HRS Hospitality and Retail Systems has announced the appointment of Tan Xiao Chen to the position of General Manager, Sales for HRS China. Mr. Tan will lead the China team in sales & business development and will continue with the expansion of the HRS product and service portfolio.
Hilton (NYSE: HLT) announced its partnership with the Sri Lanka Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management (SLITHM) to launch Hilton Liya Diriya - a specially curated female development program in Sri Lanka.
My perspective is that an authentic, personalised experience does not require touching the guest. It is true that we are accustomed to shaking hands, speaking in close proximity, and serving the guest items that one touches, but contact and proximity are not what guests remember when they complement the service of a hotel.
At the end of the day, personalised experiences are all about "thoughtful" gestures. The great thing is that these gestures can be executed in ways that don't involve contact. This can include outreach emails, following up once the guest is at the property, texting services, hand-written welcome notes, and committing to always finding ways to delight and surprise guests.
Let's take a step back for a moment to look at the bigger picture: COVID-19 will absolutely linger for some time with new variants and local or regional hotspots of concern. We'll likely face rolling vaccinations and other steps as well.
The Indian hospitality sector has grown rapidly in the past couple of decades and is a key employment generator for the country. According to WTTC, travel & tourism sector contributed 6.8% and 8% to the country's total GDP and employment, respectively, in 2019. However, shortage of quality personnel has been a perennial problem for the sector even though several students graduate from specialized hospitality institutes in the country every year. It is high time that the hospitality sector introspects on this challenge, especially as several hospitality students prefer joining other sectors after their graduation.
Having recently celebrated its 55th year of independence, Singapore is a relatively young nation. Yet, the country has quickly risen to prominence on the international stage, becoming well-regarded as a regional and global business hub. Several key factors have contributed to this success, including great foresight, a conscious push for entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as a vision to help other countries strive towards similar success.
Hotelogix, a leading enterprise-grade cloud PMS provider is pleased to share its successful initiative of running an online refresher Training programme that helps hotels keep their staff continuously well trained even amid the global pandemic.
On Friday, global research and consulting firm Great Place to Work® announced that Hilton took the top spot on the list of this year's Best Workplaces in Greater China™ 2020. This is the sixth consecutive year that Hilton has been named to Greater China's Best Workplaces list, and the second consecutive year that it has been named as one of the country's best workplaces for women.
Efforts to shatter the "glass ceiling" and promote women's equality in the hospitality and tourism workplace must start in universities, according to Professor Basak Denizci Guillet, Ph.D. graduate Dr Anna Pavesi, Professor Cathy Hsu and Dr Karin Weber of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The researchers note that statistics paint a bleak picture of women's involvement at the upper levels of the hospitality and tourism industry, both in Hong Kong and worldwide. Although progress is being made in closing the gender gap, social and institutional barriers continue to prevent talented female hospitality and tourism professionals from making a meaningful contribution to management and decision-making. Capturing the real-life experiences of high-flying female executives, this pioneering study explores what can be done by universities to better prepare women to assume leadership positions in hospitality and tourism.
HRS Hospitality and Retail Systems has announced the appointment of David Deng as their General Manager for HRS China. David will lead the China team and continue to develop, maintain, and expand its product and service portfolio.
Ascott Centre for Excellence (ACE) has seen a 400% year-on-year increase in participants to 1,300 since January 2020. ACE has doubled its class size and adopted online training methods to conduct home-based learning to continue upskilling Singapore's hospitality sector amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
After having received the EduTrust certification from Singaporean authorities last June, Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne has now secured the location of its future campus.
For the last decade or so, there's been a huge debate between man vs. machine in business. The way I see it, it's man and machine. When approached correctly, the two go hand-in-hand. Artificial intelligence (i.e. robotic process automation, machine learning) can perform tasks faster than any human can, yet people have the ability to express emotion in a way that technology simply can't.
While digital and self-service options are growing in popularity, the stats and facts are still telling us that the old-fashioned human-to-human connection is still the number-one way customers like to connect for having their problems resolved.
Indeed, it is the people that make the difference between one hotel and the next. Unfortunately, too many hotel companies have become so obsessed with "tech" that their leaders forget to focus on the "touch" part. The hotel tech providers have done an amazing job at pushing what I call the "Millennial Myth," that anyone born after 1980 has no personality, never wants to have human interaction and lives on their phone.
Timed to coincide with the Lunar New Year 2020 (Saturday, Jan. 25), Hilton has released the latest installment of its acclaimed "Room 702" video docuseries, profiling Nick Li, Manager of Safety and Security at the Hilton Chengdu in China's Sichuan province.
The benefits of studying abroad have long since been embraced by a generation of students looking to broaden their horizons, diversify their knowledge and embrace different cultures on their path into the professional world. Destinations galore are vying for attention, amping up their global curb appeal to attract international students. Some are bestowed with innate qualities that lend themselves particularly well to the role of host nation to those looking to study abroad: a rich linguistic and cultural repertoire for visiting students to tap into, high quality of life and an engaging, inspiring atmosphere, for instance.
The Indian Hotels Company (IHCL), South Asia's largest hospitality company and Swiss institution Les Roches Global Hospitality Education, ranked number 3 of the world's top institutions for hospitality management by the QS World University Rankings 2019, announced the winners of the "Next General Manager of India". The campaign, a joint initiative launched in July 2019, was to identify top talent in hospitality in India.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and the University of Surrey (Surrey) have forged a partnership to offer Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programmes that will allow doctoral students from various disciplines to attain a dual PhD from both institutions. The first programme will be launched in the research fields of hospitality and tourism, with further programmes to follow in other disciplines.
Ginger has announced its partnership with the Institute of Hotel Management-Aurangabad (IHM-A), one of the country's top hotel management institutions, to launch the 'Ginger Leadership Program' that will enable IHM-Aurangabad students to achieve Hotel Manager positions, akin to General Manager positions, in a short span of five years.
CWT M&E, the global meetings and events agency, and Kaplan Higher Education Academy (KHEA), part of Kaplan in Singapore, a leading private education institution, have signed an agreement to enhance employment opportunities for students in the hospitality & MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events) industries.
The School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute (COTRI) are joining hands to offer a new online training programme - the China Tourism Training (CTT). Aiming to become the Global Standard training in Chinese outbound tourism market, the CTT will offer five different tracks for tourism service providers.
Integrated casino resorts are moving closer to becoming a reality in Japan. While the Integrated Resort (IR) Implementation Bill was passed by Japan's Diet last summer, it is anyone's guess as to when the actual licenses, expected to be granted in Osaka, Tokyo, and Yokohama, will be awarded. In addition to one or two local Japanese firms such as Sega Sammy and Konami, the likes of global casino players MGM, Las Vegas Sands, Wynn and Caesars, are all pitching and lobbying furiously to win one of the coveted sites. Forecast to become the second largest gaming market in the world after Macau, and at least twice as large as Singapore, Japan has tentatively edged over the last few years towards legalising casino resorts while at the same time seeking to impose certain limitations in order to appease a nation concerned with the dangers of gambling addiction. Industry and government are making a concerted effort to overturn a negative perception of gaming and to better educate the general public on what exactly an IR comprises. In other words, pitching them as large scale entertainment venues centred on a comparatively small casino - in fact only up to 3% of floor space will be devoted to gaming. The huge amounts of patience, money and resources required on the part of these hopeful casino groups to get this far in the bidding process gives some idea as to the size of the potential payoff that is on offer.