A Bavarian in Bangkok

Forty years of managing The Oriental, and Kurt Wachtveitl's life has become inextricably linked with the fortunes of the hotel. Kishore Singh profiles.

There is probably no other professional hotelier in the world who has spent four decades as general manager of one hotel, yet Kurt Wachtveitl "" "Call me (thankfully!) Kurt, everyone in Bangkok does" "" probably views retirement as the only option that will take him away from his beloved Oriental hotel.

Yet, there was a time when the charismatic GM had considered putting in his papers and leaving the iconic Oriental. "The Hong Kong dollar had been devalued," he is bemused still some two decades later, "and that meant that salaries all over the group" "" that's the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, should you ask "" "had been slashed by 25 per cent. Since I was in Bangkok, I thought this was unfair," he explains this in a gentleman-like fashion, a muffler guarding him against the chill air of New Delhi at its coldest point this winter.

Well? "Well," Kurt chortles, "a headhunter offered me the general manager's post at a hotel in Hawaii, and I was going to New York on work, from where I was to take a flight to Hawaii. But I woke up in the middle of the night with a gut feeling..."

The long and short of it is that he refused the assignment, which may have been a good thing since the hotel was sold six times in eight years. "But I learnt a very important lesson," Kurt sips his orange juice, "never to take an important decision when you're angry."

Kurt, though, is frequently angry. "I do not have patience," says the manager known to roll up his sleeves and join his colleagues at work, "I push all the time. As a result, I can become quite harsh to the point of being irrational." But this he balances out against what he considers his strengths, "I think I have the capacity to bring out the best in people, and I hope I have never been unjust."

A Bavarian, Kurt was studying hotel management in Lausanne in 1958 when he met Penny, his wife. Penny was Thai, and when she returned to Thailand, Kurt followed her and found that his austere German vision was quite "open to the Thai way of life".

Over the years, he says he has "learned when to tighten the belt and when to give it a long leash. The Thai people love a strong man, someone who takes command, takes risks and accepts responsibilities."

It was Penny who helped him find his first job at a hotel in Pattaya, where service was not the best since it was really a weekend sort of resort. Fortunately, the American Embassy in Bangkok booked the hotel for 18 months, to use as a base for their air force officers. "I was a hero," smiles Kurt.

During this period, Kurt travelled often to Bangkok where he always stayed at the Oriental "" after all, the hotel had a long history, having opened in 1876, and associated ever since with writers in residence like Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Noel Coward.

But the Oriental had begun to bleed: it was an old hotel, and right next door, an InterContinental had opened, causing occupancies to plummet from 100 per cent to 10 per cent. Around the same time a director of the hotel and silk king Jim Thompson disappeared mysteriously.

A crisis was averted when the hotel was sold to the Italian owner of Kurt's Pattaya hotel, and in 1967, he took over what could loosely be termed its management. "The employees," Kurt shrugs, "each did their own thing."

The clean up took time. Among the first things Kurt did was to bring in a French chef to transform the hotel's Normandy restaurant. In 1973, the Mandarin Oriental group came in, and the number of rooms were ramped up from 100 to 400, but it was also the most testing period for the hotel, chiefly because coups in 1974 and 1976 destroyed the country's tourism industry.

"In 1976," he muses, "an incentive group of Ford executives was in mid-flight when the coup occurred, and the group was diverted to Singapore."

But the end of the Vietnam war in 1976 and the fact that no new hotels were added to the city skyline till 1984-85, meant the Oriental had a wonderful run for eight years.

The 60th anniversary of the king in 1987 became another opportunity for the local travel industry and airlines to provide Thailand a global thrust, which kept the tourists pouring in. It wasn't till 1991-92, when 30-40 new hotels suddenly sprang up, that competition became keen.

Through all this and the grand renovations that have added some of the finest facilities (such as its spa) in South-east Asia to the Oriental, Kurt has been intimately associated with his product.

"I have never thought of myself," he says, "there has been no time for investments, buying property, growing one's money" "" he sighs "" "and this when I have spent so much of my life with people at the forefront of economics."

True, Kurt is a celebrity name, certainly in the rarefied world of hoteliering, but he in turn gets his kicks from "celebrities". "They get your pulse pumping," he says, "it is the reason why you go into your office with so much joy, they make this the most interesting profession in the world."

In India to try to grow the 2.5 per cent of his Indian clientele to 5 per cent, Kurt says, "Our Indian guests are big spenders on F&B and the spa, and they're very educated."

But does he remember his first Indian guest at the Oriental? Over the years, Indian prime ministers, finance ministers, even Sonia Gandhi have stayed there but, Kurt's forehead creases, his first guests were "probably at the government level, or maybe Indians who lived in England, or even important people from the Tata group who had a big presence in Thailand, especially in textiles".

But it isn't his guests' nationality that Kurt registers. "People who come to the Oriental are seasoned travellers," he explains, "not the kind of businessmen who work 12-14 hours a day, but at the highest level. They come to enjoy the hotel."