GORDON JOHNSON AND THE DELTA BRAND: A Winning Combination
by Jonathan Niven

The running joke at Delta Hotels is that Gordon Johnson is the most traveled manager in the chain. He even has a message pad in his office listing all the Delta properties that he has worked at over the years. But after all the traveling to various properties, Gordon has ended up in the very office he has always wanted since starting as a bus boy at the Delta Vancouver Airport Hotel back in 1982. Who says dreams coupled with determination don’t come true? 

Gordon and his brothers and sisters (all six of them) got their start in the hotel industry long before being old enough to actually work; or at least for a paycheque. Gordon’s Mom worked at the Riviera Motor Hotel in Edmonton and Gordon and his siblings started by washing dishes in the kitchen. Gordon laughs as he remembers his mother telling him that he actually broke more dishes than he cleaned, but it was the start of an illustrious career. 

After starting with Delta as a bus boy in 1982, Gordon was promoted to Front Office Manager by the time Expo arrived in 1986. After a short stint of 6 months away from Delta, Gordon returned to the Delta chain where he became GM at the Tantalus Lodge in Whistler, then worked in Saint John, Halifax, Vancouver, and Richmond before becoming Regional Manager in Alberta. He is now Regional Vice President in charge of all BC properties. With a young family of his own, Gordon is now prepared to stay put for quite a while. 

While Gordon had quite a journey throughout the Delta chain during his career, he spent some time explaining the “Quality Journey” that defines the Delta brand and its relationship with its staff and guests. Gordon sums up the Quality Journey as a focus on employees, providing them with the environment to do their best to provide guests with the best experience possible. 

The company is dedicated to reacting quickly and positively to guests and employees alike. Empowering the staff to make on-the-spot decisions with respect to guest services means that guests’ concerns are dealt with immediately at the front-line level. Of course training is a critical component of the empowerment process, and as Gordon explains, it’s a matter of balance between guest inconvenience and the compensation offered. “It’s all about reading the guests and providing them with prompt, fair service.” 

This commitment to guest satisfaction and employee empowerment has helped greatly in recruitment and retention of quality staff. According to Gordon, Delta fairs extremely well as an employer of choice and their caring attitude towards staff has given them an important advantage. 

This dedication to quality service has also led to prestigious awards such as the “Canada Award of Excellence” which Delta has won twice from the National Quality Institute. 

Another component of the Quality Journey is a benchmarking system that Delta has developed. Not only do they examine best practices within the industry, but perhaps more importantly, outside the industry as well. By setting benchmarks within the organization, Gordon and the other regional VPs can assist properties across the country to meet their performance targets, and every manager in the chain has a clear and documented set of goals and objectives. 

Gordon is a stickler for detail and communication. By his own admission he says he “probably drives everyone nuts” with over-communicating and attention to detail. But this is clearly one of his key strengths as a senior manager within the chain. As he puts it, “Consistency with management leads to consistency with employees, which in turn leads to greater guest satisfaction.” 

Part of the success of Delta Hotels can be found in what they call KSF (Key Success Factors). The company shares all crucial financial information with all employees including profits, occupancy, rate statistics, and overall company performance. This ensures that everyone in the organization has their eye on the bottom line. According to Johnson, “Everyone in our organization is a salesperson.” 

The job of a regional VP really boils down to helping management achieve its goals. Whether it’s helping develop people skills or helping specific properties reach their targets, Delta has the ability to pull together an action team of senior managers to step in and assist any property in the chain with a specific problem or challenge. Quality Sales Audits (QSAs) are conducted and a support team can be assembled and on-site in a matter of days to provide support. As a small example, the property in Sun Peaks was not getting its share of corporate retreat business. The support team conducted an audit and determined that the meeting space at the property was simply too small and insufficient for many groups. They immediately began plans to renovate and add meeting space, to an otherwise very successful property, to rectify the situation. 

Delta Hotels has recently undergone an ownership change from the Fairmont Group to bcIMC, a crown corporation, based in Victoria, with an asset base of more than CDN $83B. While employees lost the ability to book very low rate hotel accommodations at Fairmont and Swiss Hotel properties, the chain now has the backing and support of bcIMC that looks upon the hospitality division as an opportunity to enhance and diversify its real estate portfolio. 
It’s easy to see how Gordon Johnson has come so far in the Delta organization. His friendly, genuine demeanor is well-suited to the hospitality industry and he has a quiet determination that seems to ensure things get done quickly and correctly. But he is very quick to share the success of the chain with others, including Bill Pallett, Senior Vice President of HR whom he describes as the “lifeblood” on the people side of the business. Gordon and Hank Stackhouse, Delta’s President, have worked together for many years and he describes Hank as a humble, passionate ambassador who still works as hard as anyone to achieve success. 

Gordon sees the next 18-24 months in the hospitality industry as a challenge. A higher Canadian dollar and fewer US overnight stays means the industry must focus on markets such as the UK, Mexico, and Australia. With the Olympics coming in 2010, Johnson sees a very bright future for the industry in BC. “It’s not a short-term plan,” he says. “We need to look at this in a 10-15 year timeframe.” 

When asked what advice he might pass along to young GMs in the business, Gordon suggests that the greatest thing we can do as senior managers is to provide leadership to all levels of the company for a common goal. He says way too many managers spend their time drowning in emails and they don’t get around to the other side of the desk. His advice is simple yet powerful: “Look after the employees - they will look after the guests, and the bottom line will look after itself. Do it right, every single day.” Now that’s a winning combination.