Language:

  • en
  • bg
  • ru
  • ro
  • el
  • tr
  • sr
  • es
  • de
  • fr
  • it
  • nl
 / +359 879 09 23 64 e-mail
We speak English

No booking fees!
FREE cancellation in most cases!

Search for hotel offers:

* optional
 (€ total)

Hotels in Bulgaria (1035)

Ski in Bulgaria 2023/24

Holidays and events

Live webcams in Bulgaria

Deals & discounts in Bulgaria (1348)

The Radisson SAS Hotel - Greeting the Demand for Perfection

The Sofia Echo, 23.10.2006

Snapshot: The manager: Fernando Gruenberg Stern The job: General manager of the Radisson SAS Grand Hotel in Sofia The company: Radisson SAS In brief: Gruenberg Stern has been in the hotel management business for Radisson SAS for almost 10 years, before which he did the same for other luxury chains. He has numerous degrees from world-class hospitality and management schools. In Sofia, in addition to being the general overseer of a staff of about 200, Gruenberg Stern also supervises the technicalities of operating the 136-room, top star-rated luxury hotel. Close interaction and consultation with all department heads - kitchen, service, reception, housekeeping, facilities and so on - occurs in every morning in a round-table briefing. Knows employees as people, and not only faces, making efforts to maintain open paths of communication. Initiated and sustains a hotel-wide charity programme. Assures environmentally friendly standards, and looks for new ways to continue in this vein. Acts as the hotel’s largest PR, attending official and non-official functions. Searches out the latest trends in the hospitality industry. Fernando Gruenberg Stern loves his job. General manager of the Radisson SAS Grand Hotel in Sofia since May 2006, he credits this to a love for people, the challenge of improving already top-level establishments and the magnetism that hotels themselves hold over on him. “I have the good luck that my parents used to travel very much, and we were always in airplanes and in hotels, and I sort of enjoy this life in the hotels,” he said. Recalling how, as a child, he saw a TV movie in which there were “a lot of things happening in the hotel and you got to see some of the movie insights into a hotel”, he thought it was “cool, really cool”: an early indication of future career thoughts. Gruenberg Stern compares hotel management to being an actor, but with the benefit that his profession is on stage 24 hours a day, not just two. “You are meeting people (constantly). There’s never a boring minute in the life of a hotel manager.” Born and raised in Chile, he chose to go to Germany for higher education. (Gruenberg Stern has the advantage of dual citizenship.) First he went to hotel school in Tegernsee and then to the hotel school in Badwiessee, followed by “several” management schools in Canada and the United States, one of which was Cornell University. Cornell led him back to Germany, where he worked for hotels in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Munich. It was at that point in his life that he realised a need to maintain himself as a person, to not lose himself to a career: “I opened a cafe in Berlin, where the squatters are,” he said, “because I thought you have to get back to reality and see what is going on around you and not always be moving in these luxurious places, which I think, sometimes, is really not good for you”. The two years he spent running the cafe he calls “the time of his life”: there he learnt how to manage a place on his own, and “to tell you the truth, my best friends I met there. People, grounded people with their feet on the earth”. But thoughts of a career in hotels still occupied his mind, and he realised that that was where he should be. So he went to Beijing, and worked there, and then to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong he went back to Germany. From Germany he went to Azerbaijan, where he was for three-and-a-half years, from which he went to Paris (two-and-a-half years), then back to Germany, then to, finally, Bulgaria, here in Sofia at the Radisson SAS. The career is something like that of a diplomat, he said. Sometime around the three-year mark at a location, the call comes from the powers that be, informing of a location change. Just when “you start feeling well, you make friends”, it’s time to go again. Gruenberg Stern has worked with Radisson SAS since 1997, before which he was with Hilton International, Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, and Best Western. As a result of this variety, in addition to seeing how hotels work all around the world, he has also had the opportunity to learn various management philosophies. He described Radisson SAS as having “a very forward, very avant-garde way of approaching business, their staff, treating their staff, and especially, they’re very conscious (about) environmental responsibilities. So this is the thing that impresses me every time”. While he knows that other chains do nearly the same, he finds Radisson SAS’s approach very actual, very applicable, very active. “Our mind has been really focused to do things like this.” Gruenberg Stern himself is also not unaware of the surrounding populations. Since he has been in Sofia, he has introduced – and this is something he creates, personally, at all his hotels – a programme in which one euro is added on to each customer’s bill – with his or her knowledge and consent, of course – and which is used for a specific charity organisation. In Azerbaijan, he built an orphanage; in France he gave it to a society that deals with children with AIDS. In Dresden he gave it to women who give birth to a child and “don’t want to have the child and also don’t want anyone to know that they gave birth to a child”. This society is not funded by the German government, so money has to come “from where they can get it. I thought, you can’t just blame a girl that has a baby and not be good to her, because these things happen”. So he helped. The programme the Radisson SAS here in Sofia does is with an orphanage near Veliko Turnovo. The week of October 2, he said, he and others from the hotel went to an orphanage of which the hotel has been taking care “for some time”. In the two months since Gruenberg Stern’s programme was introduced, they’ve collected about 2000 euro. (It was initiated in Sofia on August 15.) “It has been a huge success.” He told how a client, impressed with the initiative, donated a chunk of gold the size of a matchbox. Gruenberg Stern, at first, was incredulous (Is it chocolate? he asked), but its veridicality was confirmed. “This really impressed me,” he said about the customer’s generous gesture. When he went to the orphanage and saw the mentally and physically challenged children, Gruenberg Stern’s heart broke, but he was “so happy” to bring them refrigerators, washing machines, 500 tons of food. “You have to do something for people,” he enunciated. “It’s not only, for us, making money, making money. That’s not the point. The point is also that what you do, that there’s always a way to help others. And I think that we have this responsibility towards the not-so-lucky. And this is what makes our job so interesting, that we can connect these