Ron Anderson Cavanaughs’ Regional Boss Worked Around The Nation Before Landing A Top Job At Home

Ron Anderson has rooms filled with kings and queens.

It seems appropriate, since he says he wants to treat his guests like royalty when they stay at one of five Spokane-area hotels.

As Cavanaughs Hospitality Corp.’s regional manager, Anderson is one of the newest additions to Cavanaughs’ growing chain.

He spends his days closing sales, managing employees, meeting with customers and walking the properties to check the lobbies, the kitchens and some of the five hotels’ more than 1,300 rooms.

“Inspect what you expect,” he often says.

Anderson also coaches employees to make their own decisions in solving customer problems.

“If you’ve got a good attitude and you recover, you’ll have a more loyal customer,” he said.

Sometimes, though, a customer asks the impossible.

Anderson won’t name names, but he said that was the case with “an actor” who was staying in one of Cavanaughs Inn at the Park’s finest suites. The man called the front desk to complain he could hear the sound of running water.

The hotel sent several people to the room, including a plumber to check the pipes for air.

The actor said, “It’s coming from over there,” pointing to the window which overlooks Spokane Falls.

“It was the (Spokane River) water coming over the dam,” Anderson said. “He wanted them to shut it off.”

That guest was staying in the second best suite in the hotel. The other, the Parkside Grand Suite, Anderson says, is “the nicest room in Spokane.”

For $900 a night, you get a full kitchen, a fireplace, two bathrooms and a hot tub on a balcony that overlooks Riverfront Park. In the bedroom, a television rises from a cabinet at the foot of the huge bed.

For someone who once thought he would never get to be manager of the Ridpath - where years ago he took his junior prom date for dinner - Anderson, 46, has come a long way. He now leads a management team that includes the Ridpath’s manager, and those from the Inn at the Park, Fourth Avenue, Templin’s and the River Inn.

After graduating from Central Valley High School, Anderson attended Spokane Falls Community College and Eastern Washington University before deciding to specialize in business and hotel management. That meant one more move - to Washington State University, where in 1975, the hotel management program was starting.

His first job after college was with the Hyatt Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco.

For someone born and raised in Spokane, that experience came with some shock. He was in a prime space in an international city where guests are as exotic as they are varied.

“My eyes were just wide open,” he said. “I got a huge awakening real quick.”

But it was there, he said, that he learned “the ultimate hospitality.”

Three years later he came home for Christmas, stayed at the Red Lion in the Valley and left with a job - as hotel manager.

Anderson then moved to Yakima’s Red Lion, then to North Seattle with West Coast Hotels, and then to Kennewick, where he managed his first Cavanaughs property owned by Spokane’s Barbieri family.

Even when he left to run the Red Lion at Lloyd Center in Portland, “I always kept in contact with the Barbieris.”

Time, fate and business came together to bring Anderson home.

One reason the Barbieris decided to offer Cavanaughs stock on the New York Stock Exchange in April, was the opportunity to develop a region-wide name. The Red Lion chain had been bought out by DoubleTree, which then was bought by Promus Hotels. The name recognition for that regional chain was lost, said Don Barbieri, president and CEO of Cavanaughs.

The new parent company of what once was Red Lion started moving its top managers out of the Northwest.

“We recognized they weren’t going to be happy, so we decided to take advantage of that,” Barbieri said. “One of the ones who came to our minds right away was Ron Anderson. He was a quality guy and his roots were in Spokane. So we tracked him down.”

They found him in Houston in mid-summer this year.

“The fact that it was 100 degrees with 86 percent humidity didn’t affect my decision,” Anderson said. “It was an opportunity I would have taken wherever I was.”

He and his wife Joy jumped at the chance to raise their family in the Spokane area.

Today he’s helping Cavanaughs deal with the challenges of growing from a small family-run hotel group to a chain of 19 hotels reaching from Montana to Utah.

They’ve added to their sales force and are developing a service standards program for hotel staff.

Most importantly for Anderson, he plays host to the thousands of people who come through Spokane and stay at a Cavanaughs hotel every month.

“That’s one of the nice things about this business,” he said. “There isn’t a typical day.”