Do-it-all La Quinta manager has hospitality on lock

Chris Allen puts the general in general manager.

When customers call the La Quinta Inn & Suites Red Rock/Summerlin, he just might answer the phone. Or hand them room keys when they check in. Or swap out an air conditioner when one breaks down.

Sales calls to new businesses in the neighborhood? Been there. Carrying a load of new TVs into the guest rooms? Done that.

"My job description hardly leaves out anything," said Allen, who has been at the property for four years. "On any day, I'm human resources, I'm sales. I'm food and beverage. I'm marketing. I'm the manager. I'm the purchaser. I handle risk management and maintenance if our maintenance person is busy."

But in a city where 900 rooms qualifies as a boutique hotel, he and his hotel barely register. The La Quinta, with its 75 rooms, might cover one floor at one of the Strip behemoths and has no casino or extravagant theme to attract attention.

Instead, he is part of an industry sector, chain hotels and motels with only a few dozen or few hundred rooms, that is prominent in other cities but hard to see through the blazing lights of the Strip.

And with a staff of 15, down from 20 in the good times, he has no choice but to get his hands dirty, literally and figuratively.

In some ways, Allen's story is classic Las Vegas. Two decades ago, he held some operations jobs in the financial services industry, but some of such a short duration that he can't remember the company names. He decided in 1993 that this was the place to try a new direction in life.

"I just needed to get out of Los Angeles," he said." Things weren't working out there and I needed a new start. I had family here and it seemed the way to go. I figured I had a fallback at least."

He worked at the former Showboat while he earned a degree in hotel management from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, at the relatively advanced age of 36. Since then, he has found a home in the industry.

Question: With the segment you are in, do you feel like the Rodney Dangerfield of the Las Vegas lodging industry?

Answer: I definitely feel that way in this town. I think that we are kind of a forgotten segment. When people are talking about Vegas and going to Vegas, they are talking about the big casinos on the Strip and they are not thinking about any of the limited-service properties. And I think we have a lot to offer.

Question: How does the forgotten status play out in a practical way?

Answer: When I go to different events, whether it's the chamber or Nevada Hotel & Lodging Association, it seems we're sort of like the ugly stepchild. They will say, "Oh, you're from La Quinta, where's that?" We're kind of like an afterthought. If you go to a place like Denver, they will know us. We don't have as much pull here.

Question: Who are your guests?

Answer: We get typical business travelers that come to the neighborhood that work with either local businesses or have sales relationships, especially the big-box stores. We get a lot of government people. When Yucca Mountain was open, we used to get tons of DOE (Department of Energy) people here but that went away. There's some weekend travelers. We're seeing a big influx of people moving back into Las Vegas, people who are taking advantage of the low real estate prices and staying for weeks at a time because they are waiting for their houses to close. Anything that happens at the Red Rock (owned by Station Casinos), we will get the overflow. We track any convention of 30,000 or more because we think we will get some of the traffic.

Question: It sounds like your share of tourists, the Las Vegas mainstay, is not very high.

Answer: That's right. On weekends it's about 30 percent of our total guests. On the weekdays, it's probably as low as 10 percent.

Question: Since Las Vegas is not known for non-convention business traffic, how do you market yourself as a business hotel?

Answer: We have to go door to door. Sometimes, we have clients come to us because they relocated to the area. We track closely Tivoli Village, for example. There are a lot of stores like Costco and Home Depot that have people to change out displays. Costco has the traveling sales people that come and demonstrate products and they stay here.

Question: Perhaps unusually, you have a consistent religious clientele.

Answer: The synagogue Young Israel Aish is significant for us and we cater to the Jewish population by having shabbat rooms with hard keys. When they are celebrating the Sabbath (in conservative or Orthodox tradition), they can't use anything electronic. Our kitchen is kosher.

Question: Do you prefer being a hands-on manager to an executive?

Answer: I wouldn't mind going back to a bigger hotel one day, but I love what I am doing. Managers have to lead by example. If we don't do it, then the employees won't do it. The thing I don't like about some of the bigger hotels is that a lot of their higher-ups are more of a public relations-type job as opposed to a hands-on job. I don't like to sit behind my desk 24 hours a day or even eight hours a day. I like to get out and inspect rooms, check out what's going on and talk to the guests. I have seen in the bigger hotels that the general managers don't take the time to go out and do that, look at the rooms or talk with the guests as much as they should.

Question: You were working in Los Angeles on Sept. 11. What lasting lessons did you learn from it?

Answers: It was a totally different game. We did a lot of business with airlines. We were having to take care of them, and the market just crashed. Everybody wanted to renegotiate deals and cut rates. We weren't prepared for it.

I learned a lot of compassion and understanding. Learned to work with other people to come to common agreements. That recovered a lot faster than what we are going through now.

Question: Did the fact that thousands of new rooms came on the Strip as demand was dropping also sting La Quinta?

Answer: I don't think so. Being more of where we were, it was more Yucca Mountain and foreclosures that affected us. Bringing more rooms on the Strip benefits us in some ways. It's that wow factor for visitors wanting to see the new properties. At the same time, it was bad timing to have all those new rooms. I don't think we saw the residual traffic we normally get because people stayed home.

Question: Have you projected when you might get back to the good days of 2007?

Answer: Not really projected but I've thought about it. Based on what I see, my best guess is that it won't ever get back to the way it was in 2007. But if it does, it will take at least 10 years. I think what we saw was a market correction. Just like housing was in a bubble, hotels were in a bubble, too. What we are seeing now are room rates that are realistic.

Going down Sahara, you see so many empty storefronts. For that to correct itself, it's going to be another five years. And then, it will be another five years after that to get back up to where we were.

Contact reporter Tim O'Reiley at
toreiley@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290.