Hans Enderle: Founded and ran City Lodge 1942-2019
● Hans Enderle, who has died at the age of 77, was the founder, CEO and chair of the City Lodge Group, which revolutionised the hospitality industry in SA.
He started the hotel group in 1985 with the first hotel in Bryanston, Johannesburg, after discovering the concept of select service hotels on a trip to the US.
He decided that hotels in SA were all about opulence and luxury, and not easily accessible to those who needed to travel for business or wanted to take the family somewhere affordable.
He developed the idea of a practical, home-away-from-home style of accommodation after personal research showed that what people in this category really wanted was cleanliness, friendliness and quality service rather than “expensive fripperies”.
The group listed on the JSE in 1992. Enderle was born on September 17 1942 in Switzerland. At 15, he had to leave school to learn a trade after failing the exams that would have led to high school and a more academic path.
“I wasn’t clever enough. It’s as simple as that,” he said. After delivering bread for a bakery, he met a friend who was learning to be a chef and told his dad this was what he wanted to do. “A very good idea,” said his father, who remembered the war years when food was scarce. “You’ll never be hungry.”
He trained and worked as a chef for five years and got a diploma at the hotel school in Lausanne.
In 1966, while working as a waiter, he met someone whose French was so bad that Enderle couldn’t help asking where he was from.
He said he was the personnel manager for Amalgamated Hotels in Johannesburg, and offered him a job.
Enderle, who spoke French, German and Italian and wanted to improve his English but hadn’t been able to get a work permit for the UK or US, accepted and started working as a receptionist at the Langham, which “tried to be a five-star hotel”, for R100 a month.
He found the local hotel industry “terrible, really terrible”, and went back to Switzerland.
In 1970, he got a call about a Holiday Inn chain that was being started. Would he come back and manage the one at Jan Smuts airport, now OR Tambo International?
In 1977, he was made regional director of Holiday Inn and, in 1983, chair and MD.
Two years later, Rennies, the owners, sold it to the Southern Sun group. The understanding was that Enderle would continue as boss of Holiday Inn, but when the deal was signed the new owners told him he’d be No 2. He wasn’t having any of it.
He said he was “conductor material” and “didn’t want to play first violin”.
Built hotel group from scratch to bag SA’s top occupancy rate
If they sold him a hotel that Holiday Inn had under construction they could get rid of him, he said.
They accepted, and he got the mines pension fund to pay the R6m price tag and become a partner.
“You can have 35% of the equity, we’ll take 65%,” he was told. “We’ll provide all the money if you do all the work.”
He was given the target of expanding to 1,000 rooms in seven years.
Thus was born the City Lodge group on August 1 1985. In 25 years, it grew from that half-built hotel in Bryanston to 50 hotels around the country.
Southern Sun made the “crucial mistake” of not putting any restraint on him. He became its stiffest competition.
For five days a week, his target market was business people. He asked them what they needed. They said facilities in the room so they could work in comfort — desk, phone, wall sockets, good lighting. That’s what he gave them.
“Astonishingly”, he found that they liked dining out, so he scrapped the restaurant.
On weekends, he attracted families and groups attending weddings and sports events with a range of specials such as the “team scheme” and “spouse on the house”.
His head office was in room 101, “just next to the toilet”.
By the time he retired as CEO in 1994 City Lodge hotels had the highest occupancy rates in the country.
In 1995, he bought the Courtyard hotel group after meeting the owner, Paul Koep, in a sauna.
Koep was a developer and didn’t really want to manage the group, so asked if he wanted to buy it. Before he’d dried himself, Enderle said yes.
The City Lodge group now consists of 61 hotels in five countries, including five Courtyard hotels with a sixth under construction.
When he retired as a nonexecutive director at 67, Enderle owned 10% of the group, which had a market cap of R2.5bn. He moved to a golf estate on the slopes of the Helderberg in Somerset West, Cape Town.
He died following surgery for bowel cancer.
He is survived by his wife Barbara and two children.