When I meet members of the hospitality industry, one of the things I like to ask is how they came to be a member of our industry. Was it planned or by accident?
Years ago I’d served on the Hospitality Industry Advisory Committee for Broward Community College and in the fall of 1999, I was an adjunct instructor teaching the introductory course there in Tourism Industries Administration. In the “old days”, you basically had Cornell University. It was only much later that locally FIU and other schools added courses in our field and students could choose our industry as a career. It seems, however, that most long-time members of our industry “fell” into the business for a variety of reasons.
Don’t know if you recall a past Table of Eight newsletter column in which I mentioned a gentleman at our luncheon whose father had been in the hotel business. His father spent summers in the New York mountain resorts and winters in Florida working for a hotel company. As a child he spent half his year in one location or the other. So I guess you could say he literally grew up in the business. Linda Gill of the Gill Hotels and Walter Banks of Lago Mar continued their family’s hotel business, too. But these are probably the exceptions.
Most people didn’t have that “family” advantage. They started out at the bottom:
Some first jobs included: front desk clerk, cashier, waitress, sales department secretary, receptionist, intern, or reservationist. A couple of people I know had been in Florida for a while when they decided to make a career change. Looking around, they recognized that tourism/hospitality was Florida’s number one industry and figured there was an opportunity for them there.
So, what’s your story? How did you join our industry?
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