yay for golf!

Locals' trail to Anini Beach

I presented my golf package to the RevMax meeting today and everyone seemed to like my little spreadsheet that I had put together. We discussed how she would promote the package and I usggested posting it on Starwood travel blog site www.theLobby.com. This site is specifically targeted toward Starwood's preferred guest program. Its a really cool site, with lots of updates from Starwood's hotel's all over the world. Jay wants me to help him trying to get the package on the site and it will be interesting what process is required to get on a corporate wide website.

I am so excited, I am going to the big island tomorrow! I will work until about 3:30 and then James is taking me to the airport. Unfortunately there is only one 2 lane road to Lihue and you need to allow yourself enough time for accidents or traffic when you have a flight. I'll be back on saturday morning and probably just hang around the hotel, what a surprise :) For the fourth, one of my coworkers, Jennifer, invited me to go with her husband to watch some fireworks in Lihue. So it will be an interesting weekend and 4th!

James had a new trainee today, so for majority of the day I spent working on the golf package and orchestrating everything with it. The new revenue management trainee is part of Starwood's internal promotion program and it allows employees to try out different areas. Her name is Joanne and she mostly works in the Sales office, but once a week will be working with James to learn more about revenue management.

Its been incredible to me, how helpful and friendly everyone has been to me with in regards of the golf package. When you create a package involving different departments of the hotel and outside vendors, it can be very difficult to get everyone to agree on a common plan of action. So far things have gone very smoothly and I'm just about finished with it. It will be interesting to see how everything with it turns out in November, I won't be around to see but hopefully I'll get to find out about it at some later date ;)

Other than that, more of the same today. Tomorrow it will probably be a little bit more and then on Thursday night I'll be flying over to the big island.

The weekend and more

My weekend was pretty low key including nothing more than just hanging out in my room. It was one of those weekends where I didn't want to interact with anyone outside and just relax. Plus I really wanted to get healthy before my trip this coming weekend. Sunday I was able to venture out a bit and even get a little sun on the beach. Afterwards, I was back to resting in my room. Although I didn't do much, it was absolutely fabulous and just what I needed.

Today I worked more on the golf package that Jay assigned me to finish and so far things have been falling together fairly nicely. Hopefully I will have it mostly finished this week. For the rest of the day, I helped James update our reports from last week's sales. I also helped him with his end of month narratives about the monthly fluctuations.

I also got to talk to James, my friend from WSU who is now working for Fairmont on the big island and who I will be visiting on thursday. He lives with a couple other friends from WSU and who also all work for Fairmont. Sounds like it will be a pretty fun reunion. James also got a meeting for me with Fairmont Orchid's Revenue Manager! Yay for networking! More to come, but I'm pretty excited about getting to explore the big island in a couple of days.

yay for friday!

Hanapepe Hanging Bridge

I'm stoked its friday and plan to do little or nothing this weekend. I'm still a little sick, so hopefully I can get rid of it before I head out for the big island next weekend.

Today I worked with Tracey in accounting and it was cool to see how the department is organized and structured. Everyone has their set duties, but if someone needs a little help they all team together. June is a very busy time for them since the owners of the hotel follow a fiscal year and need the end of year report in June (but corporate follows a calendar year and that means they have 2 year-end closings. . . talk about extra work!). My impression is that accounting is very much like the detective and following up constantly, whether outstanding checks or just getting payments from vendors. That's why I like revenue management so much, because it involves numbers and analysis but also other things as well. I finished up the day and now I'm ready for the weekend!

regional boss

Waimea Canyon Waterfall

Today Riko came in to visit with James and a few of the other members of the executive committee. Unfortunately I didn't get to work with her as much as I would have liked, but I've come to understand now that when your regional boss comes to visit its not usually for a congratulations on a good job. So, everyone seemed to be pretty nervous around her. I got to talk with her for a little while and she was very encouraging in all of the opportunities of revenue management with Starwood. As she said, "There are always revenue management jobs, and even more so if you're willing to relocate . . ." Hmmm all very interesting.

