SHAPING PERSONALITIES BY INCULCATING PRINCIPLES

Education institutions like Sommet Education are combining soft and hard skills in their curriculum to guide students about efficient actions they can take while shaping the future of hospitality

- VINITA BHATIA

Recently, Sommet Education acquired a strategic stake in the Indian School of Hospitality (ISH), founded by hospitality professional Dilip Puri along with other key partners. This partnership will help the global educational entity support the development of its two institutions in India – École Ducasse and Les Roches.

Hospitality is home to a young and enterprising talent pool, which needs to be renewed regularly. As the sector emerges from the pandemic, hoteliers are faced with the dilemma of identifying and retaining skilled hotel employees. After all, their speedy business recovery depends extensively on their ability to deliver superlative guest experiences, which is possible only if they have remarkable employees on-board.

Benoît-Etienne Domenget, CEO, Sommet Education tells Vinita Bhatia that as pent-up travel demand returns quickly, hoteliers will need to tackle this issue head-on to ensure their continued profitability. This is exactly where Sommet Education’s alliance with ISH will come in handy – it will give the industry access to well-trained and skilled labour force who can hit the ground running.

While the hospitality business is seeing green shoots of revival, how can hotels manage guest experiences and associate expectations without compromising on profitability?

In hospitality, the guest experience is provided through the product, such as the location and the type of property facilities. But, it is by essence a customer-centric business and a service industry where the employee and soft skills play a central role.

In that sense, the guest experience is directly linked to the human talent a hospitality business is able to source or develop. Adding value to the guest experience isn’t, therefore, necessarily costly.