In an article this past Sunday I took another trip down the rabbit hole to the Alice in Wonderland world of hotel management as practiced at the former Holiday Inn (doesn’t that blue tarp covering the sign look tasteful?) out on Greenfield Road.
This adventure centered on three general topics: 1. Tom Showalter; 2. relations between hotel franchisers and franchisees; and 3. the future of that particular facility.
First things first.
Without Tom Showalter, who knows how long Kronos Hotels in Atlanta could’ve pulled this thing off.
Sometime in mid-September my editor forwarded me two things he wanted me to check out. One was a release from the state health inspectors reporting they found food being stored in a guest room out there because management didn’t want to fix a broken walk-in refrigerator. Someone figured the cranked-up air conditioner could maintain the maximum 41 degree temperature mandated by the state. Right. The genius who came up with that idea was off by about 20 degrees.
The other was an anonymous e-mail saying there was more going on at the hotel than simple stupidity about food management. It said the Liquor Control Board was checking into illegal alcohol sales and it also suggested we check out another hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, also owned by Kronos.
I replied to the e-mail asking the person if they’d be willing to talk, since no one at the hotel was saying anything (management for good reason, given what happened, wouldn’t comment and employees were silent because they were told if they talked they’d get fired). The person replied and said yes, he’d talk. It was Tom.
Originally, he didn’t want to be quoted on the record because he was trying to get a job in the industry and figured if his name appeared in an article detailing the problems at Greenfield Road he’d be blackballed.
After I interviewed him, though, he reconsidered and said I could quote him, since his main concern was making sure his former colleagues started to receive some help in terms of alleviating some terrible working conditions and getting paid for their back, bounced paychecks.
As for his tip regarding Cedar Rapids, I talked to a reporter out there, Justin Foss, who had started covering problems at a Kronos-owned facility in the downtown. Same stuff: liens, health problems, bounced paychecks, etc. Justin told me to contact a guy covering problems at a hotel in Sheffield, Alabama. From there the trail led to Dothan, Alabama, to St. Louis, MO, to Louisville, KY, to Pensacola, FL and to Greentree, PA. All of the reporters involved began pooling resources to keep each other in touch with what was going on.
In the meantime (to use another literary analogy) Tom decided to channel Don Quixote and begin tilting at the Kronos windmills.
He encouraged other former employees to talk to me so I could get detailed information about what was going on here. He also got two of them to appear on a video we taped in a parking lot adjacent to the place to show how much junk was lying around.
Then, in what seemed to be a stroke of genius at the time, Tom launched a web site. The official Kronos site had been down for quite some time. (Temporarily unavailable because it was “being upgraded.” An upgrade, by the way, that’s lasted over three months. Rumor has it Kronos didn’t pay the host, which would certainly be par for the course. Kronos wasn’t paying anyone. My favorite story came out of Sheffield where Kronos attorneys fighting a lease-termination suit - initiated when Kronos stopped paying the rent it owed to the city for property it occupied - asked the judge if they could be removed from the case because they hadn’t been paid either.)
Anyway, Tom did some research and discovered the domain www.kronoshotelsllc.com was unowned so he bought it. With some clever work, he used it as a site to repost all of the stories written nationwide documenting Kronos’s problems. He also opened message boards and chat rooms where employees could contact each other to provide information, support, and take the opportunity to vent their frustrations.
The website took off like crazy. He’s had hits from over 40 countries and has averaged about 1,000 hits a day since it launched.
And if you read the story you’ll notice it also got him sued.
The first question, I guess, centers around why he did this. All along Tom has contended it is because of his concern for his former fellow employees. In fact, most of the people who have talked have expressed real concern and sympathy for the folks working at these facilities. I believe them all, for two reasons:
1. I’ve met Tom personally - and his family - and they are all incredibly nice, honest, and genuine people. Tom is polite and has a real southern charm coming from his jobs in hotels in Florida and Georgia. (My mother-in-law, who’s probably only 15 years or so older than Tom, had to say, “You have to stop calling me ma’am, it makes me feel old.)
2. After over 30 years working in journalism, for city government and teaching, I’ve developed what I feel is a very reliable B.S. meter. From tall tales to body language, eye contact, vocabulary, you name it, I think I’m pretty good at smelling a rat. Not once in all of my dealings with Tom, or any of the other folks who said they were concerned about the employees did my B.S. alarm go off. They all do really care.
I asked a friend of mine who works in the industry why that type of loyalty exists and he had a great explanation. He said a hotel is like a big house that has sleepovers every night. Some of the sleepovers involve strangers but many (because a hotel thrives on repeat business) involve friends. Consequently, the staff who works at a hotel becomes a big family. They’re cleaning the house, cooking meals, making sure everyone’s safe and happy - the things a family does. And like family they share secrets, laugh, cry, get angry, fall in love, etc. So, like family, they really start to care about one another.
I also asked him another question that’s been raised numerous times: Why don’t the people not getting paid find another job? The answer is both philosophical (the “we’re goingto stick together through this” family thing) and practical (many of the folks have not reached high levels of education and in the current economy the supply of workers with those educational levels far outstrips the demand).
Did I mention that this has been a very educational adventure for me personally?
Tom was right about being blackballed, too. Even with 18 years of experience he can’t get a job in the industry. This becomes a problem because he can’t afford an attorney and therefore must represent himself in the lawsuit. He’s hoping that Kronos won’t pay the attorneys who filed this suit either and it will eventually go away. But in the meantime, if anyone knows an attorney who has some free time who wouldn’t mind helping out a guy who’s fighting a good fight, get in touch with me and I’ll point you toward Tom.
