Work record / Development / Ritz-Carlton Laguna Beach / Questions answered
Ritz-Carlton Laguna Beach: questions answered
What people ask me about Ritz-Carlton Laguna Beach, and my answers. The project itself has its own page.
What was the toughest sequencing call, given the hotel kept operating?
At the Ritz-Carlton everything comes back to the guest. Staging was the hardest decision. A hotel runs on its guests' schedule, so we worked in the dead of night and kept material deep in the valet lot, in a cordoned-off area. To move it to the patio we took the service paths, which are never the shortest way, so no guest saw a crew or a pallet go by. The price was time: every trip took longer, and so did the job. The guests never noticed.
At handoff, what told you the added time had protected the guest experience?
No complaints, and we were paid on time with no holdback. That is the usual way to tell whether a job went well. A client who is unhappy tries to hold your retention or claw money back. At the Ritz-Carlton none of that happened. The guests never felt the work, and at handoff nobody was hunting for a reason to keep money. That is the proof I trust.
What quality detail did you insist on, given that a patio can look too small to matter?
Mostly it came down to who we sent. We field A, B and C crews, and the A crew took this one, meaning our top trades and our top in-house labor. Tucked-in shirts and a uniform look across the crew were required here, and we paid those people well for it.