By Rosanna Caira
When Madone Pelan assumed the role of director of Sales at Victoria’s beautiful and historic Oak Bay Resort Hotel in 2015, the hotel was in receivership. “It was a challenging time in the industry and it had just re-opened after being closed for six years,” says the native of Powell River, B.C. Formerly owned by the Walker family of B.C., by the time Pelan arrived, the hotel was sold to two investors — Rev Investments and J.V. Driver (earlier this year J.V. Driver became the sole owner). Instead of letting the financial challenges deflate her efforts, she saw it as opportunity. “It gave us a chance to start fresh and have re-investment and support there,” says this year’s Hotelier of the Year award winner, recalling those early days. “We re-built from there and there was nowhere but up at that point, so it was really exciting and a great place to start from.”
Having worked for a variety of big hotel brands, most recently at the venerable Fairmont Empress Hotel, Pelan welcomed the opportunity to transition to an independent. “Because we’re an independent property, we had the ability to test and try and really be adventurous in our approach to different things,” she says, noting “sometimes in a brand setting you can be limited working within the parameters. We had no brand or structural template and everything was built from scratch, which was a lot of work, but it allowed us to customize everything we did in a way geared to customer service and our guest.”
With a key focus on wellness for its guests, the 100-room Oak Bay Beach Hotel is nestled on the shores of the Pacific with stunning sea views of Victoria. It taps into a predominantly leisure traveller with a focus on romantic getaways, girls’ getaways and milestone celebrations. “We are known for our annual Wellness Retreats in February, which guests now request to re-create privately for them,” says Pelan. “Many of our guests want to align their travel with their values and look for sustainability and corporate social responsibility when they’re choosing how to spend their travel dollars.”
What makes the hotel special, says Pelan is “It combines the best of everything. It has a wonderful history, a luxury-resort feel and heated mineral pools overlooking the Salish Sea.” It’s a magical location, she says, featuring a temperate climate and great culinary offerings. Large enough to feature four restaurants and a spa, it’s also “small enough to feel intimate and allows us to really get to know each of our guests.”
Since becoming GM in 2020, Pelan took the lessons acquired over her career and built on the foundation in her own inimitable style, crafting success by investing first in her staff to ensure top-notch, personalized service and then being nimble to adapt to the changing needs of their guests — all while being fiscally responsible. She’s grateful to Michelle La Sage, previous hotel GM at the Oak Bay Hotel, for taking her under her wing and exposing her to other areas of responsibility and for believing in her abilities to follow her as GM, “lending a hand and pulling her up,” something she says women hoteliers need to do.
Clearly, the pandemic created a unique set of challenges, but she also thinks it made the hotel stronger. She’s proud she was able to retain most of her staff and of the way they worked through the challenges. Fortunately, the hotel’s resort feel and the fact B.C. guests were allowed to travel within a bubble meant “we didn’t lose staff like a lot of other places did,” explains Pelan. “We became the Hawaii of British Columbia,” she quips. “This is where everyone came to stay because we were open. Not only did we get our staff back but business actually grew for us because there were limited other options to choose from.”
The wage subsides also helped enormously. “It allowed us to keep our people and do better than most. We built a culture of retention,” she says, adding it “became pretty cutthroat in the beginning, with some companies providing signing bonuses of $5,000 for certain positions. We took a different approach and undertook an internal marketing campaign to remind everyone about all the perks. We dialled up our benefits, our perks and our wages, multiple increases to make sure we were competitive and then for key positions in culinary, we did retention bonuses instead of signing bonus. We laid the groundwork to keep as many people as possible. We invest in our people; we grow them and a lot of them have career aspirations.”
The hotel also changed its working model, giving leaders the option to work from home, and associates the option to work four 10-hour shifts instead of five eight-hour shifts. “We tested and tried what would work and we had the ability to do that to find the right fit. Through the process, we’ve had a great retention rate, especially with our leadership team. It allowed us the ability to continually improve in small increments. Our constant goal is to make it better.”
Pelan believes “the ability to adapt in the moment as we need has been an absolute game changer, not only in adapting our sales strategy as needed, [but] when we were in the depths of a labour shortage and put in retention strategies, we were able to make those decisions in real time, very quickly.”
