One page on how the engagement is running: where each module stands, the five-month view, what is waiting on whom, and the commercial position. This page is the single place to look.
Two builds are live: the monthly Business Review Meeting (BRM) and the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for Morocco. Every module walks the same six steps, in plain English: agree the one-page charter, meet to kick off, learn how things work today, build it, prove it in daily use, then hand it over so Aleph can run it without us. Ideas raised in the room join the bottom of the board as potential modules. They are lettered rather than numbered, so nothing on the committed list is confused with something still to be decided; a letter becomes a number the day Aleph activates it.
| Module | Charter | Kickoff | Discovery | Build | Prove It | Handover |
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1 · Business Review Meeting (BRM)
Sponsor Bani
Project charter · Kickoff deck · Data register · Current-state map · Template drafts · GM interview questions · Owner conversations · Data room · the journey so far
Now: build, re-based 5 October. A version 1 data layer Aleph owns (Fairmas, Medallia, CoStar), an engineer hired by Aleph on DH requirements, Claude on top for the half-built review; BIRD parked on cost
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2 · SOPs Morocco
Sponsor Jad · counterpart Fiona Stewart
Now: build, the engine demonstrated to Aleph on 4 August
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3 · Intranet
Activated 4 August: one home for the engine, its outputs and the wider body of knowledge. The design direction is now set — one central Aleph repository, reaching every property through a few named seats each — and the first build artefact is live: a working mockup of the home itself, on both candidate platforms
Charter · Architecture options · Design mockup · TopNotch proposal · Scope of work (Excel) · the journey so far
Now: discovery and first build — design mockup live; sponsor confirmation and the taxonomy workshop next
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4 · Owner-Pitch Bot
Air-gapped by design before any build
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5 · LOI to HMA Review
Letter of Intent (LOI) to Hotel Management Agreement (HMA) reviews; contained and confidential by design
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PotentialA · Project Management Tool
Asked for by Jad at the 17 July review, for Fiona: the way this programme is run, one dashboard, living registers, day counters, applied to Aleph’s own project portfolio, so a team scattered across time zones coordinates itself instead of being chased. Jad may move it up the order
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Requested and awaiting scoping; it joins the walk once agreed | |||||
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PotentialB · Portfolio Procedure Library
Raised by Marc Matar at the 24 July Food and Beverage (F&B) session: one complete, consistent set of procedures for the wider portfolio, tiered for three, four and five star and for resort or city hotel, with food safety, cost control and service standards running through it. The Morocco work proves the method on two properties; this would apply it at portfolio scale, and it is a separate piece of work with its own sources, volume and terms
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Raised by Marc, referred to Bani and Jad; a conversation on its own merits | |||||
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PotentialC · Owner Onboarding Journey
Raised by Jad at the 17 July review, not yet committed: a clear picture for owners of what happens, and what they receive when, from HMA signature to opening day, so no owner asks for a pre-opening budget two years early
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An idea on the list, not yet a module; it joins the walk only if activated | |||||
The engagement runs 1 July to 30 November 2026. Solid bars are committed work. Dashed bars are indicative: the order of Modules 3 to 5 is Aleph's to set at any steering readout. The bars move as the work moves.
The few things the programme is waiting on right now, and how long each has been waiting. The counters update daily. Everything else is moving.
Three candidate designs for the monthly pack went to corporate on 7 August and waited fifty-nine days for a verdict. At the sitting of 5 October Bani gave one: they are what Aleph has today, better presented, and not what Aleph wants. What Aleph wants is the analysis, which needs the data in one place. The room decided to build a version 1 data layer that Aleph owns, from Fairmas, Medallia and CoStar, with Claude producing the first half of each review from it. The three designs stay as the specification of what the owner sees; nothing else about them is awaited. The engineer requirements are the next deliverable, due 7 October.
