Schoolies in Kuta: what running an 88-room resort at 22 taught me about hospitality

A hotel is a small town

Eighty-eight rooms means housekeeping, two kitchens, pool bars, maintenance, security, reception and a booking desk, all running at once, in a language I did not yet speak. It means a relationship with the banjar, the local community council, and with the officials who check your permits. It means Balinese ceremony days that empty your staff roster, and Nyepi, when the whole island goes silent and dark for a day and your guests have to be told why. I was 22 and I learned most of it by getting it wrong once.

Schoolies is a stress test

A schoolies package resort is full of 18-year-olds for six weeks. Everything that can go wrong with a hotel goes wrong faster. The staff who hold a place like that together are not the ones with the best English; they are the ones who can calm a corridor at three in the morning and still smile at breakfast. I employed about 80 Balinese staff, and some of them are still at the resort more than a decade after I sold it. That tells you something about who was really running the place.

What a general manager is for

The single most important hire in a hotel is the person who runs it when the owner is not there. I learned that twice in the same year, once in Kuta, where a good team carried the resort, and once on the Gold Coast, where the managers I left in charge of my solar company ran it into the ground. The two lessons are the same lesson. It is on the record.

Why Saraya is one hotel, not 154 villas

Saraya Beach Resort has 154 villas, and every one of them is owned by someone different. If each owner ran their own villa, it would be 154 small businesses with 154 standards of cleaning, maintenance and guest service, competing against each other on the same beach. Instead, every owner signs a management agreement and one international operator runs the whole property as a hotel. Revenue is pooled, villas are grouped by view tier, and owners receive 60 per cent of room revenue after platform fees. That design comes straight from Kuta.

Standards are set at the top

A hotel's standard is whatever the owner tolerates on a bad day. In Kuta I tolerated too much too often, because I was young and the resort was full. At Saraya, building the Elysian display villa showed that some local steel, concrete and electrical components were not good enough, and we changed suppliers and raised the specification for every villa before a single one was built. I would like to think that is the 22-year-old in Kuta, grown up.

What I would tell a young owner

Learn the language. Hire for temperament over English. Find your general manager before you find your pool bar. And never, while you are building the hotel, leave another business with people you cannot see. The Kuta and Troppo Zone pages tell the rest.