Four Seasons Shows That Hospitality Can Be a Passport to a Global Career
Skift Take
Hospitality can be the gateway to a richly rewarding global career. But even some of the top brands aren’t making this sell well enough to the next generation of talent. Here’s how to do it.
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.I have the good fortune of speaking to amazing hoteliers on a regular basis. And when you read their CVs and bios, they often read like that of a diplomat. These men and women forge truly global careers, gain exposure to a range of cultural operating systems, and can smoothly disarm an angry guest in a few languages. As they mature in their profession, they develop their own style of hospitality that’s based on an amalgamation of cultures and lessons learned.
It’s quite a gig — when you explain it that way. Yet many global hospitality brands are bemoaning how hard it is to find good people. In the U.S., there’s a labor shortage that makes entry-level jobs in the hospitality world tough to hire for. And, in a culture where the Elon Musks and startup entrepreneurs take center stage, the career of a hotelier might not seem so sexy. But it should be, with a few tweaks to the narrative and the sales pitch.
The reason? Not many pr
