In Brief: The new memoir ‘The Lobby Boys’ examines the culture and operations of the Hong Kong Hilton in 1976, prompting reflection on the value of personal service as hotels increasingly integrate artificial intelligence and automation.
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Image Credit Pertlink
Three former Assistant Managers, now scattered across three continents, reunite fifty years later to document a five-star lobby that ran entirely on paper, memory, and instinct — and to ask what today’s AI-driven hotels still owe that instinct.
Fifty years ago, three young men in their early twenties ran the lobby of the Hong Kong Hilton: an 800-plus-room, five-star hotel that operated at near-constant full occupancy without a single computer, guest profile, or booking algorithm. Today, Terence Ronson, Rajeev Ratti, and Niale McLoughlin — the self-styled “Lobby Boys” — have turned that shared experience into a newly released memoir, The Lobby Boys: Hong Kong Hilton, 1976.
Narrated primarily by Ronson, now a Hong Kong-based hospitality technology and AI advisor, with first-person passages from Ratti and McLoughlin woven throughout, the book recounts daily life behind the front desk of one of Asia’s most storied hotels during the mid-1970s: manually overbooking rooms as a nightly wager against no-shows; managing the U.S. Seventh Fleet on shore leave; a night-long security operation around a stranded Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; and the Whitney Rack, the entirely paper-based room-management system that predates the modern property management system by decades.
“We told pieces of it for decades — over dinners, at industry conferences, to junior colleagues who couldn’t quite believe a hotel ever ran without a computer,” the authors write in the book’s foreword. “Eventually we realized: if we didn’t write it down properly, between the three of us, it would simply evaporate, the way most working lives do.”
The book opens with a dedication “to the industry” and closes its foreword with an argument aimed squarely at hospitality’s current moment: that while the tools of the trade have changed beyond recognition since 1976, the judgment behind good service has not.
“Look past the terminals, the apps, and whatever is now quietly doing the work our paper racks once did, and the job hasn’t moved nearly as far as people assume,” the authors write. “It is still, at bottom, someone deciding — quickly, sincerely, without a script — that a stranger’s evening matters.”
Availability: The Lobby Boys is now freely available in all formats from www.pertlink.net
ABOUT THE LOBBY BOYS
The Lobby Boys: Hong Kong Hilton, 1976 is a memoir by Terence Ronson, with Rajeev Ratti and Niale McLoughlin, recounting their years as Assistant Managers at the Hong Kong Hilton during the mid-1970s. Told through interwoven first-person accounts, the book blends nostalgia with commentary on how hospitality has — and has not — changed in the decades since.
ABOUT TERENCE RONSON
Terence Ronson is the Founder and Managing Director of Pertlink Limited, a boutique hospitality technology and AI advisory consultancy headquartered in Hong Kong and operating across the Philippines and Asia-Pacific. He is a Hall of Fame inductee with both HFTP and CHTA, chairs the AI Education & Training Subcommittee of the HFTP AI Collective, and is a member of the Philippine AI Business Association. Ronson has spent more than twenty-five years in hospitality technology, pre-opening, and consultancy roles across Asia. The Lobby Boys is his first book.
