GATE – Global Academy of Tourism & Hospitality Education organized 3 days workshop on “Teaching yesterday, today and tomorrow” covering contemporary issues such as how to meet the expectation of hospitality employers in today’s competitive job market and how to equip the hospitality educators and trainers to cope with teaching requirements and modern methodology for tomorrow. The program was designed and lead by a senior expert Mr. Giuseppe Luizzi Bazzani from Swiss Contact (Switzerland). Mr. Bazzani has over four decades of global expertise in hospitality operation and education. Mr. Bazzani has been a guest lecture in Cornell University, IMI – Luzern and successfully consulted dozens of mega hotel projects and hotel school projects around the world.

Food. Culture. Entertainment. On Saturday, May 2, 2009 the Swiss School of Tourism and Hospitality will open the doors to the public for the 7th annual Food Festival. Over 2000 guest will be able to discover a world of specialities and taste a variety of national dishes from 20 different countries on the school campus. The delicious food and the decorated stands spread an exotic feeling and a relaxing atmosphere around the campus of the Swiss School of Tourism and Hospitality.

Time to Think about our Environment: GATE College Leads a Cleaning Campaign in Kathmandu: If you walk 900 Meters north from the bustling Dhumbarahi, Kathmandu (Ring road), you will find GATE – Global Academy of Tourism & Hospitality Education, a college that was established about a year ago. On the way, you will pass bamboo-carved dustbins hanging around the electric poles. Unlike other parts of the city, this road seems relatively clean and you will wonder what happened to this part of town. It’s not that the municipality is working efficiently and it’s not because many important people live in this area, but because of a cleaning campaign that was initiated by students some five months ago.

Hilton has joined the fray and launched a brand new lifestyle brand, called Denizen Hotels. The brand is an attempt to capture the growing market segment that represents the increasingly well-travelled and modern professional. Ross Klein, originally with Starwood Hotels & Resorts (well known for their unique luxury brands, from W Hotels to Aloft to Element to St.Regis) now heads up branding at Hilton and is the key figure behind this launch.



Info received from Hilton / Ogilvy today...
HILTON HOTELS CORPORATION UNVEILS NEW GLOBAL LIFESTYLE BRAND: DENIZEN HOTELS (TM): New Brand Designed to Appeal to Globally-Conscious Modern Travelers. Hilton Hotels Corporation (Hilton) announced today the addition of Denizen Hotels, a global lifestyle brand, to the Hilton Family of Brands. Appearing throughout the world in international social epicenters, Denizen Hotels will cater to globally-conscious modern travelers of the world.

The art and science of decision making…the quality of our decisions, the role of intuition, the results we achieve and the rewards we enjoy (or perhaps penalties we endure).

The ability to make good decisions is key to the survival and success of any good manager, director or CEO in today’s fast-paced, cut-throat business environment. Most of us make business decisions in the expectation of achieving great results…and our performance is measured by these results. But what if this approach is wrong? What if the results managers achieve are NOT the best yardstick of competence and decision-making ability? More often than not, bad managers are rewarded for good results that are a matter of pure luck…and great managers who’ve made the right decisions end up on the street when project results are less than satisfactory. What role do experience and intuition play in the decision making process? Is it all a matter of gut feel…or is decision making a purely methodical science?

To discover the answers to these and many more questions, I turned to Professor Zeger Degraeve, who is the ‘Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Professor of Innovation, Professor of Decision Sciences’ at London Business School. Zeger is one of the brightest minds in the field of decision making, operations research and managing project portfolios. In our interview, we talked about fundamental issues in today’s business environment…the decisions we face, the results we’re held accountable for…and perhaps a clearer way to approach decision making than just relying on gut feel.

There is considerable coverage globally about the pressures that the global recession is placing upon (hospitality) organisations generally, but what is the impact of this downturn specifically upon the hospitality job seeker at this moment in time? The obvious observation is that times are tough. That is to say competition from other job seekers is now considerably stiffer, and of course there are currently fewer jobs on the market. Matters are unlikely to improve significantly over the next couple of months realistically.

Certain employers are already taking the opportunity to capitalize upon this status quo. A leading Swiss hotel school contacted me this week to ask if I felt it was fair that certain employers had changed their employment agreements for their student placements, and that they were now only willing to accept candidates who work on a voluntary (i.e. zero remuneration) basis. I agreed that I did not think this was ethical! Another example was evident at a more senior level where a candidate had been offered a position in December (2008) in the Emirates, and was then offered the same position again in January (2009) with 60% of the salary for the same role and contract! It is sad to see such practices, and let us hope that certain destinations do not use the opportunity to devalue their (already low) salary scales across the board.