Ingo C. Peters (left) welcomed Hamburg’s Mayor Peter Tschentscher (centre) and owner Kurt Dohle, among others.
(Photo: dpa)
Hamburg For 25 years, Ingo C. Peters has been General Manager of the posh Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg. He welcomed queens and statesmen, stars and starlets, people with lots of new and even more old money. It is a coincidence that his service anniversary and the 125th birthday of the noble house almost coincide. The performance of the hotel, for which Peters is responsible, rather not.
The greats of the industry, many of whom met on Wednesday evening at the Vier Jahreszeiten for an anniversary gala with more than 1200 guests, agree: Hardly any other general manager had such an impact on the economic performance of the Vier Jahreszeiten as Peters.
As a grand hotel, it is one of the best in the world and has received numerous national and international awards. In the two previous editions of the ranking “The 101 best hotels in Germany”, the Four Seasons made first place. Peters is chairman of the association Selection of German Luxury Hotels and has been decorated many times himself. In 2014, the industry in Germany voted him Hotelier of the Year.
His role model and mentor is Kurt Wachtveitl, who ran the legendary Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok for more than 40 years, standing in the hall there for an hour in the morning and evening. “He always said to me: If you don’t have direct contact with your guests and don’t know what they want, then you can’t set up the necessary range of services at all.”
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Two supermarket owners bought the hotel in 2013
Excellent service is Ingo C. Peters’ mantra, he sees it as the most urgent service without being a servant. Since it was founded by Friedrich Haerlin, who bought a dilapidated property at auction in 1897 and gradually expanded it into the Grand Hotel, the hotel was family-run until 1989. Then there were several changes of operator and owner, the last in 2013 after two supermarket owners from Siegburg decided to buy a hotel. Kurt Dohle and his son Klaus from the Dohle trading group, owners of the hit markets, have reportedly paid 35 million euros.
According to their own statements, the Siegburgers have not really interfered in the business so far. “We don’t come from the industry,” said Klaus Dohle at the gala in Hamburg. “But we wouldn’t have done it without Peters either. He lives the hotel from morning to night, he knows the industry perfectly.”
However, Peter’s success story in the hotel began long before he was promoted to boss – as an intern in a page boy’s uniform. The path to the subject was by no means predetermined. Peters comes from a Hamburg academic family. “My father fell off his stool when I told him I didn’t want to study,” the 60-year-old recalls. The hotel industry was already his lifelong dream.
After an internship as a page boy and training as a restaurant manager at the Four Seasons – he didn’t want to do it under that – he first went abroad. The first station was the London luxury hotel The Berkeley, in 1985 he became business director at Boston’s The Westin, and at the age of 26 he was deputy director of the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia. And at the age of 30 he got his first job as general manager for the well-known chain Mandarin Oriental, first in Phuket and later in Jakarta.
On October 1, 1997, he returned to his training hotel, this time as General Manager and with due respect: “If you mess up here, nobody will forgive you so quickly.” Raffles International, which later incorporated the Fairmont Group and 2016 in the Accor group, the four seasons had taken over as operator shortly before.
“The job of a hotel manager is immensely more complex today than it was 25 years ago,” says Peters. “The challenge is not to get too caught up in it.” In the end, money is not earned by “analyzing lists and sorting Excel sheets from right to left, but still with the guest and with the employees”. When he accepted the award for first place in the first edition of the ranking “The 101 Best Hotels in Germany”, Peters said: “The Four Seasons is my life’s work.”
More: Four seasons of Hamburg and Schloss Elmau: Together at the top