BUSINESS

Biltmore manager's hotel career is full of stories

Christopher Geoffrey McPherson
Special for The Republic | azcentral.com
Sheila Foley has spent her career working in hotels — and has a lot of interesting tales to tell.

Sheila Foley has spent her career working in hotels — and has a lot of interesting tales to tell.

"In my previous hotel in Houston, during the Final Four (basketball championship), there was a big benefactor for a university who was staying with us," Foley says. "His team won. Liquor laws being what they are, everything shuts down at 2 a.m. and no more liquor is served unless it's a private party or function. That gentleman pulled $40,000 from his pocket and said, 'I want to buy every single bottle of liquor, beer or wine that you have on this property and put it in that room over there.'"

Foley, now general manager at the Arizona Biltmore, a Waldorf Astoria Resort, hasn't had too many instances of people pulling huge wads of cash from their pockets, but she rarely has a day she would call routine or boring.

"I start every morning with a bit of a walk through," she says. "Then at 8:30 all of our department heads meet and we lay out what's going to happen for the day. We review financials from the day before, arrivals, departures — all the basics of running a resort. After that's over, everyone goes back to their respective departments. Then, it's full throttle for the rest of the day."

Foley fell in love with the hotel business right out of college.

"I worked with hotels planning different meetings while I was still in school," she says. "I had planned on going back and doing law school, but once I got into (hotels), I never thought about law school again. I just love everything about it. There's something new going on every day. There are no two days alike, there are no two moments alike in a resort."

Foley, who joined the Biltmore in July 2014, is particularly impressed by the resort's history, dating back to the late 1920s.

"It's an iconic resort," she says. "There's almost nowhere I go in the city that, if someone knows I work for the Biltmore, they don't have a story or a family memory or some big event that occurred here. When you walk on the property, you can feel all that good juju, all those good memories."

The resort recently completed a $25 million renovation, but kept an eye on its history.
"It feels sort of Hollywood glamour," Foley says. "You just expect Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe to step out from behind the next turn."