Joining from Waldorf Astoria Maldives Ithaafushi after more than half a decade as general manager of the island resort, Dalançon moved to Kuala Lumpur (KL) in March 2024 to oversee the pre-opening of the luxury hotel brand’s first location in Malaysia.
The general manager of a hotel typically has little to do with the building’s construction phase. “We’re not engineers, we’re not designers by profession,” says Etienne Dalançon, general manager of the upcoming Waldorf Astoria Kuala Lumpur, “so we see this from an operational [perspective].”
Are the doorways wide enough and ceilings high enough; does the space require water, electricity or gas — these are the questions that have kept Dalançon busy for the past 18 months. “It’s more of an architecture [and] design consulting service — us trying to understand how the hotel will operate in the future,” says the Frenchman to City & Country on the sidelines of the International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM) Asia Pacific convention in Singapore on June 30.
