Kimpton Hotels Are Among the Most Respected Destinations

Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants The Kimpton Hotel chain features 65 hotels, and the company has 82 restaurants in 33 cities. Headquartered in San Francisco and known for their quality and uniqueness, these boutique hotels and restaurants are also known as excellent places to work and have taken positively open-minded positions when it comes to hiring minorities, women, and members of the LBGT community as well.

Management for these hotels and restaurants is very progressive when it comes to guests and to employees, and this paper reviews and critiques the Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants in terms of the quality of their management services. How Kimpton Hotels / Restaurants Treat their Guests & Employees An article in Fortune.com points out that Kimpton offers six weeks of parental leave, they offer preventative health services for women and hearing and vision care for all employees.

Also, Kimpton offers "backup childcare and elder care," and one very unique benefit Kimpton offers is "pet insurance .. [they] even give people time off to grieve if their pet dies" (Fortune, 2016). In the Great Place to Work website it points out that Kimpton offers up to six weeks for "parental leave" (for partners, mothers and fathers) for several reasons: welcoming a new child (through adoption or live birth).

Also, in the "Great Place to Work" website employees from Kimpton were interviewed and 97% said "I can be myself around here." That sits well in terms of the motto of Kimpton ("I can be me"). Kimpton hotels and restaurants offer a "tuition reimbursement" program of up to $1,500 per year and $100 per semester for books. This applies to classes that are related to employees' careers (greatplacetowork.com). Also, the company pays 65% of full health coverage for dependents of employees and 70% for employees.

Dry cleaning, fitness classes, free lunches (daily) and onsite healthcare benefits are provided (flu shots, cholesterol tests, blood pressure screening and "complete biometric screening") (greatplacetowork.com). On a more human level, in an age when a dozen states' legislatures have recently passed "bathroom laws" that discriminate against LBGT communities -- including North Carolina's recent law (HB2) requiring transgender people to only use the bathroom of their biological gender -- Kimpton Hotels has earned a "100% score" in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index for 11 straight years (Fortune, p. 1).

Each year Kimpton sponsors a campaign that is designed to generate awareness and money for local agencies that serve HIV-infected patients. Kimpton has raised over a million dollars for HIV charities in the past 20 years (The Advocate). The company formed "K-GLEN" (the Kimpton Gay and Lesbian Employee Network) to offer advice to the company on personnel and community outreach issues (The Advocate). Kimpton management clearly understands justice and fairness when it comes to welcoming people of all backgrounds and beliefs.

In New York City, the Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants team up with the city's HIV housing agency Bailey House (where HIV patients and their families may stay). When a guest books a hotel room at Kimpton over the phone or on the Internet, that guest gets 10% off the best rate, and five percent of the proceeds of each room go to Bailey House (The Advocate). Moreover, senior managers are eligible for " ..

month-long sabbaticals" after they have worked for Kimpton for seven years; however, there is a caveat: the senior managers have to commit to unplugging their work emails and phone calls (Fortune, p. 1). Incidentally, Fortune ranks Kimpton as the 20th best place to work in 2016; last year Kimpton was ranked #11. In 2013, Fortune Magazine ranked -- out of 257 companies' employees surveyed -- Kimpton number 21. The ranking was based on " .. employees' attitude on management, job satisfaction, and company culture" (Shankman, 2014).

The Greening of Kimpton Hotels In the publication Hotel Executive writer Jeff Slye explains that as early as 1985 the management at Kimpton properties had a positive view on becoming environmentally responsible. In that year they created a roof-top park at the Galleria Park Hotel and the eco-friendly Hotel Triton. The Kimpton top executive management made a decision to hire a leading business consult called Business Evolution Consulting. That group helped Kimpton create " ..

one of the most comprehensive eco-programs in the boutique hotel industry today" -- and the program was called "EarthCare" (Slye, 2016). The program has paid tremendous dividends for the environment, for hotel guests, and for Kimpton's bottom line, Slye contends: in a very few months Kimpton has saved "hundreds of trees, removed thousands of gallons of toxic cleaning supplies from our rivers and oceans, and has tracked over $500,000 of new revenue attributed to EarthCare" (Slye, p. 1). Sly presents what he calls the five lessons other hotels can take from Kimpton.

One, hotel managers don't have to hug trees to show they are committed to reduce their property's carbon footprint. In fact when the EarthCare program began being "mimicked by competitors," Kimpton's COO, Niki Leondakis said: "What could be better for the environment and EarthCare than having our program adopted by every hotel in the industry?" (Slye, p. 1). The second lesson from Slye: when vendors cannot provide.