The woman who runs the world's biggest Hilton
When Hilton chief executive David Michels was challenged recently about how few women reach senior positions in the hotel business, he was quickly able to point to Marie-Beatrice Lallemend, general manager of the biggest Hilton in the world.
This month Lallemend celebrates her first anniversary at the London Hilton Metropole. She took it over shortly after it had been massively extended to run conferences for more than 3,000 and sleep more than 1,000.
It gave London the ability to attract conferences the size of which had never been seen in the capital before.
And being a woman, she said, had been an advantage.
"It makes it easier since everybody knows me because there are so few of us. But it is more difficult to get the job in the first place, I think. People feel that they are taking more of a risk with a woman because if a woman fails it will be more highlighted. However, once you have the job, the opposite becomes true. It is an advantage."
Lallemend has certainly not failed. Notwithstanding the aftereffects of 11 September (a British Airways conference scheduled for 13 September was, unsurprisingly, cancelled) the Metropole has had a very good year.
Indeed, it surprises Lallemend that hoteliers in London are so downbeat about occupancy and room rate when they compare so favourably with those in Germany, where she worked before London.
"We are now running at 80% occupancy - that's 800 bedrooms a night - hardly bad," she said. "If we had these sort of figures in Germany we would have been celebrating, so it is hard for me to see this as a poor performance."
It is not the first time Lallemend has worked in Britain. From 1987-89 she managed the Ramada Renaissance in Brighton and before that she worked at the Holiday Inn, Mayfair and the Holiday Inn, Croydon, where she was front-office manager from March 1983 to May 1984.
Her absence of more than a decade puts her in a good position to judge changing standards.
"It is wonderful to see the changes that have happened in London," she said. "Food and drink here have improved beyond all recognition. There are more new ideas here now than anywhere else with the possible exception of New York. And I include Paris in that."
Her aims for the Metropole now are to continue to attract the big conferences, winning the business from other large European conference centres such as Euro Disney and Monte Carlo.
Lallemend's one commercial wish is a convention centre for London so the capital can take even larger conferences with delegates spread around hotels in the city.
by David Harris
