Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Up Your Service webinar series, “Serving To Win”  Global Best Practices In Achieving Sustainable Service Culture. Today we’re going to learn about the service culture transformation within Lux resorts and hotels. This  Mauritius based resorts and hotels organization helps people to celebrate life by delivering consistently on the promise of a different kind of luxury hospitality that is lighter and brighter.

Hosting the global serving to win webinar series, I’m Ron Kaufman, the founder and chairman of UP YOUR SERVICE and with me today are three extraordinary individuals who made the culture transformation an ongoing journey at Lux Resorts. Joining us from LUX today is Nicolas Autrey, Chief Human Resources Officer. Nicholas is responsible for the overall strategies, policies, and practices that are linked to management, learning and development of all the human resources in line with the lux resorts vision purpose and values.

The second section of today’s webinar will be presented by Smita Modak. Smita is the Group Training Manager at Lux resorts. She is responsible for the training function and is closely involved in overall HR projects within the group. Her experience in human resources spans five countries where she specializes in pre-opening and reopening resorts. And our third section today will be with Afeef Hussain- Director Of Training Development And Quality Assurance at lux Maldives. Experienced in the areas of HR, strategy, talent, performance management and Learning and Development. Afeef has been in the hospitality industry for over 13 years. So, let’s start with you, Nicholas. Let’s dive right in. Tell us more about Lux resorts.

Thank you, Ron. Lux Resorts and Hotels, we operate a total of 10 resorts in Mauritius, Maldives, China, and we are looking forward to a great project, a very exciting one in the UAE in 2016. We were formerly known as Naiade Resorts and rebranded to form LUX Resorts and Hotels on December 1st  2011. We are listed on the stock exchange in Mauritius and are an affiliate member of GML, which is a major economic player in the Indian Ocean and first in the top 100 of the Mauritius companies. We currently have around 2,800 team members belonging to more than 25 different nationalities.So  Nicholas thanks for the overview. Can you tell us a little bit about the past? Where were you when we got started on this transformation?

In fact, in 2018 as we all know, came one of the worst global economic crises. Prior to that we were doing very well. In  2018 the crisis hit and our financial situation resembles very closely to this image of the patient in ICU. We were accumulating very heavy losses at a high cost and couldn’t meet our commitments. Mainly because we had reopened close to four resorts in that same crisis.

This crisis had really adverse effects across the world and as well as in Mauritius which is a long haul destination. With  Europe being our main feeder market, we suffered a huge drop in occupancy and room rates with a consequent drop in our share price coupled with a lot of negative publicity in the media. We went basically from being a very profitable company to a non-profitable one in a matter of two years following the crisis.

It was an all-time low and we were facing even the risk of going out of business. So in October 2010 with the joining of our new CEO Mr Paul Jones we did a straight evaluation of the situation knowing where we were, we decided to make drastic changes on several fronts to clearly define where we wanted to be in the years to come. We came together to bury the past in terms of the way we think, work and deal with each other and our business. It was our time to relight the fire.

The leadership team came together across our new vision purpose. We took the time to fund the deeper the values that we had in common and were able to give the company which we could be proud of. In February 2011 the CEO, the general managers and the senior manager of the group started the rollout process for our company’s ideology.  

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