the hotel was extremely busy because, at that time, there was not much competition in Shanghai other than the Shangri-La (now the Ritz Carlton) the Hilton, the JC Mandarin and the Equatorial Hotel. There were no free-standing Western restaurants, other than in international hotels, and local restaurants were not equipped to deal with spoken or written English.

In the mid 1970s, Deng Xiao Ping, then prime minister, had visited Shanghai and saw that the city was near collapse. He then declared that Shanghai must survive and modernize. Under his leadership, the government started to invest heavily in the city’s infrastructure, creating highways and overpasses through and around the old city, which had none of the high-rise buildings that characterize its skyline today.

Across the river from the West Shanghai Puxi city sector lay the area known as East Shanghai Pudong, which was still nothing but rice fields in 1992 when Gerhard Zimmer arrived. The only "high-rise" structure just coming of the ground in that sector was the Pearl television tower. Nevertheless, wide roads had been traced through the quarter.

Today, Pudong boasts the only commercial magnetic train in use in the world. It shuttles passengers to and from the Pudong airport, a service that will soon be extended to Hong Xiao Airport located in Puxi and to the Garden City of Hangzhou, famous for its tea gardens and beautiful West Lake several hundred kilometers away. Now, there is also the Sofitel Jin Jiang Oriental Pudong, which Zimmer helped to take over for Accor in 2002 after it had opened in 2001 for the APEC conference under Jin Jiang management.

When Zimmer arrived in China in 1992 the Chinese workforce labored six days a week, with only one day off. He still remembers distinctly the vision he had on the first national holiday in October when he looked down from his Sofitel Hyland tower and saw a sea of heads moving up and down Nanjing Road – millions of people packed like sardines but flowing smoothly. He was impressed by not only the discipline of the Chinese pedestrians and their tolerance for each other in close proximity, but also recognized the importance that the street surface represented for this population.

Shortly thereafter, when he was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on city planning, he suggested that Nanjing Road East be made entirely pedestrian, which it was sometime later and he likes to think that he helped make this difference. (The Nanjing pedestrian mall was created by a French designer, Jean-Marie Charpentier from Arte Design, who also created the Grand Theater.)

In the beginning, the Sofitel Hyland stuck out like a sore thumb in Shanghai, with its shimmering glass wall exterior and sharp-looking corners, but today – a mere 14 years later – it is dwarfed by more impressive high-rise buildings. To get the full idea of how Shanghai has evolved, Zimmer recommends visiting the Urban Planning Museum which has one entire floor dedicated to model of the city that you can look down on.

The Chinese government is still pouring money into Shanghai’s infrastructure (subways and highways) to gear up for the 2010 World EXPO. Construction sites are open 24 hours a day and the wealthy Chinese diaspora from Singapore, Thailand and the United States is buying up property which they prefer to leave unrented rather than to lower rents, often creating an eerie feeling of ghostly towers.

A Room at the Top

In 1997, Zimmer was made director of operations for Accor properties and as such opened yet more Sofitel properties in the Philippines and in China, among them also the Sofitel Boao, a resort and conference hotel on the east coast of Hainan Island. This purpose built property for the Boao Forum for Asia, an annual conference, aims to be for Asia what the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland is for the entire world.

The magic of Boao is to be experienced to be believed, says Zimmer, and now, since April 2006, he has been supervising the construction of the Sofitel Wanda in Beijing. Zimmer thought it was perfect timing to move to Beijing at a time when the capital is making up for lost ground in the rivalry of the two city giants – Beijing and Shanghai. While Beijing is the political capital of China, Shanghai claims to be the commercial capital of this vast country which appears to be more like a continent than one country, with provinces the size of and the population of France or Germany.

The Sofitel Wanda Beijing, built according to platinum standards (better than a five star), will open officially in 2007 on the most auspicious date possible, according to Chinese tradition – a date yet to be announced. The property owner wants his hotel to be the best in that city – and that’s a tall order literally and symbolically in a country of run-on hospitality superlatives.

Several mock-up rooms are now viewable. They feature the best in high-tech with wireless Internet connections; electronic curtains; special glass walls in the bathroom that become opaque at the flip of a switch, thanks to the magnetic release of a gas sandwiched between two panes; and a built-in television in the bathroom so you can soak up the tube while soaking in your tub. Decoration will be "homelike", with marble floors and a console in the entrance; dark wood paneling in the bedroom with light wallpaper.

The site was carefully feng-shui-ed before construction began and will again be feng shui décor-adjusted before the opening: a mirror here; a green plant there; total positive energy flow everywhere.