Second things second, or about that blue tarp
To recap, Intercontinental Hotels Group owns the Holiday Inn brand. (Frankly, I think they should help pay for some of Tom’s legal bills. Until I called them, they weren’t aware of the fun goings-on at their Lancaster facility, specifically regarding the restaurant closing, the illegal alcohol sales, the utility shutoffs and the non-payment of taxes at the Lancaster site. As a result, they eventually “pulled the flag” (as the business lingo describes it when a franchisor strips a franchisee of the brand affiliation). Who knows how long that facility would have gone on sullying the Holiday Inn name if this hadn’t been publicized?
But down the rabbit hole things turn strange. As I continually contacted IHG for comment they played things unbelievably close to the vest. I figured once they found out what was going on here and elsewhere they’d want to distant themselves as quickly as possible from Kronos and maybe even rat them out. Silly me. They kept issuing statements about how they like to work with franchisees, yadda yadda. When they finally did pull the flag, very little was done at the property about it. Even a few weeks after the franchise was removed, if you called the hotel whoever answered the phone identified it as a Holiday Inn. The sign and collateral material was not removed. Allegedly (according to the proverbial “industry insiders”) that stuff all must go within a week of being “terminated from the system.” But not here. Try almost two months.
Again, I asked my friend about this. He said nowadays, as hotel ownership and management groups changed hands and facilities, franchisers and frachisees never know when they’ll have to work together again. So, for example, even if someone like IHG is having trouble with Kronos, they all tread on eggshells because in the future there’s a good chance they might meet again.
To me, if I were IHG and I found out someone with a track record like Kronos’s bought a facility in the Holiday Inn system I’d run screaming into the night.
I also spent a lot of time getting nowhere trying to find out how this all could happen and chase down two prevalent theoris: 1. Kronos was inept; 2. Kronos was sly as a fox and milked as much money out of its facilities as it could before dumping them on someone else.
I must’ve called 15-20 people in the hospitality industry, observers who study the industry, media outlets and publications that report on the industry, you name it. They treated me like I had leprosy.
The closest I got was one magazine publisher’s assistant said the publisher would talk and asked me to tell her a general idea about what I was looking for. Like an idiot I told her. That was the last I heard from them. And apparently their caller ID works well because that was the last time I talked to any live bodies there, regardless of what phone - work, personal, cell - I used. Maybe I should’ve gone to Reading so the call would’ve registered a 610 area code…
Third things third: What’s next?
As for the future on Greenfield Road? Who knows. In fact, it’s darn difficult to find anyone who knows much of anything about the present.
In a deal that I still don’t fully understand (largely because again I can’t get anyone who will explain the details either on or off the record - talk about your jittery investors for cryin’ out loud) somehow Kronos was shuffled off the property and a new entity, Hyperion Hotels, (and by new I mean created and registered in Georgia in the very same week the takeover took place) arrived on the scene. Turns out, if I may use another literary analogy, Hyperion took a page from the Wizard of Oz (”pay no attention to those hotel owners behind the curtain”) and immediately hired Prism Hotels and Resorts of Dallas, TX, to run the place.
Of course, rumors circulated of a shell game - that the principals of Kronos ditched that name and were hiding in Hyperion to escape the mountain of creditor-filed law suits.
This made sense to me, not because I possess any great personal business acumen, but because of my fascination, as a callow youth, with Greek mythology. As those with similar obsessions may know, Kronos and Hyperion were two of the original Titans who (in a classic case of sibling jealousy) conspired with their brothers to castrate their father, thereby eliminating the possibility of any more pitter-pattering of little Titan feet around the household. (It was Kronos, by the way, who wielded the sickle of testicular doom while the brothers held old Dad down. Yowza!)
I figured the Kronos folks were playing their own funny little word game. Who else would come up with two so closely-related names for two so closely-related businesses?
But a VP at Prism named Al Whitehouse said that wasn’t the case. That, in fact, the principal owner of Hyperion was a lending group - Stillwater Partners - that furnished the initial loans to Kronos to buy 16 hotels in June of last year. As financial troubles piled up, Kronos defaulted on interest payments (gee, imagine that) Stillwater got nervous and, to continue the grisly metaphor, used a financial sickle to remove Kronos’s hotel jewels. The conspiracy theorist in me still has doubts that there isn’t some backroom relationship, though.
According to the proverbial “insiders,” Prism has a well-respected reputation in the hotel industry as a management group that comes in to rescue foundering facilities, quickly rehab them to their former “glory,” and then depart to let the owners do with them (keep or sell) as they like.
I’m thinking, though, that Prism - or even Hyperion for that matter - didn’t know the extent of the troubles they were inheriting. The first time I talked to Al Whitehouse he seemed very optimistic and forthright. In subsequent conversations, though, he has been a bit more clipped in his answers and, in some cases, a bit more vague. The last time we talked he basically said (though in a more obtuse way) that Prism was still trying to get a handle on the problems they inherited and were trying to figure out what the heck to do. Good luck with that one.
In the meantime the place still has no liquor license, no restaurant and, according to sources, only has about two or three room occupied each night. That’s certainly not going to generate even a fraction of the revenue necessary to start any kind of healing process.
It’s also not going to do anything to repair those increasingly freakish-looking neglected Amish statues on the property either. The neighboring visitor’s bureau approached Kronos about acquiring them and restoring them on their own property but Kronos never responded. I say they get some volunteers and a tow truck and perform a middle-of-the-night surgical strike of liberation.
As for the people still working at the hotel, or those who aren’t there but suffered because of Kronos’s mismanagement, I hope they do finally get some justice. Not because I’m part of the family but because I believe it is patently disgraceful in any situation when others suffer because of the unconsciounable acts of others.
In the meantime, if you’re interested, stay tuned. I’m fairly certain the white rabbit will drop by sometime in the next few weeks to lead another journey.
