Pros
It's a paycheck. Benefits are pretty good.
Cons
As a manager, here are some of the things you should know about ESA before accepting employment. The company is franchising. To make themselves appear more profitable than they actually are, ESA has spent the last several years reducing the staffing model far past the bare minimum. There is no night auditor, no housekeeping supervisor, no rooms inspector, no porter, no sales associate, no front desk manager, no onsite HR, and most properties operate without an assistant general manager. All of these position’s responsibilities were simply added to other positions, mostly the GM. There is only only one sales manager for a dozen or more hotels. All of the sales activity for the property is placed upon the GM, and AGM if there is one. You will be required to produce 2 or more leads a week, and they are incredibly serious about those being in on a timely manner. Our district manager forced a GM to come in and finish the weekly sales submission after his house had been destroyed during a storm, and his family displaced. He left the company soon after. Managers are treated as disposable. In fact, when you join the company, they do not even give you a personal email account. You simply take over the property’s generic email address. ESA's policy and strategy is governed by the sales side of the business, and unfortunately, many of these people have no idea what it is like to work at a property. They think the GM has time to drive to construction sites several times a week and to chat up whatever contractors are in the area in a vain attempt to solicit business. Total bottom feeder mentality. ESA is obsessed with these "drive-bys". You will be required to drive past your comp set 3 times a week to take pictures of, and then try to steal (they call it "shift business") guests from your competitor to your property. They also wanted managers to go into the lobbies of their competitors to listen in on the conversations of guests for the same purpose. It went much farther though. My district manager encouraged me to dress in a hoodie, create a fake story about being an executive assistant, desperately trying to find my demanding boss acceptable lodging, and scam the swing shift front desk agent out of their arrivals list. Classy. Even when your hard work in this sales insanity seems to come to some great fruition and you are poised to bring new and exciting business into your hotel, the corporate level sales force (high schoolers in NC) will bungle the contract with your hard-won new business. Months will go by with no contract (a simple one page document in most cases). You will find yourself repeatedly apologizing to your “new client” for the lack of response and follow through from the sales department. All of these activities, sales, labor, linen inventory, broken items, and otherwise, are micro-managed in one of a dozen "trackers" they use as their primary management tool. It won't matter if all your housekeepers called out sick, you have 30 rooms to clean, and you are also covering the front desk. The submission of these trackers is MANDATORY. Many of the properties are in extreme disrepair. 3 of the 6 properties in my district were far too disgusting for me to spend even a single night in them. One of the highlight fails of their extreme minimal staffing model is the fact there is no one to actually clean the hotel. Each property has a single maintenance position for which you get only 40 hours. That means no maintenance on the weekend or evenings. The best part is, when they did the last staff reduction, they added the porter responsibilities to maintenance. As a result of this, 15 hours of the ME's week is spent taking out the trash for the hotel, so that leaves 25 hours of maintenance for 130+ room, often external, property. Perfect! Everything is well taken care of, naturally. Needless to say, finding someone that is a skilled ME, and is also willing to be the only janitor, is quite difficult. The most intense difficulty lies, however, with their housekeeping model. Each hotel is allowed only one full time housekeeper, the rest are part time. (Though at my property there were 4 housekeepers working full time hours, without benefits or full time legal protections - undoubtedly a violation of several labor laws). If you have been in the industry for even a short time, you know the difficulty in finding good housekeepers. ESA's model makes it even more challenging, because you are asking people to clean rooms with kitchens, have no porter to support them or clear the floors, often having a severe shortage of laundry, and refusing to even pay benefits for full time work. Having no HK inspector or manager, every room is required to be inspected by the GM. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad, and so many managers weren’t killing themselves trying to keep their properties afloat. As if to highlight how little value and trust they place in managers, if you need to put a room offline for the day, due to HK shortages or other disaster, you have to ask your district manager, who has to ask the regional manager, who then has to ask a senior VP for permission to put a SINGLE room offline. Only then will the VP tell the regional revenue manager (on the weekends there is a single revenue manager on call for 600+ hotels) to take that room off the market. Good luck! The laundry is done overnight, by an employee who is supposed to also be able to cover the front desk. If anything goes wrong overnight (what could go wrong overnight?) your entire day will be destroyed when the HK staff comes in (hopefully) to start cleaning rooms, sans laundry. What this means, is that if you take a management position with ESA, you are going to spend far more time cleaning rooms, doing laundry, responding to corporate whims, and taking out the trash for the hotel, than you will actually managing or interacting with guests. Though they don't say it outright, GM's and AGM's acting as housekeepers and doing night laundry is part of their staffing model. Even when you are doing 10 straight overnight laundry shifts, all those trackers, sales work, and whatever other corporate demands were deemed essential this week? You got it: MANDATORY. Don’t let those review scores drop though!!! ESA is a place where failure is not tolerated, but success is impossible. If you are a sincere manager who cares about people, you will tear your hair out in frustration and sadness. The front desk agents are also overtasked and overworked. They are responsible for things traditionally left to experienced managers, including balancing inventory, walking guests (happens so much), and managing the housekeepers on shift. The sad truth is that the reduction of staffing is just a part of modern day corporatism. Every company is forcing people to do more for less. ESA, however, takes it to a place of ludicrousness. Corporate is very, very demanding of results, and wain to offer anything in the way of logistical support or, for that matter, any understanding of the challenges of daily operations. Social media and Medallia complaints are ubiquitous across the entire brand, so they are well aware of the problems. They just don’t care. While all of the success or failure of their ridiculous model is placed upon the single manager at a property, upper management spends most of their time "on calls" with each other comparing notes about which VP has had the most sign offs on whatever online training course they want every employee to watch this week. ESA says it's people focused, but I watched them fire 20-year-veterans of the company when they had a bad quarter, and demote dozens of newly promoted AGMs back to their Team Lead position to save money. I watched them deny health benefits to a 13-year-serving full time housekeeper because she didn’t understand that she had to reconfirm her benefits every year. Pleas of mercy from the GM fell on deaf ears. Months went by with no response from HR. People. Focused. The same bad quarter they also took away the fruit from the "breakfast", and continue to straight-up lie about offering breakfast on several external booking sites. Breakfast is now referred to as a “coffee bar”, and when bad reviews come in about said “breakfast”, corporate simply asks the GM if they have trained the front desk staff in proper verbiage; as if referring to it as a coffee bar at check-in will in any way abate guest’s anger in the morning when they search aimlessly for something to eat. This is the theme across all ESA management. Placing blame and responsibility for flawed vision, lack of corporate values, and poor management strategies that cloak unchecked corporate greed, on the hard working, underpaid, and undervalued property staff. Any management personnel that have been with the company for more than a year or two, have as their primary intention self-preservation. As such they adhere, like those affected with Stockholm syndrome, to the company’s autocratic upper management, ridiculous structure, and greedily imposed staff requirements. In short, they ask for everything, and give almost nothing. This corporation, by their actions and policies, show that they don’t care about people at all. Neither employees, nor guests. I would not recommend working for this company in any capacity. You will be expected to work like a pack animal, and simply thrown away when you finally collapse.