Just a year after taking over the management rights to Glen Eden Beach Resort at Peregian Beach Hamish and Jess Watts last week won a national award from The Australian Resident Managers Association of Australia (ARAMA) for the best managed holiday resort in Australia.
The couple moved to Peregian Beach following Hamish’s 20 year career as an executive chef, operations manager and general manager at Hilton Hotels across the world including Malaysia, Japan, China and the Caribbean and spoke about their new role on receiving their award.
Q: What do you find most rewarding about the job?
H&J: We love the sense of community and meeting with local business owners. Tourism organisations like Tourism Noosa and others all support each other. What has been rewarding since we arrived has been reestablishing the resort as a premier destination. It opened in 1981 but over the last 12 months we’ve done a full branding refresh of the resort. We’ve upgraded gardens, completed a driveway project and installed CCTV to improve safety and security, and make the entire property look more attractive.
Q: What do you feel you bring most to your guests?
H&J: Positivity, friendliness, and genuine hospitality. The feedback we get on Google, Booking.com, Trip Advisor etc, is around how friendly we are and we are humbled by these comments. We are genuinely interested in ensuring our guests have a wonderful time. We have two young boys Kydn “mini manager” and Finn “miniest manager”, who are often at the reception desk greeting guests and eating snacks. I think my international experience brings cultural awareness and the ability to understanding communication with international guests. Jess is Chinese which also helps guests from Asia feel comfortable.
Q: What do you think makes you the best?
H&J: Tenacity. One of the major projects that has benefited the body corporate was the driveway rehabilitation. The driveway was forgotten about for some time, and when we arrived in July last year the body corporate was struggling to fix the problem at an affordable cost. We managed to get it done and saved them a lot of money. As resort managers, we not only need to look after our guests, but the unit owners who are private investors and rely on us to manage their property effectively.
Award judges said what stood out for this team was the glowing endorsement by their strata treasurer and their strata manager. “Their reviews contained a number of very complimentary comments about them and their teams efforts to ensure guests had a wonderful experience whilst staying at their resort,” they said. “Satisfying guests is difficult enough but satisfying the body corporate committee, especially the treasurer and the body corporate manager, shows just how effective this resort management team is.”
