Isrotel hotels provide safe haven for evacuees

• Published date: 08 April 2024
• Author: Eran Gefen
• Publication title: Globes (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

Hotel chain Isrotel (TASE: ISRO), which has 23 hotels, took in 15,000 evacuees. How does one manage thousands of employees and dozens of hotels when the world is in turmoil, and the entire business is in upheaval? Fortunately for Isrotel, CEO Lior Raviv says, the crisis has given rise to a new generation of young, flexible managers, who have been leading from the bottom up, establishing teams, and demonstrating creativity - making it possible to better cope with the mad upheavals - and from whom we can all learn

About himself, he says frankly, were he to actually manage one of his chain's hotels, he would probably be very bad at it.

Lior, tell me a little about the chain.

"Isrotel is a kind of nature reserve within the Israeli business landscape. It was founded as a Zionist enterprise by the late owner David Lewis, who had immigrated to Israel. Today it has 6,000 employees at 23 operational hotels. As we speak, we have 11 hotels under construction. The company seeks to attract tourists from around the world and is publicly traded. The owners still own 80%. They sold 4% last week, and because of that, we have been listed on the index and to my delight, the market cap has also increased significantly, and the stock rose significantly."

More than NIS 5 billion at the moment.

"Yes, the share went up by almost 20% recently."

March marks a month since the death of Moshe Bublil, a chief competitor of yours [owner of the Club Hotel chain, and among the pioneers of the Israeli hotel industry].

"Moshe Bublil was a dear man and, in my opinion, he was a marketing genius. He is the one who invented the story of Club Hotel and turned it into a amazing success. Moshe and I were competitors and friends.

"Many years ago, before I was CEO of Royal Beach [of the Isrotel chain], I lived in Eilat and went to a motorcycle rally in Morocco. Moshe gave me sponsorship to go on this rally, and I rode a motorcycle that had 'Club Hotel' written on it in large letters."

"A hotel that became a home "

Being a hotelier is not easy, certainly not in Israel. How do you manage in this reality?

"Look at the timeline and see how we got through the Covid crisis, through the most difficult economic crises in general, and our industry in particular, how we got through the last war. Look at how our financial reports have developed in recent years, and you'll see that through some extraordinary miracle, we always manage to make it through these crises".

I'm sure you've had situations in recent years where you said to yourself: 'Hold on a minute. I'm a business manager. I can't believe I'm dealing with this thing.

"It's crazy. Now we're dealing with the matter of evacuees. What company manager in the world dialoguing with people living in limbo? They were evacuated from their homes under crazy circumstances, and we became their home for six months. We turned 23 hotels into hotels for evacuees within a few days. At the peak, we had 15,000 evacuees. We're handling things you would not believe."

What's the weirdest thing that's come across your desk?

"There are endless examples. This...