Martin Mulholland, head concierge at the Europa Hotel, Belfast, descirbes his day.
I FELL INTO this job straight from school, 27 years ago, and got hooked on it. I work a five-day week and start each morning at 7am with a team of nine staff. The first thing I do is check what’s going on at the hotel that day.
We have an Ask the Concierge service, which means I’ll have e-mails to answer, too, anything from the distance from the airport to whether I can get tickets for a match. The service works really well, because it means the guest has someone they know at the hotel before arriving.
As a concierge you are the first person they meet and the last person to say goodbye when they leave, so it’s vital you make a good impression.
I’ve seen lots of famous names through the doors. Back in the early 1980s we were about the only hotel in Belfast, so if a celebrity was coming this is where they stayed.
We’ve had Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Billy Connolly. All lovely. The one that sticks out as an absolute gent is Phil Coulter.
Guests start coming down at around 7.30am and will want to know how to get places, or have their airline tickets checked in online. We will have their cars ready and waiting for them.
With 270 rooms, mornings are very busy, particularly at weekends, when everybody checks out at the same time.
It’s normally 11.30am before I get my first cup of coffee. If we have a conference on or a function in the ballroom, things stay busy through the day and into the night.
The vast majority of visitors are lovely, but if someone has had a little too much to drink we will take them aside very discreetly. Most concierges have very good diplomatic skills.
You also have to keep abreast of current affairs, politics and sport, because guests often want to know a score or talk about what’s in the news.
Because we’re in Belfast they tend to talk politics in depth – and, in fact, one of our most popular tours now is a black-taxi tour of the city.
I was here through all the times we had to evacuate the hotel because of bombs. The last one happened in 1994, and we had just spent two years upgrading the hotel, so that knocked the heart out of a lot of people. It seems a million years ago now. It’s like day versus night.
What’s great is that we get so many guests in their 50s and 60s from down south who in
all their lives have never been to Belfast before, and they love it. There are so many restaurants and bars, the city is buzzing.
For me, if all is going well I finish up between 3pm and 4pm and go home and indulge in my favourite sport – the armchair variety.