|
A Wave Crashes
White's first official day on the job at Outrigger was Sept. 11, 2001. When the federal government grounded air traffic after the terrorist attacks, visitors in Hawaii were stuck. Outrigger offered employee rates to stranded guests until flights resumed the next week and people could return home. But no visitors replaced them.
"On September 11 we were full," Carey recalls. "When planes started flying again, 50% of the house checked out. Then another 25%. Then another 10%. Then nobody checked in. You could have taken a nap on Kalakaua Avenue and not been run over by a car. It was absolutely frightening. We weren't sure when, if ever, business was going to recover. We went into survival mode. We got the Band-Aids and duct tape out."
"There was no business," White adds. "Every single week it was a struggle."
Occupancy rates plummeted from 88% to 12%. Employees shared jobs, worked four-day weeks, took vacation time. The company closed three hotels and considered a fire sale of assets. "The family dug into their own pockets to keep it alive," White says. "The company had a dedication to the people here. They take ohana (family) very seriously. Our chairman can tell you the names of half of our housekeepers on neighboring islands."
White found himself on manager duty once again.
In 2003, when travel finally started to rebound in Hawaii, Durocher and White really began reshaping the IT shop. "There had been no investment," White recalls. "Every operation was discrete. There was no interoperability. All the basics were missing. Other hotels already had figured out that automation was the way to go. We had people do stuff that computers usually do." When guests called the hotel operator, for example, clerks looked up the person's name on a sheet of paper to offer a friendly greeting.
"It was either adapt or die," White says. "Joe ran interference and I started plugging stuff in. We used to keep up with other hotels by sheer brute force. The big thing was to automate the mind-numbing stuff."
|
