It was Sunday, and Sam-Erik Ruttmann, ’82 BS Hotel Administration, wanted to sleep in. It’s one of the few respites he gets as general manager of Dusit Laguna, a lush tropical resort on the Thai island of Phuket.
But about 8:30 a.m., a light tremor shook the apartment Ruttmann shares with his wife at the center of the resort. He woke long enough to get online and learn there had been an earthquake off the coast of nearby Sumatra. Then he went back to bed.
“Around 10 a.m. I got up again and looked out, and to my horror I saw the garden filled with water,” Ruttmann says. “It was a very unusual situation. The only time we had water in the garden was during the monsoon season, with heavy winds blowing straight into the resort.
“Now there was not any wind, and it was a clear and sunny day, but very quiet. I could not figure out what happened.”
Ruttmann’s day off instantly dissolved into chaos. It was Dec. 26, 2004, and the quake that woke him had unleashed a devastating tsunami on South Asia, smashing into the countries that rim the Indian Ocean and killing more than 300,000 people.
The disaster was unlike anything Ruttmann had faced in a hotel-management career that spans two decades on three continents. The Finnish native came to the United States in the mid-1970s as a management trainee for a Playboy club in Wisconsin, then enrolled at UNLV a few years later. After he earned a bachelor’s degree in hotel administration in 1982, Hyatt International recruited him and later placed him at a hotel in Jakarta.
He advanced to management positions in Kuwait, Indonesia, Bali, South Korea, and Finland before coming to Thailand in 1992 and taking the helm of Dusit Laguna in 2000. He speaks some Thai, as well as five other languages, but business is always conducted in English. “It is important to learn the local language,” he says. “It signals your sincere interest to your staff that you care about their culture.”
While the tsunami took him by surprise, he quickly understood his responsibility to protect his staff of 150 and some 450 guests. Ruttmann still didn’t know what had forced the ocean over the land that morning when he and a few of his managers started going room to room with master keys to see if anyone was injured. “Luckily no one was, but everyone was in panic,” Ruttmann says. “I shouted to the guests who were trying to pack their bags to leave their belongings behind and go to the lobby (on the second floor) right away.
“I proceeded to the beach and realized, to my horror, that guests had gathered with their cameras to take pictures of the scene.”
Then someone screamed that another wave was coming. Hotel employees rushed everyone away from the beach.
“Once I got all the guests away from the garden, I turned around and saw the entire sea level rising,” Ruttmann says.
He followed the hotel’s evacuation plan as he dealt with unforeseen issues. The mobile network went down and stayed down for three days, and the extra walkie-talkies and megaphones were locked up — a manager had taken home the only key. And the guest service phones went unanswered for 20 minutes because the operator panicked and ran.
Dusit Laguna was the hardest hit of the five properties that make up the Laguna Phuket resort, but it resumed normal operations within a few days, Ruttmann says. Water inundated 24 beachfront rooms and two restaurants were destroyed. Ruttmann expects all repairs to be completed by July.
Still, Ruttmann’s property fared far better than many; hotels were demolished all along the hard-hit beaches of Patong and Kamala to the south. But the entire island is sharing in the economic aftershock. About 20,000 jobs were lost on Phuket, he says, and hotels lost hundreds of millions in potential earnings because the first quarter is peak season, due in part to Asian New Year celebrations.
“I would normally have had guests from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea, but they decided against coming to Phuket because of the fear of ghosts,” he says. “The belief is that for the lunar New Year, one should be in a place that will bring good luck.”
Although Ruttmann enjoys living in Asia, he is about to pull up stakes again. He and his wife of 20 years, Yong-Ran, are soon moving to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he will become a regional vice president for Dusit hotels and oversee the company’s Middle East expansion.
