Susy Soria – Executive Housekeeper Extraordinaire
On a recent trip to Brisbane, I had the chance to catch up this Susy Soria, who is currently the Executive Housekeeper at Rydges Sydney Airport. The Hotels has 318 rooms with a housekeeping team of 58 staff including Susy. She has only been there 7 months however in that time she has worked hard to insource the housekeeping team as her main project. When she first started, she had a team of only 5 permanent staff including 2 Supervisors and 3 Room Attendants with most of the team being 35 agency staff.
She has also been involved in a large renovation project, renovating 1 floor every 5 weeks. Susy has just completed all 8 floors. She also revamping all the standard operating procedures and is currently retraining the whole team.
The Hotel had been a quarantine hotel over 15 months during Covid, so it is great to take the opportunity to renew and revitalise the whole housekeeping operation.
Susy has an impressive and extensive housekeeping career. Originally born in Bolivia, Susy came to Australia at the age of 25 in 1986. She started in hotels and in housekeeping, cleaning rooms. She loved her work and within a year she became a Supervisor. Her first hotel was the Sydney Boulevard Hotel in Williams Street, a 4-star hotel. After 4 years as a Supervisor, she then moved to the Furama (now the Holiday Inn) which she helped to open. After 4 years solid years at Furama she then moved back to the Boulevard Hotel as Executive Housekeeper. This was a big jump and a fast learning curve. At 34 years old she taught herself the ropes, learning on the job and by evolving and changing as she needed to. After 4 years, Susy then decided to join the Agency, AHS to open the All-Seasons Darling Harbour (currently Novotel Sydney Darling Square) . Agencies were in their infancy in those days and after only a short stint there Susy moved to HRC Group (and outsourcing with Moira Kelly as a Director). During her 11-year tenue as Operations Manager with HRC she worked with 5-star Hotels throughout Sydney including Shangri la, Radisson, Start City Casino, Observatory (current Langham) Westin and even Lilianfels in the Blue Mountains.
Wanting to get back into hotel insource operations, her next move was to the Intercontinental Hotel Sydney as Assistant Housekeeper to Amparo, the Executive Housekeeper. She stayed 18 months and was then recruited at the Park Hyatt Sydney as Executive Housekeeper where she stayed 9 years until the start of the Covid pandemic. Susy chose to take a sea change and moved to Crown Plaza Terrigal on the Central Coast where she stayed for 18 months. Again, her main project was to insource the housekeeping operation during that time. It was a huge challenge to find and recruit the best housekeeping team she could find from the local area, with many hotels looking at going down the path of insourcing rather than using agencies. The Housekeeping team on the Central Coast were quite different from their city counterparts. There was a lot more emphasis on family and work-life balance. The operation had to be flexible with working hours as mums wanted to pick up the kids from school and have more family time. She finally moved back 7 months ago to the city with her current role at Rydges Sydney airport.
Susy has a great wealth of experience having worked directly for both hotels and for agencies. She can see both sides of the ways that housekeeping can operate, and she commented that things are now changing with agencies not always the most cost-effective option available. The original cost benefits of payments for workers compensation and sick leave are not so critical today and with staff shortages across the board, hotels are looking at insourcing housekeeping once again.
So, what’s Susy’s advice to someone starting out in Housekeeping? She has seen a lot of Supervisors promoted very quickly, too quickly perhaps, as they have not had enough experience or training to handle the big responsibility of managing a housekeeping team.
She mentioned you must like collaborating with people and be open to coach, train and develop your shining stars.
You really must know all the tasks that the team are doing, remain hands on and be firm without being bossy! Understanding the team’s needs and being compassionate and flexible are essential. Her parting words were “I have done it so nobody can fool me. I always make sure I can do the job before I ask my team to do it”. I also say “you look after the job, I look after you”
