Radisson Is Growing at a Time When ‘Instability Is the Norm’

Federico J. González Tejera has been spending a lot of time on the road. He started the week in Paris and heads to London tomorrow; then he’ll hit Madrid (where he’s from originally) and Brussels (where his company is headquartered) before jetting on to Delhi and Dubai. “There’s no week that is the same as the previous one,” says the chief executive officer of Radisson Hotel Group, which oversees about 1,500 hotels around the world. González reckons he’s slept in at least 300 of them over the nine years he’s been in charge, and while he likes to inspect rivals’ properties when he can, staying overnight is another matter. “I feel guilty when I sleep in a competitor’s hotel,” he says.

During this brief respite from travel, González, 62, finds himself in Stockholm — not quite home, but close to it. He lived here from 1998 to 2000 while working for Procter & Gamble Co., and his youngest son was born in Sweden during that time. He’s even written a book about doing business with Swedes. One thing he took away from his time here was a strong sense of national self-confidence, characterizing the Swedish way of life as “long-term and sustainable.” As he puts it, “Sweden is proud of what Sweden is.”

It’s just after 9 a.m., and González settles into a seat at a window table in the breakfast lounge at the Radisson Collection Strand Hotel, one of his company’s 570 properties in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. (It runs roughly 480 more in Asia but sold its American operations to Choice Hotels International Inc. in 2022 to concentrate on higher-growth markets.) The morning rush has mostly passed, save for a few guests pouring coffee and juice at a glowing, floral-fronted bar. The marble-floored room’s real draw is its sweeping view across Nybroviken, where old passenger boats line the quay. Opened ahead of the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, the Strand is a short stop on an itinerary that rarely lets up.

González, who has led the hospitality group since 2017, has reason to keep moving. With the effects of Covid-19 behind it, Radisson is expanding rapidly again, with hundreds of properties in development and India emerging as a major focus. Yet the post-pandemic recovery has brought its own complications: rising energy and labor costs, geopolitical upheaval and, in some of Europe’s most popular cities, escalating tensions over tourism’s impact on housing. “Instability is the norm,” says González. “It is like bubbles that appear, but they don’t vanish.”

González’s first taste of the travel business came early. At 16, he spent his summers taking groups of Spanish students to Britain for language courses. His first corporate job came later, as a brand assistant for Fairy dishwashing liquid at P&G in Spain. The conglomerate eventually relocated him to Brussels, Stockholm and then Portugal. In 2004 he joined the management team at Disneyland Paris. A spell running NH Hotel Group, a Spanish operator of upscale city hotels, brought him fully into hospitality before he joined Radisson, a growing though not dominant multinational hotel operator. The hotels in Radisson’s network generate about €7 billion to €7.5 billion ($7.8 billion to $8.4 billion) in combined revenue, González says, with the company collecting varying percentages based on whether the property is owned, leased or franchised. In comparison, hotel heavyweight Marriott International Inc. posts annual revenue of more than three times that.

González had been running the global group for only a few years when Covid hit. As pandemic restrictions took effect, the usual support from headquarters effectively “vanished,” as he puts it, and much of the day-to-day authority shifted to local managers. They were given broad principles and guidelines but had to make calls themselves, such as whether to agree to requests from local authorities to house doctors or sick people. “Follow your instincts,” González remembers telling them. In many cases, hotels closed and employees were sent home, but González says the experience revealed many of the company’s people were capable of taking on more responsibility than anyone had previously realized. “Everybody came out a bit stronger,” he says.

The experience also convinced González to stick with a more decentralized approach, with greater responsibility still delegated to regional presidents and the managers below them even today, González says. Owner Jin Jiang International (Holdings) Co. kept investing in the company through the pandemic too. González says planned renovations and spending on IT systems continued, leaving the group in a better position when the world finally reemerged.

Travelers eventually returned in swarms, though they’d been changed, too, by the pandemic. González says people now take more frequent but shorter trips. Many guests are willing to pay more for a better experience — while demanding more in return. Even with consumers increasingly cash-strapped in multiple corners of the world, he says he hasn’t seen widespread trading down to less premium chains. In Sweden, France and Spain, the higher-end hotels have been growing while midmarket and budget properties have struggled, though the pattern varies by country.

Another more recent change he’s noticed: fiercer pushback against tourism from local residents who see visitors driving local prices higher and adding pressure to housing markets already struggling with a shortage of affordable homes. González is sympathetic to residents’ concerns. In places such as Venice, Amsterdam and the Greek island of Santorini, he says authorities have failed to properly balance tourism with housing and the needs of local communities. González says city officials have to explain what residents get in return, including why scarce space goes to hotels rather than homes, while they should decide how many tourists they actually want — and be prepared to say when their cities are full. After all, that’s how it’s done at his former employer, Disneyland Paris. A theme park knows its capacity, he says. “If I go to Disneyland, I wake up in the morning, and I say, ‘I’m going to go to Disney.’ I go to the computer and say, ‘There are no tickets. It’s full,’” he says. The industry, including Radisson, has “a responsibility to try to help define what the future of each destination is and, together with the public authorities, define how much space we need for hotels, how much space for offices and how much for people living in the community.”

One place with plenty of room for expansion is India. Growth is spreading beyond its biggest cities as more people travel within the country and demand for hotels rises in smaller urban centers. Radisson wants to extend its portfolio there by 2030 to about 500 properties from roughly 200 now operating or under development. Radisson is also adding about 50 to 75 hotels a year in China, he says, but the market isn’t growing as quickly as it once did.

González says one thing he has had to adjust to under Chinese ownership is what he calls Jin Jiang’s “obsession for due diligence.” Early on, the barrage of questions could make him wonder whether his new owners were trying to catch him making a mistake. Eventually, he says, he realized they were extremely careful. The owners recognize the company’s international character, he says, and they don’t expect him to behave as though he were Chinese. He even added a chapter last year to his book, Living and Working Abroad: A Survival Guide, on doing business in the Asian nation.

Learning Mandarin has gone less smoothly. González once practiced a couple of sentences with a teacher for a presentation in China, but he couldn’t nail the pronunciation. He pared his planned Mandarin introduction back to just a few words rather than risk getting it wrong. “At my age, if you cannot do it well, it’s better not to try,” he says.

He’s still writing, though. González has just completed a novel about a concierge in a Paris apartment building who, approaching retirement, begins questioning a career spent following instructions never to interfere in residents’ lives. He’s also finished drafting a book about his own career. Its title: Have Fun! Enjoying the work, he says, is essential to having a good career. (He hopes both books will be published next year.)

For all his enthusiasm, González’s idea of a good vacation involves doing remarkably little. When he takes time off, he opts for privacy over loyalty and goes to a resort outside the Radisson network, somewhere nobody knows him, preferably in the mountains, and stays put for about two weeks. He doesn’t travel around and gets a car only to go to a restaurant. “I can dress as I wish,” he says. “Nobody would say anything.” For a man who spends most of his life moving between hotels, countries and continents, the ultimate luxury, it seems, is becoming just another guest.

By Rafaela Lindeberg