two things, and I love it.” Gruenberg Stern also loves to take care of his staff, who number about 200 total. One of the main ways he shows this is by communicating with them as people, on a regular basis. “I go around and ask them how they are. When I know something about their families I ask them about their families, and try to get involved in these things – it’s the least that you can do.” In addition, Gruenberg Stern, who speaks fluent French, German, Spanish and English, communicates with some of his staff solely in French – at their request – to improve their foreign language skills. He also takes concern for their work environment. As an example, he shared about the staff canteen at the hotel. “This is always an issue, whenever there’s staff canteen, the food is never good” and atmosphere can be, well, lacking. So, he has the kitchen staff regularly cook something special, and he also decorated their canteen nicely, getting new chairs and putting things to make staff feel welcome. He’s also arranging new staff uniforms. Another way he supports his staff is by providing trainings, to see if he can give them opportunities within the Sofia Radisson SAS, and/or to see what is possible to do outside of Bulgaria. This latter is difficult, he said, because of work permits and such, “but probably in the years to come it will be easier to make transfers and things like that”. Also since his May arrival, the turnover rate has dropped off (and he said that it used to be rather high). His efforts to stay connected with his staff could be one of the reasons. “There’s not much I can do, but there are some things I can do and these things have to be done.” That’s his staff – what about Gruenberg Stern personally? As he said: “I’m always happy when I come here”. He said that if he had to be born again, in a different life, he would chose the same career – it’s “absolutely gratifying”. Not only does he meet a lot of people – he noted that one of his largest roles in addition to managing staff is acting as PR for the Radisson SAS – he also experiences and influences many things. “You have something to do,” he said, “because if you work in a hotel where nothing goes, nothing goes because the environment is not good, because there’s not enough business going on – because you have cities like that” – then the job brings little satisfaction. In Sofia, however, he said that things are “really moving and you can still move lots of things”. And though exhausted at the end of the day, he knows why – and it’s not just because “you were sitting there. You are exhausted because you had to deal with so many different issues”, which is something that requires adaptation skills. Fortunately, for Gruenberg Stern, these skills have been present since his childhood, and his mother will vouch for it. Every year he returns to Chile, where all his family lives. “I’ve made (this) a point in my life.” The hotel business requires 24-hour availability, but this is neither beneficial for a person, he said, nor possible. “So you have to take your priorities and see. My family is something important, and I have learnt that the motivation of my family is the biggest thing you have in life. It’s not something else that motivates you to do things.” As general manager of a hotel, his priorities include the morning meeting with his department heads, in which they hash out what will happen that day, and what happened the day before. There, problems are discussed and dealt with, another way in which Gruenberg Stern demonstrates the importance of communication. From there, he and the department heads are prepared to enter the business day itself. As he put it, he is “the heart of the business”, meaning he provides the energy and sustenance and support to every far-reaching component of the hotel. Because networking is so important in his profession, and because it takes up a lot of time, including after typical working hours, Stern said that it is vital to differentiate between what is good for business life, and what is good for private life. “Because you can’t do only what is business good.” Competition is healthy in Sofia, he said. He opined that, at the moment, Bulgaria has enough hotels, but thinks that with the country’s acceptance in the European Union, lots of, they hope, businesses will come to Bulgaria, along with lots of investments, “and for this, you will have to have nice places to stay”. To help maintain their already top-standard ranking, the Radisson SAS is undergoing renovations. Within a year, the hotel will be completely revamped, he said. (Currently, it has 136 rooms, the restaurant-pub Flannagans, the bar in the mezzanine, a lounge, ballroom, fitness centre, and conference facilities for 200 people.) One of the benefits of the Radisson as compared with other luxury hotels in Sofia is its central location – and it’s only 10 minutes away from the airport and train and bus stations. In addition, free WiFi access is available hotel-wide. Staying abreast of current societal trends is another vital part of the job. Both for pleasure and to complement his work, Stern regularly reads publications like Vanity Fair and The WorldPaper. By this, he sees “what the others are doing and where I should focus, because this is changing, what other hotel chains are doing”. And then people are going to want that, Gruenberg Stern said. High-quality service is also essential at the hotel, which is something on which Gruenberg Stern works constantly. As a former communist country, like the others, Bulgaria wasn’t known for it cheery staff. This, he said, is something that will take years to change, as it’s a mentality passed on from generation to generation. He encountered the same thing – and the same lack of personal work initiative coupled with a willingness work, if told directly what needed to be done – in Azerbaijan and in Dresden, both former Eastern Bloc locations. One frustration is the country’s lack of infrastructure, and that influential people don’t see the value of tourism. “I know that the country has lots of other priorities,” he said, “but they should also think that tourism is bringing to other countries to an enormous amount of money – and this is what it does – but here, little is done for that. It complicates everything”. Work problems are one thing, personal life is another. “The moment that I get into the hotel, you will never see that I have something. I’m always here, because you have to be an example for the others. If you come late and all that, this is not going to help the morale of the staff.” Gruenberg Stern loves his job, though admits that a regular nightly intake of chocolate (milk, Lindt) helps him survive. “I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t smoke, so I think this is the thing I like to have,” he said. “You’ve got to do something for yourself.” Caring for his staff, caring for his hotel and caring for himself make Fernando Gruenberg Stern a successful director. By communicating regularly and openly, by recognising and addressing challenges, he is not only maintaining Sofia’s Radisson SAS as a top hotel in the city, he is helping to make it one to follow. See source