Calling all hoteliers. The new Hotelier of the Year will be announced at an awards lunch hosted by current incumbent, Richard Ball of Calcot Manor, tomorrow lunchtime.
To mark the occasion, Caterersearch will be simultaneously posting a webcast featuring an interview with the mystery winner at 1pm.
It's traditional for the outgoing Hotelier of the Year to host the following year's award lunch. This year's award was therefore presented to Michael Gray at Calcot Manor, whose Managing Director, Richard Ball, was the 2006 winner.
Welcoming guests to the lunch, Richard emphasised the fear-factor involved in throwing your hotel open to an A-list of pretty much every UK hotelier of note from the past quarter-century. (This year, the lunch drew its usual stellar list of hotelkeepers, among them Robin Hutson, Ramon Pajares, Peter Lederer, Martin Skan, Harry Murray ...)
He described how, as a younger man trying to establish his country house hotel in Gloucestershire, he had read of Hoteliers of the Year in the Caterer and wondered whether perhaps, one day, one of these iconic hoteliers would deign to come and stay with him.
"I never imagined 17 of the buggers would turn up on the same day!" he quipped.
Two very important sets of awards are unveiled tonight at London's Royal Lancaster hotel.
This evening, hotel employees from all around Britain will be recognised for their work at the 2008 Hotel Cateys and we will also be unveiling the 2008 Caterer and Hotelkeeper Hotelier of the Year in association with Louis Jadot.
To find out who will be 2007 Hotelier of the Year Michael Gray's successor and to get all the Hotel Cateys results, be sure to log on to caterersearch.com at around 11.30pm tonight!
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