Mr August: Franck Arnold on Why Supporting Women Means Creating Opportunities, Not Just Offering Advice

The Savoy’s Managing Director and Fairmont Regional Vice President believes gender parity won’t happen by chance. Leaders have to identify talent, take measured risks and actively open doors.

Meet our ally of the month, Mr August, Franck Arnold, Managing Director of The Savoy and Regional Vice President for Fairmont Hotels & Resorts UK & Ireland.

When I interviewed Charlotte Weatherall, General Manager of Corinthia London, recently, I asked about the people who had helped shape her career. Franck’s name came up immediately.

Charlotte had been building a successful career in sales and marketing when he saw something more. He encouraged her towards operations, promoted her and, later, tried to recruit her as Hotel Manager at The Savoy. She ultimately took another route, but for Franck, that is exactly the point of sponsorship: you create the opportunity, then let talented people decide where they want to go.

“I’m very proud of her,” he says. “She doesn’t owe me anything.” It is a small distinction that says a lot about his approach to leadership.

Franck believes in an inverted pyramid: the people closest to the guest sit at the top, while senior leaders are there to support them. That same thinking informs his approach to advancing women. Simply declaring yourself open to female candidates, he says, is not enough. If hospitality wants more women running hotels, leaders have to actively find them, develop them and sometimes be willing to take what he calls a “measured risk.”

Because, as Franck puts it, “It’s not going to happen by chance.”

We sat down at Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas to talk about the women who shaped his leadership, why watching talented women leave hospitality changed his thinking, what men can do to create real opportunities, and why he believes humanity will become even more valuable as technology transforms the industry.

You fell into hospitality almost by accident. How did it happen?

I was supposed to study sports, but I didn’t get in and was a little disenchanted with what I was doing at school. One day in Strasbourg, I saw a friend walking to school in a uniform carrying these little suitcases. I asked him where he was going, and he said, “Hotel school.”

I asked, “What are you going to do there?” He said, “I’m going to learn how to cook, how to sell, and then I’m going to travel the world.”

I thought, that’s what I want to do.

I went to hotel school and absolutely loved what I was learning, so I kept studying. Eventually I completed my master’s in Paris and joined InterContinental on a management development program, which took me from Paris to London and eventually across Europe and North America.

So yes, I really did fall into it by chance. I was lucky enough, as a young man, to find my vocation.

At first, you started in food and beverage, but your training took you into every part of a hotel.

Food and beverage was my upbringing. I trained in restaurants and restaurant management and very much thought of myself as an F&B person.

Then I joined a management development program and was very excited when they told me I was going to London, to the InterContinental at Hyde Park Corner. I thought, fantastic. And then they told me I was going into housekeeping.

I spent a year in housekeeping and another year in front office before eventually going back into food and beverage. Looking back, having that exposure was incredibly important. Today I’m really a generalist.

You took over The Savoy at an extraordinary moment, coming out of COVID. What did rebuilding the hotel require?

When we reopened after COVID, we had lost around two-thirds of our manpower. We were reopening with a fraction of the people we had before, and the hotel needed investment.

So we had to rebuild not only the rooms and product, but the team and culture as well. We had to do that in a way that respected what The Savoy is, while also making it relevant again within the London hotel landscape.

When I asked you about the women who influenced you, you started with your mother.

Of course. It starts with my mother. She brought me up and gave me the principles and basic education that still serve me today.

Professionally, there were also women who had a tremendous impact on me. One was Dagmar Woodward, who was running the May Fair when it was InterContinental and later became Hotelier of the Year.

There is a big difference between push and pull in leadership. You can manage through command and control, from the top down.

What inspired me was her ability to make people want to work with her and for her. There is a big difference between push and pull in leadership. You can manage through command and control, from the top down. Or you can empower, trust, encourage and motivate people.

Dagmar had authority because of her leadership style, not because of her title or rank. That stayed with me.

And another woman taught you a rather memorable lesson on your first morning in housekeeping.

Yes! I arrived at the office of the Executive Housekeeper, Ute Stoeppler, at seven o’clock on my first day. I knocked and eventually said, “Ms Stoeppler, this is Franck Arnold. I’m reporting for duty.”

She replied, “When you want to be on time with me, you will be here at five to seven.”

There I was, on this selective fast-track management program, thinking I was the blue-eyed boy, and one sentence brought me straight back down to earth.

She was very old-school, but firm and extremely fair. Once I demonstrated that I was willing to clean toilets, do the work and contribute, we built a very strong relationship.

It taught me that leadership is not about asking people to do things you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself.

Your awareness of gender inequality actually started even earlier, during your military service in France.

Yes. I did my military service with the French Air Force near Paris, and I was in a squadron that had some of the first female pilots in the French Air Force.

What struck me was what they had needed to go through simply to get to the same position as the men. The selection was so demanding that the women who made it through were exceptional. They were paving the way for the women who came after them.

Later, when I began hiring and developing people in hospitality, I started seeing another pattern. Women would reach executive or department-head level, then get married, have children and suddenly their careers would stop. I saw so much talent being lost.

That gave me a very strong belief that we have to do more than say, “At equal qualifications, we’ll take the best candidate.” Sometimes we need to make a special effort to allow women to continue growing, make returning to work easier and find different ways for them to continue their careers.

