Housekeeping. The heart of hotels

So you think housekeeping is a dead-end job? Well, think again. It puts you at the profit centre of the hotel and can be a fast route into senior management. Ben Walker reports.

Today, Vivien Sirotkin is at the top of the corporate ladder. As director of hotel operations at Q Hotels she is one of a relatively small number of UK female board directors (only 12% of UK company directorships are occupied by women and that percentage drops to just 6% in the hospitality sector, according to People 1st).

During a glittering career of high achievements she was the first woman to manage a five-star hotel in Europe (Gleneagles 1988-1991), the general manager of Cliveden (2001-2) and vice-president of Guinness Enterprise Holdings USA (1991-2).

The secret of her success? She insists that much of it is down to her housekeeping background: “A start in housekeeping is as good a start as you’ll ever get in hotels. Cleaning rooms is hard work and if you can motivate and manage a housekeeping team, then you can probably motivate anyone.” Vivien’s view wouldn’t be so surprising were it not for housekeeping’s persistently lowly ‘Cinderella’ status within the industry.

While Vivien was finishing her degree in hotel and catering administration at Surrey University, an international hotel company made a recruitment visit. With blatant discrimination they said they were only looking for one male trainee (“I was very upset about that,” she remembers) but added that there was a trainee opportunity in housekeeping.

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