The 4 August session became a working demonstration of the SOP engine. Bani joined from the road, with Fiona Stewart and Abdellah Essonni, the Regional Vice President (RVP) North Africa; Jad and Neil were travelling and have the recording. Caroline took the room from a version 1 standard through the engine’s marked-up version 2, with the reasoning shown change by change, to the approved clean English and the French, in minutes. Bani confirmed the mandate in his own words: the objective is the factory, not just the car. The Business Review walk-through with Bani is being scheduled separately, within the week.
Both workstreams in one sitting with Bani, Jad, and Fiona. Fiona walked the full SOP library through, division by division; the SOP brief was confirmed as customising the existing library to the two hotels, not writing a generic one; the General Manager (GM) introductions are in; owner conversations were added to discovery; and the working platform was agreed. The scoping work with Fiona has since been done in two sessions: Rooms and Spa on Tuesday 21 July, Food and Beverage (F&B) with Marc Matar on Friday 24 July.
Jad introduced Deep Hospitality to six GMs across the portfolio, from Rabat and Dubai to Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam, Accra, and Abha, with an open invitation to speak candidly, and all six conversations are done: Philippe Hitti on 20 July, Emile Roworth and Abdeljalil Zerhouni on 21 July, Ali Hdaib with his cluster head of finance on 23 July, and Jeff Nogue with his finance director and Fredrik Reinisch back to back on Monday 27 July. Jad sat the calls out so the conversations stayed free. The first working files followed the same day: the Addis monthly workbook and forecast file from Jeff Nogue, and the consolidated June owners pack for the Dubai cluster from Fredrik Reinisch.
On the morning of Thursday 6 August the other end of the same process was mapped, with Rohit Narang and Satish Jaidev, and Jad joining. Satish gave the time from leave, which we are grateful for. Three things came out of it. The finance systems question is answered: the first wave of hotels is in Fairmas training through August with use expected from around September, and ONOMO has signed with onboarding running toward the year end, so the build is designed for where the estate is going. What that platform will not carry is just as useful to know, because it presents the numbers rather than the story, and the measures that are not financial sit outside it. Second, the dates the packs actually arrive were confirmed from the receiving end and match what the files themselves show, with a target of the 10th agreed in the room. Third, and most useful of all, corporate set out what it actually wants the review to be: mostly forward-looking rather than a recital of last month, built around the few initiatives that move the numbers and the bottlenecks in their way.
Short, independent conversations with owners, added at the review on Bani’s suggestion. Jad sent the introductions on 21 July and nothing came back, the timing sitting inside the annual leave season. Bani took the follow-up personally at the 4 August session, and on 7 August he wrote to the owner contacts himself, in their own language, putting his own weight behind the request. It worked. The asset director for the two Morocco hotels answered the same morning, and the reason for the quiet turned out to be a simple one: he had never seen the July note at all. He is glad to talk. Bani passed the thread to us on 10 August and we replied the same afternoon, asking him to name a time that suits him. He named Thursday afternoon, and the first owner conversation of the programme was held on Thursday 13 August, 15:00 Morocco time, with Mehdi El Baqali, Asset Director for the two Morocco hotels, and Nitin and Caroline listening. No one from Aleph was in the room, the convention that kept the GM interviews free, and it held. One sitting carried both workstreams, the monthly review and a short passage on the standards work.
What he said matters, because it is the first time the customer of the whole reporting chain has been asked directly. He receives the month seven days after close and the review itself is the third Tuesday, so the owner clock is now measured from the owner end rather than inferred. He finds the pack too long to work from: it runs to roughly forty slides and the meeting takes three to four hours, and what he wants is five to ten slides carrying the position, the comparison against budget and last year, and the reason for any gap. He was explicit that the value is in the next three to six months rather than the month already closed. He asked for two things the pack does not carry today: productivity by department, which he cannot see at all, and a short revenue management outlook, which he requested from the property the day before the call. He also wants the figures to be comparable against budget, forecast and prior years without being rebuilt by hand each time, and he traces the errors he sees to the reporting being assembled manually rather than drawn from a system.
