Lobby for Change
Amanda Hyndman became the general manager (GM) at the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong last December, the first woman to do so in the brand’s 59 years of history. She still remembers the first time she took on a GM role: “There was a rather upset guest in the lobby demanding to see the GM. I asked, ‘How can I help you?’,” Hyndman recalls. Instead of telling her the problem, he looked at her and repeated, “I want to see the GM.”
Hyndman isn’t the only one who has been taken lightly because she’s a woman. Rainy Chan, GM at The Peninsula Hong Kong until 2017, has experienced her share of being assumed to be a secretary. “The question I’d hear most often was ‘Where is your boss?’” Chan said at the Web in Travel (WIT) Future Leaders Forum at The Murray
