THE MAN BEHIND Golden Prince
Golden Prince Hotel and Suites is a Que family owned hotel run by Benedict Que as its president. It is one hotel where one or another member of the managing family is usually present to welcome guests and to make guests feel the “unique Cebuano royalty experience.”
Benedict says the term “Golden” springs from the mother company’s name, Golden Charm Pawnshop, which the family carried in its first hotel venture in 1994, Golden Valley, beside the University of San Carlos - Main Campus. The family opened the first tower of Golden Prince Hotel in 2006 with 57 rooms and the second tower, 11 storeys high, was completed in 2016. The hotel now has 160 rooms; Q, a 24-hour café; Le’Mon, a dining room offering buffet breakfast, lunch, dinner; Kabilin, a merienda outlet featuring Cebuano delicacies; an in-house bakeshop famous for its otap and mamon; Bulawan, a specialty restaurant; a banquet hall; conference rooms; a spa, sauna and gym; and Ang Tindahan ni Angkong, a small store selling Cebu-made goods. All of these have earned this business hotel a four-star rating from the Department of Tourism.
The Que principle in running the hotel and the other family enterprises is the spirit of humility. Benedict says that his father, Ramon, always told him and his siblings Allan and Christopher to be humble: “If you remain humble, you will have no enemies. If you are overbearing, you will have a lot of enemies.” Humility is also taught, ingrained in the hotel’s staff who have been “warned” that there may be difficult guests and that they have to try to see how these guests can be pleased. The family is happy to note that about six of their hotel employees have learned the family principle and have stayed with them since 1994.
Benedict, incidentally, was a polio victim when he was four years old. Therefore he limps and is considered a paraplegic. Despite this handicap, he is devoted to playing badminton and became a member of the Philippine team in the Asean Paragames in 2005 and 2008,
when the team got a bronze medal. Because of his passion for this sport, he’s a life coach, teaching the game to children from financially handicapped families and to teach them discipline as well, making them eligible to enter athletic programs for the regional Palaro games.
Ten years ago, Benedict joined the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry and says he regrets that he had not joined it earlier as he has now seen what the group is doing for the business community in particular and for the whole Cebu community in general. He is now a member of the Board and was surprised when he was called at a difficult time in his life (he and his wife Teresa were in the United States where Teresa underwent an operation) that he had been elected chairman for the 2018 Cebu Business Month (CBM). He accepted the challenge and is now very upbeat about the theme for this year’s CBM: “Innovate Cebu!” The group is inviting “innovators,” mostly Filipino inventors to come and speak about their innovations, including one who has found a way to have “perpetual” light (which is being developed outside the country), and one who invented a railroad running on magnetic tracks.
Aside from Golden Prince and Golden Valley hotels, Benedict is also president of the family’s Primehomes Development Corp. and the Golden Charm Pawnshop which has become the Golden Charm Gift Shop, where the Que family’s charmed businesses began; charmed, because of the family principle of humility.