None of that was prompted, and it lands the week the three template drafts are with corporate for their verdict, asking for very close to what those drafts propose. The second conversation followed on Monday 31 August: the Onomo ownership leadership – Valerie Karmin Detry, Chief Operating Officer of the group, with asset managers Zaynab Bouhachi and Reda Chraibi – with Nitin and Caroline listening, and again no one from Aleph in the room, so the convention has now held twice. They arrived prepared, led with their own list, and kept the call running well past its slot by their choice. Their brief for the reviews came in their own structure: one view where the systems speak to each other, comparison against budget with the path of the strategy visible rather than just the number beaten or missed, and above all anticipation – seeing the signals early rather than explaining deviations after the fact. Owner-set targets with early alerts drew the strongest reaction of the call. On standards, they read the library as comprehensive but written from large upscale hotels and not always fitted to a midscale estate, and the brand side is preparing brand standards of its own for arrival, departure and the outlets. Both of the owner groups Jad introduced in July have now been met. The approach, the question blocks, and the running log of every owner conversation – attendees, route, and status – sit on the owner conversations page; logged on the data register.
The Morocco side is in: the brand positioning pack from Jad and the two mystery guest assessments from Fiona on 18 July, then the division files themselves on 19 July. Still to come on the Business Review side: access to the Hotel Management Agreement (HMA) terms offered by Bani, and the data warehouse cut-over plan. Each is logged on its register: Business Review and SOPs.
Closed on Friday 24 July. Bani returned a revised agreement that same morning, adding the payment clarification and the limitation of liability Deep Hospitality had asked for and confirming the intellectual property position already drafted. Deep Hospitality reviewed the updated clauses, signed, and returned it the same day, with the first invoice alongside it. Rohit handles payment.
Fiona uploaded them to the 02_SOPs folder on Sunday 19 July: Rooms in English and French, the Food and Beverage (F&B) manual and SOPs, Spa in English and French, and the Food Health and Safety manual with its checklists. Both scoping sessions now work from the documents themselves rather than a description of them. The marketing toolkit followed by email on 20 July, and Annette moved the Revenue Control and Reservations set alongside the other divisions on 22 July. The guest satisfaction feedback asked for after Tuesday’s session came in on 22 and 23 July from Jad and Fiona, which leaves the library index as the one thing still to come. Asked and arrived, in full, on the SOP data register.
| Invoice | Period | Amount, ex VAT | Status | Ageing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| INV-000004 | July 2026 | AED 52,500 | Sent 24 July, due 23 August · past due | – |
| INV-000007 | August 2026 | AED 52,500 | Sent 26 August, due 25 September | – |
The Business Review work runs on a simple discipline: understand how the review works today, name where it hurts, design the future state to remove exactly that, prove it on one property, then let it run month after month. Each step publishes its working documents here as they are ready; the deeper working files stay in the Deep Hospitality workspace.
What we are solving and for whom, agreed in the room on 8 July: insight first, accuracy second, time third, and the owner never needing a call to understand their own review.
The current process, drawn from the kickoff, the sample packs, six General Manager conversations, the corporate session and now the first owner conversation: six properties mapped step by step, four different finance systems feeding one shared template, and two clocks running at once, because the numbers reach corporate early in the month while the owner sees them somewhere between the tenth and the twentieth. All three ends of the chain now agree on that, which makes it the first measured thing in the programme rather than an impression. The owner end is the newest and the most precise: for the two Morocco hotels the month arrives seven days after close and the review sits on the third Tuesday, so the gap between the numbers being ready and the conversation happening is a fortnight by design, not by slippage.
Twelve friction points, each traced to a call or a pack, severity-rated to steer the design. Eleven came from the property side and were tested property by property; the twelfth came from the corporate seat on 6 August. The register sits inside the current-state map, and every item carries what was actually said, by whom, and what it was checked against. The owner conversation of 13 August corroborated three of them from the one seat that had never been asked: the pack having grown past what it is read for, the effort spent rebuilding comparisons by hand, and the review looking backwards when the value is forwards.