You saw that personally with your wife as well.

Absolutely. My wife was a fabulous hotelier and very successful in her own career. Then we had a family and travelled around the world for my career.

We spent ten years in the United States without family support around us, and the reality was that somebody had to take care of the children. Her career was the one that stopped.

When you have watched somebody enormously talented experience that, these issues stop being abstract.

Last year, when you were recognised by your peers, you used your speech to talk about women in hospitality. Why was that important?

Because when you look around the room at senior hoteliers, the imbalance is still obvious. Perhaps 10 or 15 percent of the general managers in the room were women.

Why? Is it because women are not as good as men? Absolutely not. In many cases, I think the women who reach those positions have had to travel a much harder road to get there.

I can say that because I’m an educated white man. For somebody like me, if you are talented, motivated and work hard, there has traditionally been a fairly clear path forward. That has not been the experience for everybody.

We are making progress, but we need to do more.

Charlotte Weatherall credits you as one of the men who created opportunities for her. What did you see in her?

Charlotte was Director of Sales and Marketing, and she wanted to move to London for personal reasons. I really wanted to keep her because I could see that she had everything required to become a successful general manager.

It wasn’t only sales and marketing expertise. She had leadership, drive, care, empathy, style and education. So I wanted to move her into a broader operational role and promoted her.

Charlotte Weatherall attempting to introduce one of her daughters to Franck

Later, I tried to recruit her as my Hotel Manager at The Savoy, but for different reasons she didn’t take the role. And more power to her, because she went on and became a general manager.

I’m incredibly proud when I see what she has achieved. But she doesn’t owe me anything. She did it.

That feels like an important distinction. Sponsorship is about creating an opportunity, not taking credit for what somebody does with it.

Exactly. As leaders, we need to see potential and create opportunities.

At The Savoy, I now have a much more balanced executive committee, and I love what that brings to the business. Not because I believe in appointing somebody simply to achieve parity, but because different people bring different perspectives and sensitivities.

The challenge is that when you recruit for certain senior operational roles, the female candidate pool can still be very small. When we were looking for a Hotel Manager, I said to our Director of People & Culture, “I would really prefer to find a woman.”

We looked internally across a very large hotel organisation and struggled to identify someone who was ready for the role. That tells you something. It means we need to be developing women earlier.

What do you mean by the phrase "measured risk"?

Sometimes leaders need to take a certain level of measured risk to move women forward.

If every time you recruit a Hotel Manager you ask for somebody who has already done exactly that job, and your candidate pool contains 19 men and one woman, nothing changes.

We need to ask ourselves whether there is a woman capable of doing the job who may not have followed exactly the same traditional path. Because it’s not going to happen by chance.

You have to actively look for talent and create the experiences that prepare people for those roles.

Why do you think women still fall out of the hospitality leadership pipeline?

For me, one of the biggest obstacles is continuous employment at the point when careers become most demanding. You become Director of Rooms, and your next role might be Hotel Manager. That requires tremendous presence and flexibility. At exactly the same time, somebody may also be becoming a mother.

There are societal issues involved that companies alone cannot solve, but at enterprise level we can do something. We can keep asking the question: Is there a woman capable of doing this job?

We can make returning to work easier, think differently about career paths and make sure somebody doesn’t stop progressing simply because their life circumstances have changed.

I do believe it is getting better. We are on the right track, but we’re just not there yet.

Women also sometimes wait until they feel completely ready before putting themselves forward. Do male leaders have a role there too?

Yes. I have certainly had examples where I’ve thought, Why aren’t you applying for this? I wouldn’t want to generalise and say that is true of all women, but it happens.

Yes. I have certainly had examples where I’ve thought, Why aren’t you applying for this?

That is another place where a leader can make a difference. Sometimes somebody needs you to tell them, “I see this in you. You should put yourself forward.”

What should other men in leadership be doing differently?

First, you have to be an example. Whenever I’m involved in recruiting another general manager, any sign of sexism, machismo or misogyny would immediately be a reason not to progress somebody.

But I think we have to go further than simply eliminating bad behaviour. We need to actively create opportunities.

If you believe somebody has the potential to move forward, help her get the experience she needs. Put her name into the conversation. Encourage her to apply. Give her responsibility. That is how you change the pipeline.

Emily Goldfischer with Franck Arnold at Virtuoso Travel Week 2026

You also believe women will become even more important to hospitality leadership as AI changes the industry. Why?

Anything that can be automated or programmed will increasingly be handled, in one shape or another, by machines. So where will our value come from? Our humanity.

Hospitality will continue to differentiate itself through empathy, connection, care and the ability to understand another human being. People are not going to come to great hotels because they want to be served by machines. They will come because of how people make them feel.

Our imperfections may actually become part of our added value. And that makes having different forms of leadership, different perspectives and different sensibilities around the table even more important.

Thirty-five years into your career, do you feel optimistic about where women in hospitality are headed?

Very much so. When I started in this industry 35 years ago, I don’t think I could have imagined talking about women leading major international hotel companies.

Today we have those role models. Look at Maud Bailly, Barbara Muckermann, Amanda Hyndman and Kathleen Taylor. Their stories matter enormously because younger women can see what is possible.

We are going in the right direction. But we haven’t arrived.