There are conversations that stay with you. Not because they are filled with grand revelations, but because they remind you of things you already know to be true, and it takes hearing them said plainly, by someone who has genuinely lived them, to bring them back into focus.
My recent conversation with Peter Caprez was one of those. Peter is the Multi-Property General Manager at JW Marriott Bangkok, a position he has held for over two decades at the same property. Fifty-one years in the industry. Thirty-three of those in general manager roles. A Swiss boy from the ski resort of Davos, now one of the most experienced hoteliers operating in Asia today.
I have known Peter for some years. We came up through broadly the same era, shaped by the same industry rhythms, and I was curious to explore how someone with his particular background and trajectory sees the world of hospitality now, from where he sits and from what he has seen along the way.
A Career That Began With a Window
Peter did not set out to be a hotelier. His father was a bookkeeper and the plan was always that Peter would follow him into the business. He went to the bank. He lasted nine months.
What stayed with me was how he described that experience. There was a thick glass window between him and the customers, and in a small village like Davos, where he knew half the people who came through the door, he felt as though he were sitting in a cage. The customers were outside, living their lives, and he was behind the glass, cut off from genuine human contact.
When he walked into the hotel next door as a trainee, he knew on the first day that this was right. No glass. No scripted language. You could shake someone's hand, be genuinely warm, and actually connect with people.
That instinct, to seek the human connection over the transactional, turned out to be the foundation of everything that followed. It is also, in my view, one of the qualities that separates a truly good hotelier from someone merely doing the job.
Peter sent sixty applications to hotels in America and heard nothing back. Then he spotted an advertisement for the Peninsula Hong Kong and sent one application. He got the interview. The Peninsula, at that time, was largely under Swiss management and took Swiss hotel graduates. His passport and his education opened the door. His ability kept him inside.
What Culture Actually Means in Practice
One of the things Peter and I spent real time on was the question of what separates a good general manager from a truly exceptional one. Operational competence, he said, is a baseline. It is the starting point, not the destination. What differentiates the exceptional operators is something less commonly discussed in hotel schools: cultural intelligence.
Peter has spent the majority of his career working for an American company, on behalf of Asian owners, in Thailand. He was candid about what that requires. Policies and procedures mean very little if you do not understand, respect, and visibly demonstrate respect for the culture in which you are operating. He gives every foreign executive who comes to work with him a thorough cultural briefing. Not a formality. A serious foundation for getting the work right.
I found this genuinely refreshing. We talk a great deal in this industry about brand standards and consistency, but not nearly enough about the fact that a hotel operates inside a living community with its own values, customs, and ways of doing things. You can run an operationally clean hotel and still miss the point entirely if you have not made the effort to understand where you are.
Alongside this, Peter highlighted emotional intelligence as the other great differentiator. In an industry that is increasingly reliant on technology and systems, the capacity to read a situation, respond to a person rather than a process, and make a judgement call that no algorithm will produce, remains the most valuable thing a senior hotelier can bring. I think he is entirely right about that.
The Permanent Tension Between Guest Experience and Financial Reality
No honest conversation about hotel management can avoid money. The two things that hotel general managers are asked to hold simultaneously, the quality of the guest
experience and the financial health of the business, are in constant, creative tension. Peter described it as a slim distinction, and I thought that was precisely the right way to put it.
He had a conference call on the very day we spoke in which he and his team were asked to find cost savings without reducing guest experience or service quality. He compared it to asking a forest animal to swim long distances. The instinct runs against the direction of travel.
His answer was not a system or a formula. It was common sense, brought to bear by the right people around the right table. The finance team will always tell you what can be cut to the maximum. The operators will always tell you what cannot be touched. The general manager's job is to hold both sides honestly and find the decision that serves the business and the guest without destroying either. That, in essence, is what leadership looks like in a hotel.
Owner Relations and the Mediator's Role
Peter spent twenty-three years in the same building. That kind of longevity is rare, and it does not happen by accident. He was thoughtful about the relationship with ownership, describing it in terms I think are worth repeating.
