Exclusive Feature: My path through hotel management has not been a straight line, I spent years in environments far from the lobby — industrial kitchens, airport tarmacs, insolvency proceedings and each time I came back to hotels, I brought something with me.

This is what that looks like from the inside.

A hotel career with detours

The professional detours that take you away from your core industry are often the ones that define how you think when you return. Mine took me into operational environments that rewired certain reflexes — and I have been grateful for that in every hotel role since.

I began building my hotel career with Meliá Hotels International. Three international mandates — Cuba, Lanzarote, Cape Verde — gave me the financial architecture of large-scale resort management from the inside: owner reporting structures, GOP dynamics, capex cycles across different ownership models, the particular pressure of a seasonal island business where the margin for error compresses in ways a city hotel never experiences.

Between and alongside those mandates, I ran operations in a world that most hotel professionals never enter: industrial-scale food service. Gate Gourmet in Cancún. Then nearly seven years directing Newrest in Tenerife — one of the world's largest collective catering groups — managing airline catering contracts, institutional feeding and over three hundred people across rotating shifts, seven days a week, year-round.

And then the hardest assignment of my career: Financial Director of Ten Bel Turismo during its insolvency proceedings in Tenerife. Twenty months managing the financial restructuring of an insolvent resort complex, working directly with the insolvency administrator, the bank, the works council, and an ownership entity that needed to understand what had happened to an asset it had trusted others to manage.

Those years outside the conventional hotel path shaped the operator I became. Not as a theory, but as a set of instincts I reach for every time I walk into a hotel operation — whether as a manager, a CFO, or an advisor. What follows is an account of those instincts and where they came from.

Preparation as a management reflex, not a checklist

The most durable thing I brought back to hotel management is a preparation reflex — the instinct to ask, before anything begins, what needs to be true for this to work. Not as a checklist. As a way of thinking. In hotels, it changes the quality of the briefing, the pre-opening, the season launch.

Managing airline catering operations means organising everything around a fixed external deadline that cannot be moved. The aircraft boards when it boards. Every activity — production, quality control, loading, logistics — is structured backwards from that moment. The operation learns, over time, to think in terms of preparation windows rather than reaction times.

When I brought that reflex back into hotel management, the first place it showed up was in briefings. The pre-shift briefing in a hotel is often an information transfer: arrivals, VIPs, special requests, today's specials. What I found myself doing — and what I have encouraged in every team I have led since — is adding a preparation layer: not just what is happening today, but what needs to be ready before it happens, who is responsible for confirming it is ready, and what the fallback is if it is not.

This is not a complicated change. It does not require new systems or new processes. It requires the habit — built deliberately, reinforced consistently — of thinking one step ahead of the service encounter rather than responding to it. The hotels where I have seen this habit embedded perform more consistently, and their teams handle disruption with more composure, because they have practised anticipation rather than only reaction.

The back-of-house team as the foundation of the guest experience

Years of managing teams with no direct guest contact gave me a clear conviction: the guest experience is built in the back of house long before it is delivered at the front. The hotels that understand this invest in their invisible teams with the same intentionality they invest in their guest-facing ones.

Managing over three hundred people across rotating shifts in food service — people who never see the client their work serves, who receive no direct feedback from the end recipient of what they produce — taught me something that changed how I think about hotel workforce management.

Engagement in the absence of guest recognition has to come from somewhere else: from the team itself, from the immediate supervisor, from the clarity of the standard being maintained and the acknowledgement that it matters. The person who loads the trolley correctly at 4am does so because their supervisor noticed the last time they did it right, not because a passenger will ever know their name.

In hotels, this translates directly. The housekeeper who never interacts with the guest, the stewarding team, the maintenance technician who fixes the issue before the guest arrives — these people are building the guest experience as concretely as the front desk team that delivers it. The question is whether the management culture treats them that way.

In every hotel I have managed since those years, I have tried to make the invisible work visible — to name it, acknowledge it, and connect it explicitly to the quality the guest experiences. Not as a motivational speech but as an operational truth: the room is right because someone got it right before the guest arrived. That person deserves to know it.

Reading a P&L with the owner's questions, not the operator's

Managing hotels as CFO and as Financial Director during an insolvency gave me a double perspective on hotel financial reporting that I have never lost: the operator's P&L answers the operator's questions. The owner's questions are different — and the best hotel managers learn to ask both.