The design corporate asked for on 6 August, drawn three ways on one real month so the room can choose rather than imagine: a compressed version of today’s pack, a five-question story that is mostly forward-looking, and a brief that shows a fixed dashboard and then only what actually moved. All three carry the same content, the same automation and the same Aleph look, so the choice is arrangement rather than substance. The numbers arrive already drawn as charts, the commentary is the only thing a General Manager types, and every pack opens with the commitments the last meeting left behind. On 3 September the choice resolved by rule rather than ballot: Neil set one standard Aleph format for the estate, with exceptions reserved for portfolio-scale owners and the two Moroccan trophies, and the three drafts now fold into that single consensus version for the dedicated sitting.
The four working examples built earlier from the packs have done their job and are no longer separate proposals. The commitments idea now lives inside all three templates, as the page every pack opens with. The pre-issue control sheet stays on as the safety net the pilot runs before anything issues. The other two served the diagnosis and rest here for reference.
One property, one month, run alongside the current process so nothing an owner sees changes until the two have been compared side by side. The design is done and rehearsed: the folder pattern each property month will use, the master list of everything a pack contains, and a full dress rehearsal built on a real month inside the Deep Hospitality workspace, so the September cycle starts on tested ground rather than a diagram. The property is chosen with Rohit, and the steer is to start where the new finance platform has not yet reached. The gate is unchanged and deliberately blunt: the drafted output goes out as written, or with light edits, or it is not ready.
Business as usual once the pilot passes: the process runs monthly, measured against the baseline the corporate session set, with the target of packs ready by the tenth. Each review is captured so that what was agreed becomes a short list with an owner and a date against every line, confirmed by whoever chaired, and carried into the front of next month’s pack automatically. Ownership moves to the regional teams as it beds in, which is where the leadership has said the reviews belong. Guardrails on one page and a handover so Aleph runs it without us.
The SOPs Morocco work runs on the same discipline as the Business Review: understand the library as it stands, name where it hurts, design the property-fitted future state, prove it on one division at one property, then hand the method over so Aleph runs the next property without us. Documents publish here as each step matures.
Two resorts, one collection, no copy-paste: the Category A operational set adapted to each property’s identity, in both languages, inside the timeline Aleph has given the owner. The brief was confirmed at the 17 July review: customise the existing library to the two hotels, not a generic rewrite. Two scoping sessions with Fiona settled the first divisions and the working method: Rooms and Spa on Tuesday 21 July, Food and Beverage on Friday 24 July with Marc Matar in the room. The charter is agreed on that basis, and the work has moved on to the library itself.
Roughly one thousand documents, professionally translated, indexed, and inherited. Fiona walked the full library through at the 17 July review, division by division, and on 19 July put the division files in the data room: Rooms and Spa in both languages, the Food and Beverage (F&B) manual and SOPs, and Food Health and Safety. Reading them is what the two scoping sessions now build on.
The first procedure has now been through the engine end to end, and what it exposed holds well beyond that one document. The library is directionally sound but it is not fitted. It is generic where it needed to be local, carrying nothing of Morocco and nothing that separates a mountain chalet from a lagoon resort. It is unfinished where it needed to be exact, with template placeholders and blank amounts still sitting in issued pages, and the odd line inherited from a different class of hotel. And it is procedural where the standard is experiential: clear about what a team should do, near silent on how the moment should feel, which is the whole of the luxury difference.
Rooms and Spa carry procedures but no divisional manual. The new Food and Beverage manual has not yet been lined up against the older procedures beneath it. Bar service has no section in the library at all and in-room dining barely one. There is no Ramadan standard, in two Moroccan hotels where it is the highest-stakes month of the year. And the French runs unevenly, sound across most divisions and thin in Food and Beverage.
Most operator libraries age exactly this way. Naming it precisely is what lets the redesign start where the guest actually feels it, rather than at the top of a list.
Six General Manager conversations, and the two Morocco working sessions. Everyone was asked a version of the same question: what actually happens to a standard once it lands.
