Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming May 2016 20 Industry profile IAG: Let’s start at the beginning — where did you grow up and start your career in the hospitality industry? Niall Murray: As a child in Dublin my mother used to always point out our top school, the Dublin College of Catering. So from an early age I wanted to go there. When I got in I found I loved it. It was very hands on; the real European style. In the kitchen you learnt all of the classical stuff for cooking, then how to be a barman, how to be a sommelier and so forth, and even how to arrange flowers. I had good internships. First I was at the Omni Sagamore in upper New York state; a five star five diamond hotel on a little island in a private lake. Then I was at the Hamilton Sheraton in Ontario. IAG: Tell us about your time working in the top hotels in New York and Las Vegas. NM: Irish hotels rely on the traditional European style of training. That means the slow passing down of knowledge through long apprenticeships. In America it’s more about standard operating procedures (SOPs); analyzing knowledge into error- proof steps and putting it down in writing, pictures and video guides; painting by numbers if you like. That makes it easier to replicate that knowledge; to rapidly transfer and multiply skill sets. During my internships in the US and Canada I learnt that this way can make a big operation very, very efficient. Then just before graduation Disney came knocking because they were opening a new theme park near Paris. I took a job there as a trainee manager. It was a remarkable opportunity because it was the first time there was going to be an opening on that scale; a big park with 5,700 hotel rooms and all the infrastructure to pull it together. One day a truck showed up containing all of the SOPs from Disneyland in Florida; written down and refined over 30 years. After unloading them we had to sit down and convert them for use in France; with lawyers who would tell us what was allowed under French labor laws, food safety and so forth. It was an amazing Dublin-born Niall Murray came to Macau from Las Vegas 12 years ago to open the city’s first western- style casino. In addition to running his own hospitality management consultancy and beverage distribution business, last year he opened Taipa’s PREM1ER bar. He also heads the local Irish Chamber of Commerce.