A hotel GM is an SME CEO – with added complexity

In many respects, a hotel GM operates like the Chief Executive Officer of a Small or MediumEnterprise (SME). Hotels are typically run with lean management teams, strong operationalfocus, and hands-on expertise close to the ground. Decisions are practical, immediate, and often made under pressure.

However, hotel GMs, particularly those operating branded assets, face an additional layer of complexity. Beyond local market dynamics, they must navigate imperatives such as:

• International brand standards
• Group-led initiatives (e.g “mobile key adoption”, “zero single use plastic”, “loyalty in-hotel new subscription”, etc…)
• Local and International regulatory and compliance requirements for guests
• Owner expectations and investment constraints
• Labour shortages and skills gaps
• Cost inflation and margin pressure

This combination places hotel GMs at the intersection of local execution and global governance. While SMEs in many industries face similar operational pressures, hotels frequently experience a higher degree of external dependency and stakeholder complexity.

Why transformation is especially challenging at the hotel level

This SME-like operating reality helps explain why end-to-end significant transformation across topics such as digitalisation, AI, robotics, sustainability, or workforce redesign remains particularly challenging for hotels. In many industries, successful business transformations atscale has been challenging: a 2024 study by Bain & Company estimated that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. For SMEs, the challenge to succeed business transformations is even trickier than for large companies – SMEs are heavily absorbed by day-to-day operations with minimal or no “corporate” support. Service delivery, people management, cost control, and incident resolution naturally take precedence, making it difficult to step back and invest sustained time in mid- to long-term thinking, delivery transformation and change management.

Hospitality presents, on top of these shared challenges with SMEs, some structural constraints unique to the sector. The widespread asset-light, B2B2C model means that many initiatives must first be aligned with individual hotel owners before implementation can begin. Even when owners are supportive, execution and change management largely fall on hotel teams already operating at full capacity.

Expecting hotel GMs and their teams to simultaneously:

• Run a complex 24/7 operation
• Manage hundreds of employees
• Deliver guest satisfaction and brand standards
• Achieve financial targetsAnd lead often multiple transformations at the same time

… is an exceptionally demanding proposition.

An illustration: Singapore’s position on hospitality and its ecosystem to achieve digital and AI tranformation

In Singapore, there is a unique ecosystem put in place which can help hotel GMs feel less alone in their transformation journeys. Singapore is a premium city destination, and even before Covid-19, there were already challenges to attract talents into working in hotels. As a country with low unemployment rates, most Singaporeans were already turning away from hospitality-related jobs which could feel demanding and not always highly remunerated. As a consequence, most jobs in hotels have been held thanks to a foreign workforce… until Covid-19 hit. Hotels closed down, foreign talents and went back to their home countries.

What happened after Covid-19 is interesting: first, hotels experienced even more difficulties to recruit as many potential hires had experienced less-demanding jobs during the pandemic (e.g.not onsite all the time, less physically straining…). Second, Covid-19 led to a conviction that theSingapore workforce should upskill towards future-ready jobs around digital, AI, robotics.

The message to the hospitality and F&B sector in Singapore is therefore the following: use digital and technology to improve productivity, reduce the need of manual manpower for lower added-value tasks and elevate jobs to higher value-added activities (e.g data analytics for better guest experiences, more revenue generation…). This is believed to foster jobs that will be more appealing to Singaporeans, thus making them more “future-ready”. As stated by the Ministry of Manpower the rules around foreign workforce are therefore updated to “support industry transformation to achieve a more productive, manpower lean foreign workforce and create better jobs for locals”.

There is a recognition that digital transformation is challenging for organizations, especially small and medium enterprises. This is why a number of government agencies are providing schemes and financial grants, especially geared towards SMEs, to help them in their transformation journey: Enterprise Singapore, IMDA in its foreign workforce policy, (the Info com and Media Development Authority), Singapore Tourism Board, Workforce Singapore. There is an impressive array of support that SMEs in Singapore, especially hotels, can tap into to support the implementation of digital and AI solutions, such as:

• External expertise to have a clearer view on how digital and AI can help to streamline their operations while improving guest experience and staff experience;
• External expertise to identify and select solutions relevant to their hotel in the vast ocean ofhospitality solutions;
• License costs of solutions implemented;
• End to end project management; and
• Upskilling of hotel staff to bring jobs into more value-added jobs and support to change management.

Recognizing the role – and sharing the responsibility

While Singapore may offer a conducive environment, it remains true everywhere that Hotel General Managers are more than operators or executors of corporate strategy. They are leaders of complex human systems, balancing global direction with local realities, short-term performance with long-term resilience.

If the hospitality industry is to successfully navigate the necessary transformations ahead across digitalization, AI adoption, sustainability, and workforce evolution, GMs cannot be expected to carry this burden alone.

A more realistic and sustainable approach requires shared responsibility across the ecosystem:

• Owners aligning investment horizons with operational realities;
• Hotel groups designing transformation initiatives with on-the-ground capacity in mind and ready to support change management at the hotel level;
• Government agencies supporting SME-style hotel operations through targeted schemes and financial incentives. This is the case for example in Singapore, where the Info comm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has put up a Go Digital scheme for SMEs specifically, in recognizing the need to support the small and medium economic tissue which does not have the same capability than large companies;
• Vendors and partners moving beyond “install and forget” models; and
• Advisors and consultants supporting hotel strategy design to end-to-end execution and change management. The real outcome to achieve lasting results must go beyond rolling out initiatives but in making new habits and new ways of operating stick. Too often, initiatives stop at the “solution installed and training done” step, missing thorough change management (e.g.job re-design and upskilling) to ensure transformation outcomes last in time to achieve Owners’ expectations linked to their investments.

Transformation in hospitality does not fail because of lack of ambition. It often struggles because the SME nature of hotel operations is underestimated. Hotel General Managers are, in many ways, like the captains of a plane that need to be flown and reconfigured or repaired at the same time. Like captains, however, they can only succeed with the right crew and support around them.