Hospitality Help is Here!

Think back to all of the leisurely outings, family vacations and business trips you may have taken throughout your lifetime. At the cornerstone of each of your memories was the friendly, welcoming face of the hospitality industry. The pillars that form the foundation of the hospitality industry play a major role in supplying your travels with culinary creations, tasty libations, comfortable accommodations, exciting destinations, reliable transportation, and enjoyable recreation to infuse your days and nights with an experience outside of the ordinary.  As the business, marketing, and executive coach at Your Hospitality Partner, I am always eager to work with companies from any of the four segments that comprise the hospitality industry – food and beverages, lodging, travel and tourism, or recreation, to help them create strategies and solutions to achieve their growth and revenue goals through a focus on delivering excellence that helps to lay the groundwork for those memorable guest experiences.

Are you one of those friendly, welcoming faces who is an owner or leader of a company defined as a hospitality business? If you are, I sincerely appreciate you. You make a difference in people’s lives every day. Because this industry has made such a difference in my own life, I am now committed to partnering with those in the industry who are committed to delivering excellence but may need a little guidance. Recently rebranded as a hospitality coach, my extensive travel experiences can now be utilized to your benefit as Your Hospitality Partner. Here is a high-level overview of each of the four segments that fall under the hospitality industry umbrella and the unique ways in which you can look to me for help.

1. Food and Beverages

Someone once asked me what my favorite food was to cook. My response was “take-out and leftovers” without any hesitation! While I looked forward to restaurants preparing most of my meals, my career experience in the food and beverages segment spans both the back of the house and front of the house. After a short stint as a server, then an office manager for a restaurant, I became a young entrepreneur and partner of a wholesale food distributor. I later studied to take the national Society of Wine Educators exam to become a certified wine educator and successfully completed my event planner certification.

What does this mean to you? My varied background and skill set uniquely positions me to understand the challenges that owners and managers commonly face in the day-to-day operations of an F & B business such as competing for traffic volume, the impact of seasonality on revenues, staffing, training and frequent turnover, the criticality of excellent customer service as a service-based business, customer reviews and brand loyalty, inventory and quality control, supply and demand issues, and the need to constantly reinvent your business to stay competitive. Acquisition of additional properties can improve market share, however cash flow or investor opportunities must be present to turn this option into reality.

2. Lodging

What is not to love about being welcomed at luxurious or comfortable accommodations where your surrounding are always spotless and a complimentary happy hour may await your arrival? Unless of course, the welcoming staff is less than welcoming, the room looks like it has already been slept in, or (gasp!) the bathroom is dirty! Accommodations should always present as five-star, no matter whether they are budget or luxury. Anything less and your brand reputation is on the line, and that is a terrible thing to waste. With my marketing and consumer behavior background, I can help you to consistently meet brand standards, or create your own if you are a private enterprise. Seeing your property through a guests’ eyes, I can pose as a mystery shopper to help uncover issues and help you develop a keen eye and insights toward what qualifies as five-star excellence in the minds of your guests.

3. Travel and Tourism

In most cases, in order to enjoy the sights and sounds of tourism, you must travel to get there. Traveling to tourist destinations within the 46 states, 14 countries, and 4 continents that I have visited so far, I have experienced almost every mode of transportation that supports the tourism industry. I have been on jets and puddle-jumpers, a helicopter, cruise ship, sailboat and ferry boat, double-decker tour buses and small jitneys, taxis, ride-shares, high-speed trains, steam-engine trains, subways, RVs, and rental cars. Using these various modes of transportation has provided me the opportunity to arrive at destinations from Mt. Vesuvius to the Grand Canyon. First a tourist by passion, and now a tourist advocate by trade, I have developed keen insights into what makes a tourist attraction popular, and what needs to happen to market and promote tourism and tourist events. Destinations must be creative and innovative in grabbing the attention of the consumer to want to spend their time and money to visit, and there must be reliable transportation methods and infrastructure in place to transport them there.

4. Recreation

The stage has been set. The destination has been chosen, the lodging accommodations have been reserved, the transportation has been booked, the restaurant reviews have been read in anticipation of their arrival. Your guests now start to search for things to do in the area. Introduce recreation! Destination marketing organizations work hard to ensure that there are leisure activities available in popular tourist areas. Creating strategic partnerships and alliances bring together all segments of the hospitality industry to ensure that it is a win-win for all involved. Not many things can ruin a well-planned trip faster than discovering too late that there is little to do once a traveler arrives at their intended destination. Creativity is critical to have well-thought out recreational and leisure activities, and marketing those activities properly is key to increased revenues and happy travelers. I can work with you to ensure that your messaging is on par so that your participation in the tourism scene is not missed on the map.

Of course, within all four segments of the hospitality industry, proper staffing and training is crucial to graciously extending that welcome mat to all who come through your doors. Creating this culture of excellence in hospitality starts with great leadership who believe in the mission, vision, and values that the word hospitality stands for, and encourages that throughout the ranks with happy, engaged employees who also embody the belief that they have the ability and responsibility to turn every guest visit into a memorable guest experience. As a certified Coach Master Toolkit facilitator, awarded by the World Business and Executive Coach Summit, I have a wealth of resources to utilize in developing managers into high-performing leaders. As a business owner or leader, I can utilize this toolkit to help you develop an effective business and marketing strategy to achieve business growth and earn five-star reviews.

All of the tools in the world cannot accomplish excellence without the proper mindset to transform this into a priority and expectation for your company. We can work together to achieve breakthroughs that shift the focus from quantity management to quality management. Quality in products, services, leadership, employee engagement, facilities, operations, fiscal responsibility, marketing, business development, and community involvement all contribute to delivering five-star excellence. That, of course, all starts with making the decision to prioritize excellence. If you are up to the challenge, I am ready to help create solutions!