The sharpest line anyone has given us: “when you receive SOPs and it is so big, it is decoration.” They described volumes arriving that they compared to War and Peace, and the receipt they were asked to sign against them — “receiving it is a thing, but reading them is another thing.” Their example of what quietly discredits a set: a procedure still routing physical post through a General Manager’s assistant, at a hotel that has neither. Their own fix, offered unprompted, was to synthesise it, make it easy, and then carry it in video and audio rather than in more pages.
The working reality: the manuals and procedures arrive, “we receive it, we sign on it, and we send it back,” and the property then tailor-fits them to its own departments and its own country before building its training from them. Asked which format lands best, they would take all of them — and named on-the-job training as the thing that actually carries.
The same pattern again: procedures arrive generic because they are written regionally, then get customised to local labour law and culture. Their most useful contribution was the opposite case: an HR process where the system was built around the standard, so the procedure is executed by the workflow rather than remembered from a page.
The most standards-credentialled voice so far, and the only one who has written this kind of library rather than received it: fifteen years as a corporate director of food and beverage for an international group before moving into general management. He offered his own collection unprompted, “I have tons of SOPs of all different colours … a very deep and clear understanding of all the SOPs in food and beverage and modus operandi of all these big chains,” and volunteered to help.
On why libraries bloat, described from inside the corporate office rather than from the property: every two years a new adviser arrives in fashion with the chief executive, selling the latest steps of service, and everyone has to read the new book. The volume grows by cycle, not by need.
And the distinction he pressed hardest, which sets the scope of any standard we write: a franchised hotel run by a white-label operator is not a managed hotel of a global brand, and the rules of engagement are not the same. “You do not manage, operate, and have the same expectation of a fully managed property by a big international brand.” A standard authored for the second lands differently in the first, and the person the property actually answers to is the owner.
Named Rooms, Food and Beverage and Spa as the last divisions written and the weakest, and was precise about what is missing. Not procedure, but “the personalisation of that luxury experience.” Their description of the documents as they stand: “rather more systemic … an action-based tick box. Did you answer in three rings? Did you say good morning?” — with the higher element of welcome absent.
On their own division, plainly: “we’re missing a lot of SOPs.” What they want is an index of a complete set, section by section — bar, restaurant, room service, specialty dining, conference — and past the document itself, the same content turned into training material and into something the operation can be audited against.
Read together, they say the same thing from different chairs: the content is not the problem, the form is. Every one of them, unprompted, described the fix as something other than a longer document. The fifth conversation adds a second axis to that: not only the form a standard takes, but whether it was written for the kind of hotel it lands in, since a franchised property under a white-label operator answers to its owner rather than to a brand.
Public reviews across TripAdvisor, Booking.com and Trip.com, read for pattern rather than score. Both hotels rate strongly overall; these are the themes that recur underneath the rating.
Food and beverage service speed and sequence is the most repeated operational complaint at both properties, and it turns up inside five-star reviews as often as poor ones: fifty minutes for a coffee and a juice, a breakfast slow enough that the guest fetched their own plates, drinks that took three or four asks, a long wait in an empty restaurant.
Arrival is the second theme: rooms not ready and waits of an hour or more, and at least one guest who recorded no welcome and no help with luggage.
Recovery is the sharpest. When something goes wrong, the complaint is rarely the fault itself; it is that no empathy was shown and no solution offered.
Seasonality against promise at the lagoon, where the beach and outdoor pool were closed while guests had booked on the strength of them. And in-room detail: room-service calls that went unanswered, amenities only on request, and a running question about value.
Every one of these maps to a procedure that either does not exist or does not say how the moment should feel. That mapping is what the redesign works from, so the first procedures rewritten are the ones a guest is already noticing.
The engine is built and was demonstrated to Bani, Fiona and Abdellah Essonni on 4 August: a version 1 standard into a marked-up version 2 with the reasoning behind every change, property parameters carried per resort, then the approved clean English and the French in minutes. Nothing enters the library except as tracked changes accepted by a person; the engine has no pen of its own.
