Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Ron: The SALT brand was already into this whole connected community, circular, caring for what matters. Absolutely. As it’s now extending to the LUX* brand and Tamassa and to other countries as well. What are your thoughts about how that’s being picked up and what you see as its future? 

Nitesh: I think it’s something which is a must for all of us to follow across all our brands. I’ll come to LUX* I’ll go to Tamassa first as it’s a new brand also, and the Tamassa’s purpose is bringing people together, and what better way of bringing people together when taking the whole community along with you and coming and doing things together. So Tamassa fits in very well as such. In the LUX* Shining, you know, helping people celebrate life. 

Ron: Wait, can you give us an example in Tamassa, about ways in which you may have taken, let’s say, a group of friends, or a large family or a convention group and engage them with the community? 

Nitesh: What we did in Tamassa was that we needed the buy-in of all our team members, you know, and I recall in 2012-13, when we did the team members’ survey as such and all, which is very important part of our staff, we used to get in 60s, 62%, 64% as team member satisfaction survey. We came up with a program called Etiquette and Morale Week and we thought in multiple dimensions, okay, how do we make our team members happy? 

How do we make sure that the future generation of Mauritius is in good hands? How do we make sure that they choose the best career path based on their skill? So we said that everybody, all the children between 8 to 12 years of age, bring them into the hotel for four days and three nights. During these four days and three nights, they will go to different experiences. So for example, they will have cooking classes, they will go for golf classes, they will have Padel Tennis with the expert, you know, including a coding class also. Just to understand how in one class they will not learn, but just to give them the idea of what coding means, what does it stand for? You know, when I play tennis with an expert, I understand, okay, is this what I want to pursue as my career? Is this what I want to do in my life further as such and all. Culinary. 

Ron: Right, at 12 years old, they’re being exposed to I.T. and to engineering and to gardening and to water sports and…

Nitesh: Absolutely, and then what it did was that, so, for example, if I’m working in the laundry department, I know that my child is staying in the hotel, right? Yeah. During those four days, three nights, we made sure that each kid went and met their parents at their workplace so that they can understand how hard their parents are working to bring them a living for them. Now, for the child, it was an eye opener that oh my God, look at my father is working so hard. I need to really be thankful to him, you know. At the same time, the parents felt so good that, you know, for example, after this Etiquette and Morale week, one woman walked into my office. I think she’s 55, 56 years old, and she started crying. I said, “What happened?” and she said that, you know, “My salary is to stay at this hotel.I could never, ever afford to stay in this hotel, and my child is staying for four days, three nights in this hotel, free of charge and experiencing all of these things.” and she started crying and said “Thank you for giving me this opportunity, and what we said was there’s no thank you. If you want, give a blessing to us because blessing works, you know, and that’s what we went forward with. 

The best part came at the end of this program, where we got all the kids into a graduation dress and our CEO, Mr. Paul Jones, handed the graduation certificate to everybody and our chairman, Mr. Lodges, put the graduation cap. With all the board of directors standing in the front. The parents were like, “Whoa”, you know. But the biggest part was that, the engagement. How they brought everybody together towards one goal. That we make this hotel the best hotel today.

Ron:  This is an extraordinary story. Were guests exposed to this in any way? 

Nitesh: Absolutely! How so? So, we said that, you know, we wrote to all the guests, and said what exactly they were doing, and we said that should you wish to join in one of the dinners, please come in and share your thoughts. If you have a skill, come and spend some time with the kids and many guests on the graduation night came and actually joined that event because it was such a grand event, and you know, Mauritius people are very, very lovely people. They’re very friendly. I think they’re the most friendly people in the world. Now, they all get very close to the guests. So they started talking to the guests, “Oh, my kid is there,” and they came with the guest. Absolutely, and the family photo now includes the guests.

It was a phenomenal program. Not just for the score because the score went above 90% survey, but the main idea was how to bring everybody together. How to engage them, how to connect the hearts together. That was the idea, you know.