Beyond Barriers: Building Belonging at Hotels | Alejandro Boucabeille

What do you get when you run a 200-year-old historic hotel in Vienna with 80+ employees representing 26 different nationalities and speaking over 20 languages? You get a beautiful human experiment—and a management nightmare if you don't know what you're doing. 

In this episode of Talking Hospitality, host Mauricio Schuler sits down with Alejandro Boucabeille, the former Deputy General Manager at Mercure Grand Hotel Biedermeier Wien. Alejandro isn't just a hotelier; he’s a lawyer, journalist, world citizen, and a literal marathon runner who has lived in more than 10 countries. 

Together, they dive deep into the industry's worst-kept secret: Hospitality leadership is lagging behind.

For decades, the industry has relied on old-school, rigid structures, high employee turnover, and uninspired onboarding. We love to brag about "multiculturalism" on our websites, but when it comes to the actual working conditions, are we doing enough? When your housekeeping team commutes four hours a day just to get to work and back, standard Excel sheets and corporate jargon just won't cut it. 

🔥 What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• The "Visual" Onboarding Hack: Why standard text manuals fail in a multilingual environment, and how Alejandro successfully trains teams using localized, visual-first strategies. 
• Hiring for Heart vs. Hiring for German: The massive struggle to find qualified local talent post-COVID, and why shifting your mindset to hire for "soul" rather than skill is the only way forward. 
• The Ritz-Carlton Secret Power: How a 16-year-old kitchen trainee carried a single service motto in his pocket for decades, and how you can apply it to a budget or premium property. 
• Why Your F&B Concept Might Be Outdated: The psychological trick to making locals fall in love with a hotel restaurant (and why pretending it isn't a hotel restaurant actually works). 
• The "Paintball with the GM" Retention Strategy: Why modern tech apps and AI are great, but absolute "human listening" and actual fun are the ultimate corporate retention tools. 

⚡ Let's Face the Hard Truth...Let's be honest: hospitality has a luxury problem. We complain about labor shortages, yet we are slow to change the way we treat, onboard, and connect with our people. If your leadership strategy hasn't evolved past "fill the shift and hope for the best," you are bleeding revenue and talent. 

Tune in to discover how to transform a chaotic, multi-language grid into a synchronized, high-performing "theater" where your team actually goes home happy. 

👉 Listen to the full conversation now and stop managing like it's 1989!

Connect with Alejandro Boucabeille on LinkedIn to talk marathons, philosophy, or hospitality culture.

Review your People & Culture framework, Fix your Hiring Strategy, and Modernize your Employee Onboarding with Schulering. Because Great Hotel Teams are BUILT, not found.

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