Three procedures are through end to end — a walk-in without a reservation, an arrival, and a guest complaint — each taken from the issued document to the adapted standard in both languages, with its training and checking material. Roughly 270 procedures are queued behind them, the checkout procedure next; fine-tuning continues to full reliability.
The handover pack is one folder of 161 files: 144 built for this engagement — the rules, the staging intelligence, the tooling, and the worked runs as proof — and 17 of Aleph’s own material, the evidence files and the source procedures the runs began from. The pack carries its own inspector, which verifies every file against the manifest in under a minute. It does not carry the library: Aleph’s procedures stay on Aleph’s drive, and the engine is pointed at them once, by whoever keeps the library.
What is inside, part by part, and the walk from the zip to the first sentence typed, is on its own page below — written for the person who will stand at the machine, not for us.
The handover proposal went to Bani, Fiona and Abdellah Essonni on 6 August with two worked examples attached, and it asks for two things: a name, one person trained to run the method, and the licence to run it on. Bani replied the next morning that Aleph would discuss it internally and come back within a couple of days.
One division at one property, adapted end to end, read back with the GM and department head, and validated on the floor. Only then does the method widen across Category A and the second resort. The first procedures are through the engine and waiting at exactly this gate: an approver named on the Aleph side, and a read-back at the property.
The adapted set live at both hotels under Aleph’s own governance, and the method handed over: Fiona’s team trained to run the adaptation for the next property themselves.
Opened on 4 August, the moment the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) engine was shown working: where does everything it produces live, and how does it reach every property? The same discipline as the other two modules, in this module’s own language: agree the brief, map the estate as it is, settle the taxonomy, choose the platform and the rules, prove it at the two Morocco hotels, then hand it over. Documents publish here as each step matures.
One home for the body of knowledge: every approved standard and its supporting material in one place, found in seconds, reaching every property whatever systems it runs. We are calling it the intranet, but the name matters less than the architecture; it may equally be a document management system or something built on what Aleph already owns. Taxonomy first, platform second, governance throughout. The draft charter is written, and it went to Bani, Neil and Jad on the evening of 4 August; Jad is pencilled in as sponsor and confirms on his return.
The constraint that shapes everything, named by Fiona on 4 August: some properties run Google, some run Microsoft 365, Onomo is not permitted into Google at all, and some property teams may not enter shared drives under their own IT rules. PDF is the one format that reaches everyone today. Before anything is chosen, a simple map: property by property, who runs what, who may access what, and what remains of the intranet Aleph tried before.
How the body of knowledge is organised: by division, by geography, by document type, local standards against main standards, and how cross-referenced material like checklists stays attached to its procedure. The shaped options are now written and drawn: five ways to structure the library, from a disciplined drive to a knowledge bot that answers questions from a phone, with worked structures from operators we have built this with. They come to one working session with Fiona and Abdellah Essonni, and the room decides. The architecture is Aleph’s; our job is to shape it with them, not for them.
A platform recommendation that honours the estate as it is, on desktop and mobile, built with what Aleph already owns wherever possible. Alongside it, the rules that keep the library alive without letting it dissolve: each property sees and touches only its own, changes are requested and approved rather than made, corporate holds the pen, and the review triggers and schedule are written down. The build has begun: an interactive design mockup now shows the home as it could actually look, on either route — Google, or a custom build on Laravel, the framework GO-Globe proposed — with the library, an open standard in English and French, and the assistant; try both coats on, and rename the site live from ten candidate names. SharePoint is off the page: Aleph runs on Google and Neil confirmed it.
Stood up first for Michlifen and Marchica: the engine’s approved output lands in it, the property teams find what they need in seconds on the systems they actually use, and a requested change travels the approval path end to end. Only then does the home widen to the rest of the portfolio.
Aleph runs the home without us: governance live, the operator trained, the engine and its output under one roof, and the next property added by Aleph’s own hands.
The running minutes behind the commercial position and the programme's key decisions, newest first. Each entry is cited to the call or document it came from, so nothing rests on memory. Open items sit at the top until they are settled.