Ivan Chadima

* 1940

  • “Every year in June an evaluation of the previous year took place at the UN Plaza hotel. During one of those evaluations my boss Tom Appleby asked me: ‘Chadima, what actually motivates you in life?’ I told him it was partially recognition, partially money, and he just looked at me and said: ‘I didn't think you were that dumb. The only effort in life that's worth anything is to get your life under control. And you have absolutely none! You live in the hotel, your car is in the hotel, you eat here… If I die somebody else will come and they'll fire you, or if I fire you myself you'll end up on the street, you'll be looking for a job and you'll have a hard time finding a job like the one you have here.’ I got slightly scared and started thinking about what I was going to do about that and I ended up taking the opportunity of the beginning negotiations with Czechoslovakia after the revolution. One of my friends worked for Bankers Trust, another one for White and Case and with them I organised meetings with important partners for Václav Havel and his ministers.”

  • “Even today I can clearly see my granddad sitting in the wood-tiled hall in his house at 21 Sibeliova street, drinking some expensive alcohol, with Red Army soldiers running around. Then my uncle Vladimír came up, dressed in a Czechoslovakian lieutenant uniform. ‘Father, father,’ he said, ‘We were liberated, our brothers are here!’ My grandfather looked at him and said: ‘Don't shit yourself with happiness just yet, not even grass will grow here for a hundred years.’ Later it turned out he was right.”

  • “After arriving to Canada I and other emigrants from Czechoslovakia received accommodation in a monastery. We each had our own room, we were given food, they were teaching us English and French. I myself only spent a week there because I immediately found a job but some stayed for as long as a year and a half – they were getting fifty dollars per person per week as pocket money plus everything else was provided for them so they'd just save up for a Spartacus and go back. And that was not a rare case… I remember a story related to this attitude. The monks taking care of us asked us during a meeting if everything was alright. One doctor who had already been in the monastery since Sempember 1968, not from January 1969 like me, raised his hand, had an interpreter translate for him and asked in Slovak: ‘When we first got here, the oranges had less seeds compared to those we get now.’ I thought I'd get a heart attack! You can't imagine how ashamed I was.”

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    Praha, 02.02.2017

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    duration: 08:11:47
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Every end is just a new beginning

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Ivan Chadima

Ivan Chadima was born on the 17th of October 1940 in Prague. Due to political reasons he was not allowed to study at a gymnasium but thanks to his father’s contacts he was accepted to a vocational restaurant school and at the start of his third year he transferred to a hotel school in Mariánské Lázně. Following his final exams and military service he spent ten years working in the Alcron hotel which focused on foreign clientele. From September 1967 to August 1968 he attended lectures organised by the Hotel Institute, back then a unique school for top-level management of international hotels in Czechoslovakia. Shortly after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies he emigrated to Western Germany and in mid-January 1969 he left for Canada. Working at the Château Champlain hotel in Montréal he quickly worked his way up from a waiter to a beverage manager and thanks to his knowledge and experience from Alcron he gained his colleagues’ respect and was employed in top positions in hotels belonging to companies like Ramada Inn, Four Seasons, and Ritz Carlton both in Canada and the United States. By the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s he was already considered to be one of the best hoteliers in the world. Between the years 1983 and 1990 he worked as the director of the United Nations Plaza hotel in New York. After the Velvet Revolution he co-organised the first travels of Václav Havel and the Czechoslovakian government to the USA and Canada, started a business in his home country, and in 1992 he moved to Prague. Today he is the executive director of the Four Seasons hotel in Prague, runs an affordable housing project, a one hundred and fifteen room accommodation facility project, and remains very active as a consultant.