"I have a federal vision of my country"

by Lyda Durango

And it is that for this entrepreneur of the hotel sector the true leaders of society are those who allow a better standard of living for people. "Many people have the idea that the entrepreneur is a selfish person and that all he wants is to get rich," he explains. That's why, every time he opens a new hotel, he seeks to move his image away from that prototype. "I have a strong social sensibility from capitalism," he clarifies.

His passage through Argentine political life, more specifically the liberal party, allowed him to transfer that sensitivity to the political field from where he was an arduous defender of private property. "I was an entrepreneur in the food industry, importing and exporting food," he recalls. But the bonanza would have an end when the dictatorship arrived, then the country lost the Falklands War and then his father died. "I planned to leave the country and reacted because I thought I didn't want my children to be immigrants," she explains. The decision to stay in his country was also marked by his roots in the land that has seen him born, grow and train as an entrepreneur.

Hotels, art and part

Alberto describes himself as a traditionalist person and one of the maximum expressions of that nature is to have been the author of the National Day of the Gaucho and also, writer of the book "El Gaucho, nuestro arquetipo", a work that condenses an interesting vindication to the figure of the gaucho through a description of his life, customs and history. But Alberto is careful to talk about the issue and clarifies that his love for the country does not mean that he is a nationalist. "I am deeply Latin American," he emphasizes. "I have a great love for all the peoples of the world but above all for the Latin American peoples because I carry them in my blood with their music and their writers," he explains.

A lover of the artistic expressions of the Latin American region, Alberto reads on average two books per week and has great admiration for writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez.  Such is his passion for reading that he equates his role as a reader with his role as a hotel entrepreneur. "There are two things that fill me with satisfaction: when I buy a book and when I open a hotel," he says. To compensate for that interest, Alberto ventured into journalism some time ago and managed to connect with the public through articles and columns. "I had a TV show for ten years," he says.
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Between politics, journalism and entrepreneurship, Alberto found the path that would lead him to the position he is currently in. The scarcity of an offer according to an international market would motivate Alberto to start the Howard Johnson franchise in Argentina. "I arrive at the hotel more for observation. Traveling all over the country I always suffered because there was no hotel industry that could attract international tourists," he says. Convinced of the importance of tourism for the country's economy and that it was necessary to guarantee the quality of services, Alberto ventured into teaching, long before he even opened his first hotel, in 1998.

"I managed to bring to the country from Mexico an important man of hotel teaching," he recalls. That was the first step to achieve the approval by the Ministry of Education of the country of the first university degree in hospitality. "Today the country has six top-level universities with a degree in hospitality," he explains. That professionalization is what has solved Howard Johnson's successful career in the country. "We cannot have a large project like ours to reach more than 100 hotels if we do not have the right staff," he emphasizes.

Love of a brand

Choosing which brand Alberto would choose for his hotel dream had a pivotal moment when he got to know the HJ brand and what it meant. "At that time we found that Cedant was a holding company with very important companies linked to tourism and hospitality and that was what prompted us to acclaim Howard Johnson," he explains.  Additionally, at that time Argentina's medium market, category four stars, was the most important at that time.

The decision marked Alberto's life. Therefore, when this man talks about his chain and its hotels, he does so with an enthusiasm that even the vertiginous growth of the race does not manage to stop and that on the contrary strengthens with more vehemence. "I always fall in love with the latest hotel and future projects," he explains. Judging by the plans, many loves will come and this businessman of the Argentine sector will have a lot of passion to continue overflowing but "without losing the valuation of priorities in life. When a man or a woman is dissubicated in the sense of priorities, he loses his reason for insignificant things," he says.

Taking into a good balance his love for the country and his values as a person, Alberto Albamonte will continue to mark the development of cities that for a long time were forgotten by hotel chains and that thanks to HJ have been put on the Argentine tourist map. Ten years after opening the first hotel, he can say without a doubt that thanks to his successful management the HJ hotels are as Argentine as his blood. "I have a federal vision of my country," he says, so he spares no effort to continue opening hotels in intermediate cities, but with great projection for national and international tourism.

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Previous title: Alberto Albamonte, president of Howard Johnson Argentina