Further, the hotel will feature a French restaurant catered by no less than the iconic Pré Catelan and Le Nôtre from Paris.

For now, Gerhard Zimmer has arrived at the top of his profession a happy man, grateful that he has had both the luck to have great opportunities come his way and the intelligence to follow them to wherever they would lead him. He recognizes that he benefited greatly in his career, not only from his own native talents but also from many good, strong role models. He has never felt hindered by his lack of a formal university degree. Serving as a positive model for up and coming hoteliers and continuing to learn about the cultures and people with whom he comes in contact daily now provide a deep sense of satisfaction.

His only regret is to have lost a valued Chinese colleague and role model tragically in the 2004 tsunami catastrophe. Reggie Shiu, Accor’s senior vice president in charge of Asia, had just signed the contract to build the Sofitel Wanda Beijing on December 16, 2004, and on December 26 of that year, he, his wife and two children died on the western coast of Thailand. Gerhard Zimmer, Accor director in charge of Beijing China and now GM of the Sofitel Wanda Beijing, still remembers Shiu, who had been raised in America, saying to him, "Gerhard, I’m the banana and you’re the egg – I’m yellow on the outside and white inside; you’re white outside and yellow inside."

Gerhard Zimmer, Chinese at heart, is proud to be a hotelier "egg" in China.

Q & A

CK: Hotel management studies are getting longer and longer, often up to the Masters and MBA levels. What do you – a self-made man – think about this trend and how do you think that hotels should adapt their recruitment strategy to take advantage of this new breed of hoteliers?

GZ: The industry has changed considerably since I started my career, especially with regard to computers and electronics. If you’re in a leadership position today in the hospitality industry, you have to realize that people need higher degrees than in the past to face not only the technical demands but also today’s competition. It’s not like the old days when experience alone counted the most.

We have strict qualification requirements for recruiting, but a university degree is not the deciding factor. We will only consider a person who knows how to interact with guests. This is the most important point at all levels of jobs. Managers need to be role models. I also wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t already speak good English.

In China, we at Sofitel believe that it’s more important to train new employees massively rather than hire them from the same industry because usually when the young Chinese change jobs it’s just to get a better salary, not to learn new ways, values, behaviors or attitudes. And that is not good for our business.

We do hire some Chinese staff from hospitality management school backgrounds but we insist on other backgrounds as well, believing that the cross-disciplinary viewpoints will enrich the outcome.

CK: What do you see as essential skills or attitudes for new recruits?

GZ: Patience – and above all patience to learn from one’s own mistakes. That and a keen sense of observation are keys to success in our hospitality industry. We are basically interested in hiring people who have a genuine interest in other people.

CK: Chinese students are eager to study hospitality in Europe and the US. What do you think of the development of hotel schools in China?

GZ: It’s all a question of who is teaching. If the professors they use here are teaching only out of a textbook, then it’s not enough. Teachers need personal background and maturity in their field as well as just knowledge from a book. We are currently trying to work with the Chinese academic system to promote the concept of a dual education program, an apprenticeship with two months in school followed by three months of practical work in the field and so on. An apprenticeship should be either two or three years.

CK: Could you please tell me how the French are perceived in general in China and in the hospitality industry in particular?

GZ: Well, I’ve been told I should have been a diplomat instead of an hotelier, so what I can tell you is that the perception of the French is not too bad, but also not that great.

Germans have a higher regard from the Chinese. Germany, for instance, has been in China with Siemens for 130 years and the Chinese use German medical language.

Nevertheless, the Chinese proudly refer to Shanghai as the Paris of the East. I would say that French culture, art, luxury products, and life style all have some prestige in China. However, they will all tell you that it’s more cumbersome to deal with a Frenchman than other Western people in China, and they feel offended when a Frenchman will switch to his native language from English if there are other French people present, cutting the Chinese and others who are not French speakers out of the conversation.

CK: Is Accor identified as being a French brand in China?

GZ: Yes, I think so. However, we should be doing more to let people know that Sofitel is French. But generally speaking, I think that the brand is identified with the French style of living and our clientele expects us to display luxury goods and offer fine French cuisine and superior wines. We are making a special effort – which I believe is succeeding – in marrying French and Chinese decorating styles in the new Sofitel Wanda Beijing by juxtaposing a traditional French armchair with a traditional Chinese armchair in the room décor. Our little cross-cultural wink to good international relations!

CK: Mr Zimmer, thank you very much.