Tomorrow I'll be working with Tracy in accounting and with other various accounting staff. Next week I'll probably mostly be working on a golf package that Jay, the dir. of sales, wants me to work on. I can't believe that I'm halfway done with my intership! Its gone pretty fast, but I've learned a lot. Still got a ways to go though . . . :)

A cool ohana

Today was a pretty fun day. Nothing too out of the ordinary, just one of those days where a lot of good little things happened and made the overall day pretty nice :)

I'm still working on recovering from my cold, which slowly but surely things are getting better. I worked with James on preparing an analysis/narrative for the hotel's performance last week compared to that of last year's. Every week he has to turn in little blurbs to his regional boss and she then has to turn them in to corporate. It was fun to help out, especially since we were a little busy dealing with more of the relocation guests from Sheraton Kauai.

At lunch today we celebrated Wayne (the controller's) birthday with bento box lunches. Someone ordered the box lunches from a local restaurant and they were delicious. It looked like your average Hawaiian food including rice, portuguese sausage, fried chicken, breaded tuna, a sort of potato hash, and Chinese noodles. The accounting department, James, and I all sat together and celebrated Wayne's birthday. For dessert James had made this pistachio bunt cake, which was delicious but so rich that I couldn't really taste too much of the pistachio flavor. Never have to twist my arm for any kind of cake though :) As we were eating lunch, I noticed how everyone was laughing and talking freely about random subjects, from pregnancy, braces, to different areas of the Phillipines. The atmosphere was so upbeat and comforting. Everyone has always been very friendly to me, but now I'm really feeling accepted into the Princeville ohana, as they say here (which means "family" in Hawaiian). I can't believe that I've already been here 6 weeks on Saturday and just about half way through my whole internship. It will definitely be hard to leave my new ohana in about a month!

After lunch I helped James with the RevMax meeting and presented some of our findings to the RevMax team (dir. of sales, dir. of rooms, controller, reservations manager, and GM). Before hand, James asked if I would be ready to present some items in the meeting and I thought I would be able to. Its funny, because usually I feel very comfortable talking in front of people but for some reason I had a harder time talking at the RevMax meeting. I've been thinking about it and about why did I not feel comfortable presenting our numbers to the meeting, and I realize now that it was because I was not presenting the way I usually like to. I was presenting the way James presents, by just reading off numbers. Looks like next week I'll be helping him present again and hopefully by then I'll be a little more comfortable with presenting in James' style.

After work, James and I got invited to help Kelly Hoen (the GM) with the weekly Manager's Reception. The reception is a little cocktail hour that we have for a few invited guests with a little wine and pupus (appetizers). It was cool to talk to guests who were very happy with the hotel and Kauai and hear all of their fond experiences. I also happened to learn tonight that Kelly, is the first female GM at any of the Starwood Hawaii properties and she is also the longest running GM that the Princeville Hotel has ever had. She joked about how she's a little nervous to be promoted to a different property and I know that a number of people would be greatly saddened to see her leave.

Tomorrow Riko (the regional dir. of rev mgt) will be coming in and I'm pretty excited to meet her. Also on friday I'm going to be working with the accounting department! Yay for numbers!

Doh!

Waimea Canyon

After I worked out yesterday, I started to get a bit of a sore throat and it ended up getting worse from there. There's been a little bit of a cough going around the office, so I think I was lucky enough to pick up the tail end of it. Hopefully it won't last much longer, it was hard to stay inside and rest when it was absoluetely gorgeous outside.

Things at work went pretty well today. The designers and project managers for the proposed rennovation took a tour of the hotel today, but it will be a ways until we hear anything more. Today James and I mostly prepared for the RevMax meeting tomorrow and our suggestions for the coming months. This thursday Riko, the Regional DORM will be visiting with various employees of the hotel and I'm pretty excited to meet her. I was supposed to spend some time this week working with accounting, but I'm not sure if that's going to happen or not. I guess we'll have to see!

