My Day

Conor O'Connell - concierge

I’VE BEEN at Brooks Hotel for 12 years. I had been a concierge in other hotels but felt at home here as soon as I walked in. I love the atmosphere here.

My role is to be the first person the guest sees when they enter the hotel.

In some hotels management don’t encourage you to get too friendly with guests. It is the opposite here. Guests become friends, and there are many I keep in touch with. Of every 10 people that come through the door, eight are repeat visitors.

I start at 7am and the first thing I do is the handover, to check how the night went.

Then I’ll scan the guest list to see who is leaving and who is arriving, checking in particular for return visitors so I can welcome them by name.

When I first meet a guest, I ask how they would like to be addressed and ask them to call me Conor, it’s all very friendly.

Then I’ll go into the breakfast room and say ‘‘Hi” to the guests and ask them if there’s anything I can do for them or help them with.

Mostly it will be booking theatre or gig tickets for the O2, or recommending a nice restaurant or tour.

At some point I’ll check the meeting and screening rooms, just to make sure they are laid out correctly.

If someone is organising a meeting and wants something changed at the last minute, I’ll sort that out for them.

When lunch is depends on what’s going on. I’ll eat in the staff canteen but am always on call.

An emergency here might be someone ringing from the airport to say they’ve left their passport in the safe, so I’d have to organise a taxi to deliver it.

Recently, we had a man who fell and broke his ankle in three places the day before he was due to go home.

His wife had to go back, but he had to stay on for two weeks and so we gave him total TLC to help him through.

I might have to nip out for some international papers at some point, and it’s nice to get out for a bit.

I’m a member of the Clefs d’Or, a network of concierges from top hotels around the world, so I know that the first five minutes is when a guest makes up their mind whether or not they like a hotel. You can’t get that first five minutes back, so I’ve to make sure they are happy from the moment they come through that door.

To be a good concierge you need an in-depth knowledge of the city and a love of people and, luckily, I have both.

* Conor O’Connell is head concierge at Brooks Hotel in Dublin