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.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to The Editor's Hospitality Blog in the Richard Ball category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
Rich media is the previous category.
Richard Shepherd is the next category.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.