Relocation

James- my trusty DORM mentor

Today was very similar to the Mondays I've experienced in the past, except the Sheraton Kauai was having a crisis. They are renovating their hotel and a number of their rooms are taking longer than expected to complete. Lacking quite a few rooms has caused the hotel to have more guests than rooms and therefore be "oversold." Since the hotel is "oversold" their director of revenue management (DORM) has to try and do everything possible to relocate their guests. Ideally, a hotel would like to pass on their "oversold" guests to sister properties and keep the business under the same company. Also, if they had to move them to a different company they would have to negotiate a rate and then achieve higher relocation expenses. It sounds like this is a common occurrence among hotels in the summer, but the problem is that most hotels are very busy in the summer and can't always take extra guests.

For example, we're close to being sold out and only able to hold a certain number of rooms for Sheraton. The relocation puts a lot of stress on our staff trying to deal with other hotels' disgruntled guests while also trying to keep our current guests happy. Princeville has to give up outside business to accommodate Sheraton's rooms and in turn Princeville is losing opportunities for greater revenue elsewhere! Oy! A DORM's worst nightmare :)! As with all things though, there is a fine line between meeting our goals and helping our counterparts out. Kind of like, I scratch your back and you scratch mine mentality. James says its always wise to help out your fellow DORMs when you can, because one day you could be in the same predicament.

Other than that we worked on forecasting July and preparing for August and September. As with most things in life, you gotta always be lookin a couple steps ahead :)

Waimea and the rest of the weekend

Waimea Canyon

Saturday I met with Kelly K to go for a hike around Waimea Canyon on the west side of the shore. Unfortunately it poured all morning and we weren't able to go hiking, so instead Kelly took me around to some of the touristy spots on the west side. This was really the first time weather had kind of spoiled my plans, but it seemed to clear up pretty well by the afternoon. We ended up going to Kokee national park, Fort Elizabeth (an old fort built by the Russians), and to the hanging bridge in Waimea. The west side was much drier than the east side and therefore was more brown and even some cacti around. While we were driving I learned some more cool Kauian town names like Hanapepe (HAN ah PAY PAY) and Eleele (EL ay El ay). Its just fun to say them and I'm still trying to pick up more of the local dialect, pretty soon I might be able to start picking up Pigeon.

She had to pick her kids up from the airport in Lihue so we hung around and killed some time by going to a movie and a little shopping at Walmart. Kelly dropped me off at the hotel and by that point I was pretty exhausted, but it was great to finally make it over to the west side of the island.

Today didn't do much, but I decided to hit up another local beach. There's a shortcut trail off of one of the Princeville streets, but typically to access Anini beach you have to drive to Kiluea to access it (about a 15-20 minuted drive). The trail wasn't as steep as the last one and much more overgrown with vines and trees. It was a pretty cool beach, but when the clouds started to roll in I decided to head home. It only ended up raining for about 3 minutes and was back to sunshine. The walk was fun and gave a great relaxing note to end my weekend with.

Aloha Friday

My lil desk

Instead of TGIF (thank god it's Friday), in the islands you call it aloha Friday. Of course to keep up with the true spirit of aloha, everyone throws on their aloha shirts or dresses on Fridays. Today was also a goodbye party for one of the office's secretary's. It was kind of potluck promotion celebration and a lot of people chipped in with dishes from home. My contribution was a couple liters of Coke from Foodland, especially since I can't cook anything in my room. This is the second promotion I've seen that has taken a Princeville employee to another property and both goodbyes were so heartfelt. At each goodbye, there was always someone crying or tearing up and I was surprised how emotional I was getting as well. I'm not sure how it is at other offices or properties, but it sure feels like a surge of true feelings in wishing them well on their journey into their new promotions.