Now the improvements are showing on the bottom line. The business fundamentals of the hotel are impressive. ADR is a healthy $450 and RevPAR sits at $350. The hotel “went into 2024 with a four per cent revenue growth projection, however, it looks like the year will end stronger than anticipated,” boasts Pelan.
“Our executive team has been together since pre- pandemic; most have been here seven to 10 years. We worked through those tricky four years and every single one of them is so engaged. We see all our potential; we’ve scratched the surface so we’re excited for what the future brings. It’s that core team of people that continue to move the dial and make it an exceptional place. They know what they’re experts in. I always joke I’m in a room full of people who are smarter than me in a lot of things. And that’s exactly what I want it to be.”
Interestingly, while most hotel operators have reduced staffing through the last few years, Oak Bay has grown its team from 150 to 239 associates, primarily by adding a new restaurant to the mix and by enhancing various services. “We’ve added positions we’ve never had before,” says Pelan, explaining that during the pandemic the hotel built out its own inhouse laundry service, adding six washers and dryers. “We did the math and it just made sense financially,” explains Pelan, adding the washers and dryers paid for themselves within six months.
Since helming the resort, Pelan has crafted a culture of celebrating success. And it’s paid off in spades with a variety of different awards, including TIAC’s Business of the Year Award in 2023. “It put us on the national stage as an independent boutique hotel and surprised us in the best possible way,” and in 2021, Conde Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice award selected the Oak Bay the number-1 hotel in Canada, and the 19th in the world.
She’s a firm believer in giving back to the community. The hotel is actively involved with the David Foster Foundation, dedicated to providing financial support to Canadian families with children in need of life-saving organ transplants. The hotel’s theatre is the only physical building in the world sporting Foster’s name on it and the hotel donates partial proceeds from every event booked in the theatre. Last year Oak Bay hosted “An Evening to Inspire,” where it invited guests to join for an evening of awareness and celebration, including a performance by American Idol participants, a silent and live auction, a live band and multiple food experiences, raising more than $50,000 from this event.
Additionally, the hotel donates to various charities, and non-profits. In fact, every Friday, Pelan reviews requests that have come through, and selects a few the hotel is able to support, through donated hotel stays or gift certificates. Other causes include the annual Hungry Hearts event, Soap for Hope, the Victoria Pride Society and the annual South Island Powwow hosted by Songhees Nation. Ahead of this fall’s National Truth & Reconciliation Day, the hotel took the Small Business Pledge with the Victoria Native Friendship. The hotel also has its own canine ambassador, Ella, to enhance the overall guest experience and boost team morale.
It’s been a memorable year for the hotel, but amidst the success, there’s also been some challenges, including a fire in its Snug Pub. It was the dead of winter and the hotel had to fully evacuate for eight hours. “There was smoke and water damage and it was quite extensive,” says Pelan. Because of that, water and heating in the hotel was shut off. But eight hours later “we had pipes freeze and burst, flooding our spa building, so two crises — flood and fire within eight hours of one another, and significant, significant damage.”
Pelan is proud of the way her team came together and addressed that crisis head on. “We pulled through in the most incredible way,” says Pelan. By 8 a.m. the next morning, the hotel had re-set its entire Snug Pub in its grand lobby and served breakfast to its guests. “Everything went exceptionally well. We built great loyalty with the guests that had been with us that day instead of a negative experience.” The hotel operated its pub out of its lobby and ran spa treatment rooms out of its guestrooms for two months.
Looking back on her trajectory in the hospitality industry dating back to her first job as a 16-year working for Princess Cruises as a frontline staff to do embarkation check in at Canada Place, and then three years working on a cruiseship seeing the world, Pelan is grateful she chose the hospitality industry. While she started working in the industry because she wanted to travel, see other destinations and experience other cultures, as she grew in her various roles, she quickly realized how equally fascinating it was “to meet the people who were travelling to her destination.
“You could become part of their experience and that was really impactful. It was really powerful for me to see that from the other side and see that we’re playing host to people’s memories when they come here. That was a pretty magical moment for me to realize just how much of an impact we have when people come to travel and visit our part of the world.
