Ed Wijkhuys in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. (SG photos by Bizzie Frost IF you happen to be staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Jeddah, and instead of taking the lift you decide on the healthy option and use the stairs, there is a good chance that you will come across the tall, lean General Manager doing the same thing. Edwin Wijkhuys makes this a part of his daily work routine for a number of reasons. “After lunch, I will walk the building, the staircases and the fire escapes – it keeps me fit, and I can also ensure that nobody has parked pieces of furniture or extra beds or mattresses in the fire exits. This is an issue in any hotel in the world. If I see anything, I call housekeeping to remove things before we have an emergency. I can also see what is going on in the hotel and see the staff,” he said in an interview with Saudi Gazette. Wijkhuys, who is from Holland, has a long working day: “ I am in the hotel between 7.45 and 8 A.M. every day and usually leave between 7 – 7.30 in the evening. It is a long day, but welcome to the hospitality industry!” he said with a laugh. He went on to describe a typical working day: “Usually, the first thing I do is to meet with the night manager and ask him if everything went well. After that, I go through what happened the day before and this review takes me about an hour. We have a briefing with all the department heads to see what has been going on – there might have been flight delays and we have airline crews staying here. We review the guest arrivals of the day and see who is coming, who is a returning guest, who are our loyalty guests, or if any royalty are coming – this is to ensure that the right rooms are allocated. Then there are other typical meetings, either with someone from sales, or a client, or a supplier. And then we have a huge renovation programme going and this keeps me very busy. I have meetings with the project team, with the builders, the project manager, the architects and the owners. We also have the Sheraton Resort so I drive there once a week just to see what is going on. “Sometimes this is a surprise visit, or it may be an announced visit. I check some rooms in the resort, and take a coffee break when the weather is nice – it is beautiful in the resort during the week because there is nobody else there. Then in the afternoon, I have a couple more meetings to check up on the next day, to meet with the department heads, go to reservations, ask them how many rooms we gained and how full we will be in the evening. I also check the buffets, and the dinners, and sometimes meet with the clients at the end of the day.” After leaving school, Wijkhuys took a three year Trade Degree which involved learning everything about the hospitality industry from economics, finance and business administration to culinary skills and four languages: Dutch, English, French and German. “Looking back, it was a very good school, and at the weekends, I worked in a restaurant. We were trained up to the level of Food and Beverage Manager, or Restaurant Manager, and I had a certificate to open my own restaurant anywhere in Europe. After that, I had one year of formal training and we could choose where we wanted to go – I chose to go to the Sheraton in Brussels. Working outside Holland has always attracted me,” he explained. His first real job was in the US. “I was hired as a supervisor for a big beach restaurant in Florida. It was perfect for a young guy who had just left school to be able to tell all your friends that you are working in shorts on the beach! It was a big resort serving 300 breakfasts and 500 lunches and a couple of hundred dinners, so I was also the host for the guests, taking complaints, and making sure that the rotas were running well and that staff arrived on time. I was working with a very diverse group of employees from very wealthy Americans who have their second or third house in Florida and their kids were working in the resort, to Haitian and Cuban refugees who were doing all the manual work.” After a year and a half, his visa and work permit expired and it was time to move on. As his career developed, it took him to New Zealand and Turkey, and then he re-joined the Sheraton Starwood Hotels in 1995. After a few years at the Sheraton Skyline in London Heathrow, he moved to the Sheraton in Karachi in 1999, which proved to be a challenging time. “Things were fine until 11th September 2001, and then things started to get rough. We had a bomb attack in the hotel, and then Daniel Pearl was kidnapped – it happened just outside our hotel. His wife stayed in our hotel and we had the FBI staying with us, they were watching the footage in our meeting rooms of the beheading of Daniel Pearl … so then we decided it was time to go,” he said. After a few years at the Pulitzer Sheraton in downtown Amsterdam, Wijkhuys was ready to abroad again. Saudi Arabia was a strange choice because Wijkhuys and his wife had said to each other many times: ‘We will never go and work in Saudi Arabia!' He explained: “I was pretty much the stereotyping kind of person who only had information about the negative things. But the GM that I had worked with in Karachi had gone on to the Sheraton in Riyadh and because we had gone through so much together, we had stayed in touch. He had many positive things to say about Saudi Arabia and the job in the Sheraton Jeddah interested me.” Wijkhuys enjoys a challenge in his work, and that is what he has had in the three and a half years that he has been here, including a total renovation of the hotel. He showed me the plans that were spread out on his office walls. “It is a huge program and it will go on for another year and a half – then we should have a brand new Sheraton.”