Also some exciting news for the hotel, we just received news of a $36 million (the low estimate) renovation next year and the designer and his team are flying out next week. His name is David Easton and he is a certified St.Regis designer, which suggests that corporate could be possibly interested in turning the hotel into a St.Regis property. The St.Regis brand is very selective in its hotels and currently only has about 10-12 properties in the world, so this would be a huge advantage/honor for Princeville. Kelly Hoen, the GM, is really excited about it but she's worried about the designer. One of our values at the hotel is to stay indigenous to the surrounding area and this designer does not have a lot of experience designing for the islands (he's worked mostly in Aspen). It all be very interesting to see how it pans out.

Tomorrow I'm so stoked because I'm going on a long hike up into Waimea canyon or as some call it the "grand canyon of the pacific." The GM's secretary Kelly Kaona invited be today so I'm pretty excited to finally make it over to the west side, which is supposedly very different than the east. She's picking me up at 6:30 and it should be pretty spectacular!

Numbers galore!

James and I met with the E-marketing manager for Starwood Hawaii for a meeting including Jay, the director of sales, and Kelly, the general manager. We basically discussed a promotions strategy for the next couple months to try to increase our average daily rates and occupancy.

For the rest of the day James and I looked over reports and tried to help out Sheraton Kauai (our sister property). SK oversold their hotel and they are trying to relocate some of their guests to our hotel. Its alot of stress on both parts, but at least this is providing some increase in our occupancy. Reports reports reports! Then you have to turn around and explain those reports or as they say give them the "Reader's Digest" version to a variety of people with different levels of interest/backgrounds. Once James has reports put together, he has to turn around and send different versions out to accounting, the general manager, and of course regional (which eventually moves on to corporate). Actually one of my assignments tomorrow is to take a look at all of the revenue management reports and sift through them to make a more feasible packet of reports to present at the RevMax meeting next week. The current reports are a little confusing and Kelly wants James and I to work together to only have the key reports.

another Wednesday . . . check!

My "Locals" slippas'

Ditto from yesterday! Spent the day with James working on reports for the hotel's weekly RevMax weekly meeting (which is basically to figure out the hotel's sales strategy). Tomorrow we'll be meeting with one of e-marketing managers for regional Starwood and should be interesting to hear what he has to say about our current marketing strategies. Also next week the regional director of revenue management is coming out to our hotel so I will definitely get to meet her!

gotta love rev. mgt!

Spent another day with James today and will probably be working with him for the rest of the week. Next week I'll be hitting up accounting a bit, but I think for the rest of my time here I'll be working with James. Its great to be working with him, because now I feel like we're more of a team. Whenever he refers to things that need to be done, I notice now that includes me more and also lets me know more of what's going on. Even when he has meetings or presentations to go to where I'm not needed, he'll leave me in his office to finish up little projects. I even got myself day dreaming a bit when I was in his office, picturing the day when in fact I too will have my own office! A little silly, but hey its the small things and achievements in life that keep things exciting. Pretty soon we'll start working on next year's forecasts and budget, where hopefully I'll be able to help and also meet with Starwood's regional director of revenue management for . Exciting times in the world of revenue :)

manic monday

Not too much to report for today; I thought I was going to be working with the accounting department but actually spent the entire day with James in revenue management. He and I spent almost the whole day updating the latest spreadsheets of data that he has to prepare weekly for all of the different department managers. It was neat to finally be working more on revenue management stuff and seeing the kind of stuff that I would be typically doing. In fact, as sad as it may sound, I actually enjoyed updating all of the reports. It was neat to be able to see the changes currently take place and be able to compare them to where we should be and/or want to be. Then you can start to use strategy to take you where you're revenue should go. Should you raise or lower your current prices? Oversell the hotel? And by how much? Should you open up different channels, like a new Internet distribution site? Should you create a promotion or a new package? The possibilities could be endless and revenue managers just need to decide which ones to use in order to zero in on the specific goal that they have. All very interesting stuff and I could be learning more about it this week or be placed in the accounting department. Guess we'll find out tomorrow :)

