Jim Moore - Hotelier with a heart for the kids

Jim Moore grew up around hospitality. His Irish tea trader father brought the family to Auckland from their home in Sri Lanka soon after Jim was born. “Mum and Dad had a lot of overseas people coming to visit, whether it was Sam Twining of Twining’s Tea, or Dilmah founder Merrill Fernando, I was familiar with hosting and found it really interesting,” Jim says.

His dad met Jim’s Canadian-born mum in India where his parents lived prior. An orphan, Jim’s dad had instilled a passion to care for disadvantaged kids. It was a baton Jim willingly picked up, going on to drive fundraising of almost $700,000 for Cure Kids during his 16 years as general manager of Novotel Queenstown Lakeside.

“Dad only died recently, aged 98, after writing his own book and donating all the proceeds to Women’s Refuge. What an example,” Jim says.

Jim’s popular Memorial Centre quiz nights were packed out - this year’s starring Shaun Wallace, the Dark Destroyer from The Chase, raising $79,000. His Novotel Men’s Lunches raised $30,000. He and the team also fundraised for a charity in India – dear to Jim’s heart, the Whakatipu Reforestation Trust and Educate For Nature.

Cure Kids became his thing, Jim either spearheading or competing in Accor fundraisers like $10 Challenge and its Fiji multisport events. In 2004 while managing Novotel Ellerslie he biked with 20 staff from Wellington to Auckland raising funds.

As a kid, he was a strong long-distance runner, school champion while boarding at King’s College. Sport and the outdoors were a way of life for him and his four siblings, enjoying great holidays boating, fishing and camping at Lake Taupo.

“At about 13 my brother and I rode our bikes to Taupo from Auckland. They just left us to it,” grins Jim. “We got to Hamilton on the first night and knocked on a farmer’s door asking to pitch our tents. At the end of the holidays we rode back.”

A year at uni didn’t cut it but in 1984 Jim scored a traineeship with THC (Tourist Hotel Corporation) in the Bay of Islands, aged 19, where he met wife of 34 years, Sue. “I worked a six-day week, 70 to 90 hours. It was essentially slave labour. I decided I’d never work in a hotel again,” Jim grins. However, they spent several years in the UK working in small hotels, restaurants and bars.

Jim was street smart by then. As a 19-year-old Northland duty manager he wasn’t old enough to drink in the bar but old enough to break up a fight. “We had a fine dining restaurant staffed by Europeans, but also a pretty rough public bar that was almost ‘Once Were Warriors’. I played pool with the locals on my day off so if there was a fight in the bar, I’d have protection and not get beaten up.”

After a short stint at Waitomo, they headed overseas, Jim hitching around NZ first in 1986, ironically visiting Queenstown when the Novotel, that he’d later manage, was being built.

Back home he worked at Quality Hotels in Auckland, before becoming front office manager for its Queenstown A-Line Hotel, living in staff housing on Gorge Road. He and Sue married at Walter Peak in 1990.

It was then off to Wellington and Auckland’s Waipuna International Hotel before becoming opening manager of Sky City Hotel in Auckland. “That was full on. We had 11 lifts, and I was told I needed 44 permanent staff to stand in them and push the buttons 24/7. I hired 50 people on three-month contracts after which I was very pleased to say goodbye,” Jim grins. He had to write his own systems and was given 7500 CVs from which to employ 200 staff.

In 1996 he joined Accor, managing the new Novotel Rotorua, headed back to Waipuna, then as a young, inexperienced general manager opened Novotel Hamilton at 35, recruiting the whole team. “Those were my biggest challenges.”

Jim worked his way through the North Island with Accor and was applying for jobs in Australia when Novotel Queenstown manager Carl Braddock announced he was moving. With three primary school-aged kids it was a great, settled option. “The boss said maybe a one-to-three-year contract. I stayed 16,” Jim, who recently became cluster manager for three Accor hotels in Fiji, smiles.

There have been lots of laughs in his 30 years of hotel management, like the lady who called reception as her “pie was stuck in the microwave”. “I said, ‘You don’t have a microwave in your room’, but she insisted she did,” Jim says. “She’d locked the pie in the safe.”

In Queenstown a female guest unwittingly placed a breakfast glass in the fruit juicer and turned it on, spraying shattered glass around the restaurant.

Fiji is an opportunity to travel, but Jim admits there are new cultural challenges.

However, he’s used to rolling his sleeves up and helping his ‘wonderful team’ in Queenstown, who recently nominated him for a prestigious Accor Bernaches Award for community service, which he won. Only three are awarded to individuals out of 350,000 staff worldwide. “I’m looking forward to flying to Paris to pick that up,” he says.