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Executive Session with CARLOS CABRERA
Hyatt Senior Vice President of Field Operations for Florida and the Caribbean.
PERSONAL
AGE: 50
FAMILY: Married, three daughters
HOMETOWN: Napierville, Ill. "I was born in Cuba and moved to Napierville in 1962 when I was 7 years old. I was born in Havana in a place called Miramar. Castro took over in 1959 so my family fled three years later. We lived in Miami six months and moved up north because there were a lot more opportunities."
EDUCATION: Business degree from Central Florida University.
HOW YOU RELAX: Rides a Harley Davidson, Road King.
DO YOU WEAR A HELMET: "Yes, absolutely."
BOOKS ON YOUR NIGHTSTAND: "I just read Good to Great and started Oz."
RADIO STATIONS YOU LISTEN TO: "I like 107.1, which is jazz. But my kids either put it on 103.9 or 105.5, and it's all rap."
TV SHOW YOU'RE EMBARASSED TO ADMIT YOU WATCH: "Desperate Housewives. I love it. And I like Six Feet Under. Believe it or not, I lived in the Caribbean for 17 years - I moved here four years ago - and I had never seen one episode of Seinfeld. When I lived in the Caribbean I never watched TV."
FIRST PAYING JOB: "Besides mowing a lot of lawns, I worked at a sod farm. We cut sod and delivered it."
FAVORITE HOTEL: "If it's a Hyatt hotel, it's the Hyatt Regency Aruba. If it's non-Hyatt Hotel, it's Cap Juluca in Anguilla. I absolutely love it there. It's got white, white sands, the architecture is Arabesque, and all the buildings are white. It's got the most unbelievable bathrooms you've seen in a hotel. Besides having huge Roman tubs, it has indoor and outdoor courtyards where you can sunbathe. They're just so dramatic and comfortable with the Jacuzzis and the open light. Everything is glass, so you can see the ocean."
PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
TIME WITH COMPANY: 28 years, 11 properties.
POSITIONS PREVIOUSLY HELD: I got a job at the Hyatt Oak Brook (Oak Brook, Ill.) at the front desk 28 years ago. I worked seven days a week, because in those days in the hotel business if you wanted to move up you worked a minimum of six days, always. I moved up the rooms division. I worked in every single department of the rooms division; front desk, reservation, housekeeping, front office. In the Hyatt system you typically work at a 300-room hotel, then they send you to a 600-room hotel, then a 1,000- and 2,000-room hotel. I was executive housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, which is a 2,023-room hotel, and in housekeeping alone we had 500 employees."
WHEN DID YOU BECOME A GENERAL MANAGER: 1987 at the Hyatt Regency Cerromar, Dorado, Puerto Rico.
ATTRIBUTES OF A GOOD HOTEL MANAGER: "You have to really be socially inclined and like to work with people ... If you're the type of person who wants to sit in an office and close the door, you shouldn't be in the hotel business. Hotels have a lot of departments; it's almost like a city, so the business aspect is extremely interesting too."
FAVORITE PART OF THE BUSINESS: "I love getting involved in the community and meeting new people ... At the same time, and I tell you this with all sincerity, I love getting to know the employees and finding out about their families."
LEAST FAVORITE PART OF THE BUSINESS: "It's a lot of hours away from your family, because hotels are 24-hour operations, seven days a week."
COMPANY AND POSITION:
HOW MANY HOTELS WILL YOU OVERSEE AS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF FIELD OPERATIONS: We have 15 hotels, 11 in Florida and four in the Caribbean. We're in the process of developing hotels in Curacao and Trinidad. In addition to that, there are a number of other projects in the Caribbean we're looking at.
IMMEDIATE CHALLENGES: "The immediate challenge is that Hyatt is going through a globalization process where we're merging our domestic and international companies. We're setting out to really dramatically upgrade the company. I mean upgrade in every sense of the word, in terms of reinvesting money into all the existing facilities, to come up with a new room for the future and all kinds of technology developments and training issues. Right now, we're putting a tremendous emphasis on our service and food and beverage. It's a time when we're going to put a lot of money into training, from the general manager down to every single employee who works in the hotel. So that's going to require a lot of traveling, a lot of visiting of hotels, making certain that everything's in place and everybody's moving in the right direction."
WHAT'S GOING TO KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT: "I tend to see a glass half full and I tend to be very optimistic. I don't have any issues sleeping, which is a good thing."
-Jean Gruss
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