hanging with the locals

Kilauea Lighthouse

Today was an awesome day off. I got a call yesterday from Penny inviting me to come out to see her ranch. So this morning her son and daughter, Keith and Haley, came to pick me up. They were very friendly and took me around to some of the local beaches and showed me where different movies were filmed. I mentioned that my Dad likes lighthouses and Keith offered to take me to the Kilauea Lighthouse. It was a great point looking out over the ocean and you could see a huge Albatross nesting ground too. After we left the lighthouse we went to meet some of Keith's friends and then left for Foodland to pick up some poki (raw seasoned ahi). We headed for the ranch and I got to meet Penny's husband (Bert) and other friends. Keith took me up on their ATV and we got to look out over their property and the Kapaa valley. I even tried to drive, but learned I still need a little practice with that one. We then just hung around and ate boiled peanuts, steak, rice, and ahi. It was quite an interesting combination for me to take in, looking out at a horse ranch sipping on a Coors Light but being surrounded by palm and coconut trees and eating raw ahi with chopsticks. Never thought I would be in a place like it, but it felt really cool to be out of Princeville and see more of the local scene. Right before I left, Penny extended another invitation for me to come back next weekend and hopefully I'll be able to.

Tomorrow, I'll probably just be hanging out at the beach and maybe going to see a couple of condos. I connected with a realtor to get an estimate of what I could possibly get if I was to move here. Of course I am just looking ;)

Miranda Family Ranch

fun with the graveyard!

I survived the graveyard (night audit) shift and actually had a fun time doing it. My trainer was named Penny and in between her showing me how to close the different accounts, we got to know each other. She owns a ranch with her husband in Kapahi (just outside of Kapaa) where they train and breed horses. She’s a big rancher, or as they say in Hawaii a “paniolo,” and I got to ask her questions about the upcoming rodeo in August. She also has a son my age and a daughter the same age as my sister. So we had lots to talk about and that made the night pass fairly quickly. Once 3 am came around, I noticed that it took some effort for me to continue to focus on numbers from all of the closing reports. Gotta love coffee though! Once we hit 4:30 I was pretty good until when I was finished at around 7 am.

I got to see the sun rise and I was blown away by it. Penny and I had pretty much finished everything by that point, so she let me go out on the balcony to watch the sunrise. I am so mad that I didn’t have my camera, but it was just breathless. I did notice a difference between the sunrise and the sunsets I’ve seen here before. I’m not sure what was different about it, but something more inspiring about the sunrise. I guess the whole symbolism of it . . . here I go again on my philosophic mumbo-jumbo :).

After I finished, I grabbed some breakfast and went straight to bed. I was out until about 12 pm, so it was a good 5 hour catch-up. Later, I jumped on the bus to explore a little bit of the other near-by town Hanalei. Definitely more upscale than Kapaa, with more restaurants, bars, and boutique clothing and antique stores. They even had a Subway! For some reason, it just felt weird to me to see a Subway in Hawaii, but I bet it’s a big comfort to the tourists. I was waiting to catch the bus back to Princeville, when I ran into Shawn, Princeville’s IT person. She was heading back to Princeville and offered to give me a ride back. It’s funny and cool, that already I’m getting that small town feeling and running in to people I know on the island.

I came back and headed to the employee cafeteria for some dinner. I sat and talked with one of the room service attendants, who is about 40ish and a huge surfer. It’s so neat to see how his eyes light up when he starts describing different swells or surfing techniques. I swear, if you’re a true blue surfer it’s practically like a cult following out here. It’s fun to learn about it and even cooler when you can start using the lingo and talking the talk, but an entirely different thing to walk the walk :)

waiting for the night

Well, I just woke up from a nap and waiting for 11 o’clock to come around so I can head out for the night audit shift at the front desk. Today was a pretty low key day, just hung around Princeville. I went to check out the Princeville Stables and met some of their staff. Also went to talk to a real estate agent about possible condos out here. Although Princeville Hotel has made it pretty clear that they’re intending to give a final offer once I’m done for the summer, there’s still a chance I might end up somewhere else too. Never say never! In the case that I will be here, I wanted to check out what my housing options would be around here. The night’s not over quite yet and more to come later about the oh-so wonderful night audit :)!

almost 4th week done!

