The Brown Palace Hotel is laying off its last bellmen and doormen effective March 15, and replacing them with valets working for a third party.epitomized elegance and excellence in Denver. But the landmark hotel has been on a downward slide in recent years. And that thud you just heard? The Brown is cutting its longtime doormen and bell staff and contracting with an out-of-state valet company instead.
After the layoffs, Chicago-based SP Plus, a corporate valet company, will supply the hotel with valet drivers to help guests when they arrive; there will be no more doormen or bellmen. Among the ten staffers losing their jobs, six primarily worked as doormen while four were bellmen, but those roles overlap at times. Most have worked at the Brown Palace for more than a decade, and one has been there for more than forty years.
"We've built up a rapport with dozens and dozens of people who live here in Denver and come to the hotel frequently," the doorman says."Many of them were saddened and angered when they found out they wouldn't be seeing us again." "It was discourteous, to put it mildly, and offensive, to put it strongly," Kley says."How cheaply everyone was discarded, these people who had spent so much of their lives on the institution. It was pretty shocking."
Dumping the beloved bell staffers is just the latest move in a"process of taking a once-luxury property and turning it into what we call the Holiday Inn East," says one employee, referring to the Holiday Inn that's attached to the Brown by a sky bridge."We're turning our hotel into the Holiday Inn."A third describes the Brown as"an icon, emblematic of the hospitality scene in Denver.
In 2018, Crescent Real Estate bought the Brown Palace for $125 million and appointed HEI Hotels & Resorts to run the iconic hotel.