He said he communicates with his owners the way he would with close family or trusted friends. Cordially, openly, and with consistency. The management contract, technically, gives the brand considerable authority to execute decisions. The reality, particularly in Asia where many hotel owners are family businesses with deep personal investment in the property, is more nuanced. Owners in this part of the world often want to be involved at a level that goes well beyond the contractual arrangement.
The general manager sits in the middle. He is the representative of Marriott and the face that the owner sees every day. If the owner is unhappy with the GM, he said simply, there will be a new one in the seat within three months. If the relationship is solid and grounded in mutual trust, the tenure can last considerably longer.
What struck me was his refusal to romanticise this. It is not about always agreeing. It is about building a relationship strong enough to withstand disagreement, and being the kind of person that both sides trust to arrive at a fair outcome. A compromise, he said, is always better than a disaster.
Sustainability as Genuine Commitment
When we were coming through the industry, nobody spoke about sustainability. That is simply true. Peter said it plainly and I could only agree. Today, it is central to how major hotel groups operate and how corporate clients choose where their people stay.
Peter has been involved in Marriott's Business Councils structure since 2005, when he became chairman of the Thailand Business Council. By 2010, he was the guidance team leader for Asia Pacific. He held that role for over two decades, only recently handing it over to a successor.
What Marriott has built through its Business Councils is a structured approach to corporate social responsibility that operates at three levels: global, continental, and local. At the local level, hotels have genuine freedom to work with community partners on things that matter in their own context. Peter's hotel in Bangkok has been measuring and reducing food waste since 2017. Last year, across all its initiatives, the hotel saved the equivalent of nearly thirty tons of food from going to landfill.
The detail I found most telling was this: CSR started as something companies did because it felt like the right thing to do. Now it is asked about directly by corporate accounts before they commit their travel spend. The companies sending people to your hotel want to know what you are actually doing, and they want evidence. The overlap between doing good and doing well commercially has become impossible to ignore.
Teaching and Giving Something Back
Covid changed a great many things for a great many people in this industry. For Peter, one of the unexpected consequences of the enforced pause was a deeper connection with his own team. He had conversations with his associates that the pace of normal operations had never allowed. He came away with a genuine appreciation for the curiosity and intelligence of the people around him.
From that period came a decision to start sharing his experience more deliberately. He has been a guest lecturer at Hong Kong Polytechnic University's School of Hotel and Tourism Management on several occasions over the last two years, and the sessions on sustainability and CSR have generated the most engagement.
He made an observation that I think is worth holding onto. When he looks at what today's students are learning compared to what we absorbed at hotel school in our day, the breadth and depth are almost incomparable. Their academic preparation is, as he put it, two or three times what ours was. What they sometimes lack is the practical understanding of what the work actually requires in terms of engagement, presence, and personal commitment.
The hospitality industry still has three shifts a day. Hotels still open on weekends. That will not change. What we can do, and what people like Peter are doing by going into classrooms and being honest about what the career involves and what it rewards, is help the next generation go in with their eyes open and their expectations properly calibrated.
What I Took Away
Talking with Peter for an hour reminded me why this industry attracts and retains the kind of people it does. Not in spite of its demands, but in many ways because of them.
The GM role, he said towards the end of our conversation, is the best job in the industry. Not because it is easy, or prestigious, or well paid by the standards of other sectors. But because it is genuinely broad. You understand the boiler even if you cannot fix it. You understand the revenue line and the guest's name. You hold the whole thing together.
The best GMs I have known, and Peter is among them, share certain qualities. They communicate with conviction and warmth. They understand the culture they work within. They balance competing pressures without losing sight of what the business is fundamentally about. And they know, somewhere underneath everything, that what they are actually doing is creating experiences for other human beings.
That has always been what this industry is for. Everything else is the mechanism by which you deliver it.
Richard Hatter is a former international hotelier and the host of this podcast series exploring leadership, hospitality, and the conversations that shape careers.