Chloe’s Unexpected Journey into Hospitality
Chloe Martin is Director of Operations at the Glenroyal Hotel & Leisure Club in Maynooth.The UK native first came to Ireland at the age of 18 after her mother fell in love with Ireland and decided to make a permanent move here.
“We moved over to a place in South Tipperary in the middle of nowhere,” recalls Chloe. “It was a very new experience coming from East London! It was a strange age for a move like that, at an age when your friends are everything. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I sort-of fell into the hotel business.”
At her mother’s suggestion, Chloe applied for a 16-week Bar Course with Fáilte Ireland in 2007. It led immediately to a job as bartender at the Tower Hotel in Waterford, where she received further training and became Trainee Manager after six months.
Climbing the Ranks: Chloe’s Early Success in Ireland’s Hotel Industry
From this point on, the hospitality bug had well and truly bitten. It was, Chloe says, just something that she loved – even on the worst days – and the holistic training in her initial posting gave her a thorough appreciation of the various moving parts behind the scenes of hotel management. At a personal level, it also brought her out of herself; transforming her from a shy person to a more outgoing one.
The newly-opened Gibson Hotel in Dublin was to be her next place of employment as Assistant Bar Manager. She was thrust into the deep end when the Bar Manager had to take time off following an accident – providing Chloe with the opportunity for greater responsibility and a sharp learning curve. She became Assistant Restaurant Manager, as well as looking after functions at the Gibson and managing their food truck, which went to various locations around the country.
Chloe embraced each challenge and by the age of 22, she had attained invaluable hands-on experience in the critical area of budgetary analysis and management at a high level in the Irish hospitality industry.
She moved to O’Callaghan’s Hotels, starting as Duty Manager at The Green Hotel just off St Stephen’s Green. After a year at The Green Hotel, she moved to another O’Callaghan property in Dublin – the Mont on Merrion Square.
The Road to Management Excellence
This provided her with her first experience of looking after a refurbishment project as the kitchen was being overhauled. At this point, Chloe was also getting experience filling in with ‘odd-jobs’ in the other Dublin properties in the group – mainly the Davenport and the Alex.
A former colleague from The Green had moved to the Dalata Hotel Group and he invited Chloe to come and work with him at the Clayton Ballsbridge.
“It was a very interesting experience,” says Chloe who worked in the 300-room property under GM (and former IHF President) Denyse Campbell as Food & Beverage Manager. “It was heavily group-focused and a very large and busy hotel. I was going back into bars and restaurants again and the bar there was extremely busy… and it was undergoing a €9 million refurbishment as well.”
This was about five years after Chloe had begun her career in hospitality. It was a meteoric career trajectory.
“A lot of people ask me how did I get here,” she admits. “But I just go, ‘Well, it’s a kind-of funny story!’.. It’s nearly laughable but I remember a head chef in Waterford saying to me that if I fell out of a window, I’d probably fall upwards! So while I accept that some luck plays its part, I know that sheer hard work went into it… I’m also very determined and I always want to be the best at what I do.
“More generally speaking, I’d say that it’s simply because I like it. Anyone can do it – if you like it and you work hard enough. It’s a great industry to be in, no matter what your educational background is. It’s a very welcoming and open industry.”
After three years in Ballsbridge, she now had the perfect skill set for the role of F&B Manager at the Morgan Hotel, which included a €15 million refurbishment project.
“When I was reading through the job description, I thought that this was the most exciting job that I’ve ever heard of,” says Chloe. “It was a building site when I started. There were four of us sitting in a bedroom in a hotel with our hard hats on for three months – going over concepts of what it was going to be; writing menus, planning every cocktail and planning out how it was going to be a change from the old Morgan. The old Morgan had a notorious reputation for parties – the nightclub and the saxophone – and they wanted to become a corporate hotel.”
When the hotel reopened fully in July of that year, Chloe says that she had “never before been so proud of something that I had done.” It had been a project almost completely from scratch, with the final weeks involving 120+ hour weeks. She loved every minute of it.
“It was also then that I truly fell in love with the Food and Beverage experience; with how we can offer people so many different elements and go the extra mile.”
Making an Impact at the Glenroyal: A New Chapter in Maynooth
After the enforced closure during the Covid period (during which she was kept on as part of an 11-person skeleton staff), Chloe was looking for a change in her career path. She spotted the advert for the position of Food & Beverage Manager at the Glenroyal.
“My partner is from Maynooth originally,” she says. “We’d been in Dublin together for the ten years that I was working there. When I suggested about moving to Maynooth, she just laughed. I decided to meet them in any case, even though it was a step down on paper (from Deputy GM to F&B Manager)… I couldn’t get over how many people were so nice and who were saying hello the minute I walked in the door. It was such a different vibe from Dublin.”
With her partner able to work remotely, the move was on. The hotel was, she says, the “busiest closed hotel that I had ever seen” owing to the fact that the Government had deigned the workers from the local Intel factory as essential workers who filled the rooms of the hotel’s 100 rooms every night.
“Dublin City hotels are also very much about the transient tourist, whereas local business was paramount here – learning regular customers’ names for example.”
With almost four years working at the Glenroyal (now as Director of Operations), Chloe has already overseen huge changes in the property in various departments and the recent success at winning the Food Lovers Choice award at the Good Food Ireland Awards was an important acclamation and recognition of all that work.
The independent structure of the hotel gives it the freedom to move with the times and the desire to be the best in every way gives it the impetus to keep striving forward. And at this point in her life and career, Chloe is grateful for the opportunities that the hospitality industry has given her:
“You build a family here. It’s very different. I know a lot of people that say, ‘I’m very lucky, I get to work from home’ but for me, it’s important to meet people, to have coffee with friends… walking through the hotel, you’re saying hello to everybody. I think it’s a great industry because it’s enjoyable and I’m a great believer that if you don’t enjoy your job, then it’s pointless.