As CFO across Meliá's international properties, I built and managed the reporting frameworks that hotel groups use to run their managed assets. I understood, from the inside, how those frameworks are designed: to answer the questions that matter for operating the hotel efficiently. RevPAR, occupancy, ADR, GOP margin — these are the instruments of hotel operational management.

At Ten Bel Turismo, I sat on the other side. The ownership entity had been receiving operator reports for years. The hotel was functioning. The ownership entity was not. The report that answered the operator's questions was not the same document that would have answered the owner's questions — and nobody had been asking the owner's questions: yield on invested capital, real cash position after debt service, contingent labour liabilities, deferred capex accumulating as structural risk.

That experience permanently changed how I read a hotel P&L. I now carry both sets of questions into every engagement: the operator's — which tell me how the hotel is performing — and the owner's — which tell me whether the asset is building or destroying value. They are related but not the same. The most useful hotel financial conversations I have had start when both sets of questions are on the table at the same time.

What the restructuring years gave me that nothing else could

Leading a hotel through insolvency is the most complete hotel management education I have encountered. Every dimension of the operation — financial, legal, human, operational — is under pressure simultaneously, and the decisions made in that period have consequences that are immediate, concrete and irreversible. It changes how you assess risk in every hotel you touch afterwards.

The twenty months I spent managing the financial restructuring of Ten Bel Turismo were the most demanding of my career. The hotel complex had entered insolvency proceedings. An indefinite strike had been called by the works council — in the middle of the pandemic, in an asset that was already in difficulty. My role was to stabilise the financial position, manage the relationship with the insolvency administrator and the bank, negotiate with the workforce, and preserve the value of the asset for the ownership entity.

What that period gave me is impossible to acquire in a normal operating environment: the ability to read a hotel's real financial position beneath the surface of its reported numbers, the clarity about which decisions can be deferred and which cannot, and the discipline of communicating difficult truths to multiple stakeholders — the bank, the administrator, the workers' representatives, the owners — each with different interests and different tolerances for uncertainty.

I came out of those twenty months a different kind of hotel professional. Not harder — if anything, more attuned to the human cost of financial difficulty on the people who work in a hotel. But more clear-eyed about what hotel assets actually are: businesses with capital structures, labour obligations and operational dependencies that exist entirely independently of how well the rooms are decorated or how warm the welcome is. Both things matter. The best hotel managers hold both in view at the same time.

The hotel professional I am today

The unconventional path produced a specific kind of hotel operator: one who is comfortable reading the numbers behind the numbers, who invests in the invisible teams as deliberately as in the visible ones, and who carries a preparation reflex that no management course gave me. I offer it here not as a model but as an account — in case any part of it is useful.

I write this not to advocate for a particular career path. The hotel professionals I most respect have followed every kind of path — linear, lateral, academic, operational. What they share is not a biography but a quality of attention: they look at a hotel operation and see more than is immediately visible.

The preparation reflex I developed in industrial operations made me better at running hotel openings, season launches and pre-opening processes. The back-of-house leadership instinct made me more deliberate about the teams that guests never see. The double financial lens — operator and owner simultaneously — made me more useful to ownership entities and more honest with myself about what a hotel's numbers are actually saying.

And the restructuring years made me, above everything else, a more grounded professional. One who knows that a hotel is not only a hospitality product but a business with real obligations — to its workers, its creditors, its owners — and that the general manager who forgets this is not serving the guest experience. They are deferring the moment when the asset and the guest experience both fail together.

The hotel industry is large enough and complex enough to need every kind of professional experience. What I have tried to do, across a career that has not followed the expected line, is to bring whatever I learned in each chapter into the next one — and to share it, where I can, with the teams and organisations I have had the privilege of working with.

Juan R. Sánchez-Harguindey is a General Manager and CFO with over 25 years in hotel management and food service operations. He held CFO roles with Meliá Hotels International in Cuba, Lanzarote and Cape Verde, managed Gate Gourmet operations in Cancún and directed Newrest in Tenerife for nearly seven years. He led the financial restructuring of Ten Bel Turismo through insolvency proceedings in 2020–2022. He operates from Tenerife, Canary Islands, through Harguindey Hospitality Consulting.

harguindey.eu / juanharguindey@gmail.com

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