SNAPSHOT
The company: Grand Hotel Sofia
The manager: Ivan Angelov
The job: General manager
In brief: Angelov entered the hotelier business with the opening of Grand Hotel Sofia, a five-star hotel in downtown Sofia. Previously, he worked as a financial analyst on a number of privatisation and post-privatisation control deals. His academic background includes a degree in international economic relations in Moscow and a management buyout specialisation from the University of Nottingham.

It was a twist of professional fate and serendipity that propelled Ivan Angelov towards the management of Grand Hotel Sofia. Yet it was his 15-year friendship with the investors – developer NIKMI – which made financier and trader Angelov enter the hotel management business.

“I am in – rather than from – the hotelier business,” he says, adding he was never nurtured in a hotel management environment.

However, this has never hindered his pulling the fledgling hotel through to success. With an international economic relations degree completed in Moscow, a management buyout specialisation at the University of Nottingham and a background as a financial analyst on between 20 and 30 privatisation deals, he had the necessary skills and network of contacts to seesaw the business to balance... and growth.

Since its June 4 2004 opening, this five-star hotel glided past the difficulties of a saturated market to attain its present 75 per cent occupancy rate, a high-end room rate of 130 to 140 euro (the minimum being 100 euro) and a profitable mix of party, conference and restaurant amenities.

To run a hotel past the break-even point it takes a clear vision about what it and its clientele should be and a mix of products tailored accordingly, says Angelov.

Since inception, Grand Hotel Sofia was conceived as a business hotel whose guests would be a blend of foreign investors, representatives of international institutions and celebrities. All the more, the contemporary profile of a business hotel entails not only maintaining high-quality rooms but also providing facilities for premium restaurants, bars and conference halls for business gatherings.

THE LOGIC BEHIND A BUSINESS HOTEL
The Grand Hotel Sofia would seem to be the hotel with everything. As if to prove this, proceeds from guest occupancy have gradually faced competition from conferences, events, restaurants and bars.

Developing this pattern has helped the hotel weather worsening market conditions. Despite the slump in foreign visitor numbers since the turn of the year, Grand Hotel Sofia has been successful in keeping occupancy at previous year levels without engaging in a price war as a number of Sofia peers did. The main reason for this has been clients’ willingness to pay for high quality, Angelov says.

It is no less important to keep the client profile high. He remembers that when he made his first steps in the hotelier business, he was told that if he failed to sell a room today he’d fail to do so the next day.

“I think the logic is different: if you sell a room today you might not sell many rooms tomorrow,” Angelov says. “Because if you fill the hotel with cheaper tourists at the weekend, this might turn off regular guests during business days.”

And, just as important, there is that spirit and positive emotion emanating from the hotel’s personnel and atmosphere that makes people pine for it and return.

GUEST SLUMP
Angelov ascribed the downturn in visitor numbers to slackening interest in Bulgaria. He would not rule out it was temporary, but for the time being a number of foreign aides to projects of overseas companies in Bulgaria had completed their work and did not need to travel to Bulgaria so often. As did experts from the European Commission (EC) and other associated international institutions, which had a busy travel schedule in Bulgaria’s run-up to EU accession.

Furthermore, Sofia and its surroundings are not such an attractive destination for cultural tourism that they lure weekend tourists. On the other hand, Bulgaria’s capital is still prepared to offer conference or incentive tourism, although these are the two tourism segments Angelov sees as prospective.

The potential for incentive and conference tourism has spurred NIKMI to add another hotel, which, apart from offering about 250 rooms, will house a conference complex with all modern facilities.

MILLENNIUM CENTER
To be called Millennium Center and due to open doors in four to five years’ time behind NDK at the junction of Vitosha and Bulgaria boulevards, it will become the third hotel in NIKMI’s chain, after Grand Hotel Sofia and Central Park Hotel.

According to Angelov, this set of hotels is the result of a well-thought out, diversified and synchronised business. While Grand Hotel Sofia caters to individual business guests, Millennium will be the conference business hotel. Central Park Hotel, in turn, serves as the cushion between these two hotels. They are all located in Sofia’s centre because Sofia is unlikely to become such a busy transit tourist hub that it would warrant many new hotels far from the airport or in remote newly-built business centres.

With this triple hotel asset, NIKMI hopes to create the first locally managed chain of hotels, Angelov said. This goal, however, has been achieved as both Grand Hotel Sofia and Central Park Hotel are run by local management teams despite the fact that Grand Hotel Sofia has repeatedly been courted by international hotel management companies.

The initiative could gain scale.

CHAIN AND FIVE-STAR ACADEMY PLANS
“In time we hope to create a Bulgarian hotel management and consultancy management chain, whose asset portfolio would not be in the hands of a single investor but would be diversified with city, mountain and coastal resorts,” Angelov says.

The idea arose after a number of fellow hoteliers called for help in running their hotels through development programmes.

“We intend to develop and customise them according to the vagaries of each individual hotel.”

In that vein, to operate such a chain it is integral to have qualified staff, presently a weak segment of Bulgaria’s tourism industry, according to Angelov. So it is that Grand Hotel Sofia has applied for a licence with the National Agency for Vocational Education and Training for the formation of a new vocational training centre called Five Star Academy. As the name presumes, it’s intended to prepare personnel for five-star hotels.

“Through it we will create a database of prospective young talents in Bulgaria who would appear destined to travel abroad. We will start from the lowest possible level, from the lowest possible prospect for development,” Angelov says. “At the same time, we want to retain them because Bulgaria is in need of people and after they obtain the relevant qualification, they can help tourism grow to a higher level.”

And now tourism is suffering, he adds.

HOW TO MAKE TOURISM THRIVE
Addressing the fracas surrounding the tourism chambers and associations, the core of which he argues lies in appetites for EU funds, he called on the tourism sphere to, instead, focus on raising the level of tourism education, joining initiatives of the likes of Five Star Academy to ensure development and professionalisation of the tourism business in Bulgaria.

Urban tourism, in particular, could also have benefited if municipalities were more proactive in upgrading infrastructure or participating as an entity at tourist expos, bourses and seminars, among others.

Mindful of Sofia’s potential as a conference host, he honed attention to the National Palace of Culture (NDK), a venue he sees as the sole relevant congress tourism facility, which, however, is in need of a holistic revamp. Having the entire set of amenities predisposing congress organisers to flock to Sofia – infrastructure, modern halls, facilities – is essential to make the Bulgarian capital preferable to alternative destinations.

ANGELOV AS A PERSON
Getting personal, Angelov is pretty much a sports fan. Just like work, he shares his sport activities with staff, playing basketball on Saturdays and football Sundays. While the football team has already ranked second in the cup of magazine One World, the basketball squad is still waiting to find a team to beat.

His musical tastes are changing. Formerly a jazz and rock aficionado, now he catches himself singing the tunes of more refined pop-folk singers such as Anelia, Ivana and Preslava.

Although he appears on the pitch, he generally avoids being in the public eye. As a financier and trader, he’d rather be behind the scenes. All the more because publicity as a source of creating contacts is not his goal, already having the ties he needs.

He even wonders how celebrities, frequent guests at Grand Hotel Sofia, can live 24 hours in the limelight.

Jocularly, he calls himself a stand-alone, who prefers to trip on a spade and get hurt to learn always out of his own experience. And he’s always open to new challenges both in personal and in professional terms. He would not rule out if one day the world saw him in an absolutely different vocation, which could appeal to his nature that is open to experiments and improvisation as well as his penchant for figures. But not any time soon, he says. Grand Hotel Sofia is a challenge in itself and it satisfies him.