"I’m genuinely sad to leave behind Queenstown, it’s a town I really, really love — I love the community, the industry, the team.
"But the company has been trying to pull me back across the ditch to take on some bigger projects over the last couple of years.
"I guess this project [a newish 251-room corporate hotel with a hatted restaurant] was just too good to refuse in the end."
Before his eight-year Queenstown stint he’d run Adelaide’s Ibis and rebranded Pullman.
"What I learnt about Adelaide, and probably amplified more in Queenstown, is the genuine sense of community, unlike Sydney, where I’m from, where business is cut-throat.
"There is a genuine sense of wanting to make sure we are providing the best experience, regardless of what part of the ecosystem you’re in, and I’ve never found that in any destination I’ve worked in other than here and Adelaide."
He jokes he’ll be wearing a suit and tie in Adelaide — "I did for my first two years here, but I was getting a lot of people thinking I was a real estate agent".
Samuels is very proud of how quickly the hotel recovered from Covid’s "dark ages" when he lost 75 to 80% of his staff.
"There were three or four months where myself, the operations manager and the front office manager worked 12-hour shifts, just doing everything in the hotel — it was quite an intense period that kind of created this sense of camaraderie in the team.
"Covid didn’t gift us many things, but it did gift us the ability to look at things from a different perspective, and I think the model we operate under now is stronger.
"I’m leaving the hotel in very, very good hands."
The acting GM is Jo Finnigan, who also runs fellow Accor hotel, Hotel St Moritz.