Not too much to report for today, but things went fairly well at the front desk. I’m definitely getting the hang of things and I’m even getting used to saying “Aloha” and “Mahalo” all the time (then again I think the muumuu helps too). Dinner was great tonight since I ate at Café Hanalei and I had the grilled Walu (a fish that’s very similar to Sea Bass).

Tomorrow night I’m working at 11 pm and then I’m finishing at 7 am. It’s the night audit shift where everything from the current day gets settled to zero in preparation for the next day. A lot of the shift’s activities involve accounting which will also be great preparation for me for next week in the Accounting department. It’ll be an interesting night, but hey learning is what I’m here for and I don’t think I’ll have an opportunity to ever do this again. Once I’m done at 7, I’ll be done for the week! Goodness, I can’t believe I’ve already been here for 4 weeks!

So there's this really cool window in my bathroom. Sounds a little odd at first, but basically its a window that you can either have "open" or "closed" by flipping a switch. When I want it "closed," a screen appears which acts just like the wall.

When I want it "open," I flip the switch and the window allows me to see through my bedroom and also through my bedroom window to the outside. This allows me to look from my shower technically out to through my bedroom window. Hope this makes sense, but the "open" window is below and you can make out the frame of my bedroom window.

smooth sailing

Much better! You know it’s amazing what a day can do to change your attitude at work. As you could probably tell I wasn’t the happiest camper yesterday, but things went much better today. I worked again at the front desk, but I worked with a different “guest service agent” (basically a front desk agent) named Lani and she was awesome. She explained how things worked, she had me help her, and she actually let me do stuff too! It’s hard for the front desk to know what to do with me, especially since I’m just going to be around for a week, but its always nice to feel helpful/useful. After the usual of checking guest in and out and accommodating their every wish, I headed “home.” I grabbed some dinner, read the paper, and did some laundry.

Today I also got to eat breakfast with the new Café Hanalei manager from Boston, Jeremy. He’s living in the hotel too and so we’re both the new guys to the company. We’re hoping to hit up some of the hiking spots later in the week and he even offered me to use his rental car while he works at night. Wahoo! Perhaps I’ll have a little more independence from Princeville.

After dinner and on my way back to my room, I got a glimpse of the sunset and decided to drop my stuff off and head down to the beach to unwind. Amazing. Absolutely amazing to see sunsets like this practically every night, but tonight’s was the first that I really sat to enjoy it. It’s funny how you can get wrapped up in the small things, when beautiful wonderful things happen around you every day. Awwww . . . that’s my inspirational thought of the night ;)

Why yes . . . I am wearing a muumuu

Don’t you love when people say they are going to train you and then they don’t? They just kind of assume that by watching someone do something once will be plenty of explanation for all of the whys, how, and any of the other questions you may have. I feel like I’m seeing a trend here, but then again that’s kind of just the hospitality biz for you.

My day started off great; I went on a long walk in the morning and enjoyed reading the paper and eating breakfast on the lanai in Café Hanalei. So I went in today to work at the front desk from 2-10 and the person who was suppose to be training me was named Vilma. She didn’t know that she would be training me and when she did have me she really didn’t explain much of anything to me. She’s very good at her job and has been here for a while, but she didn’t really seem to want to explain things to me. So this led me to kind of follow her around and ask questions where I thought necessary. It was a very slow night, so for about 5 hours I prepared key packets and filled them with different promotional flyers. While I was up at the front desk, I noted things that went on and tried to pick things up as much as I could.

And yes . . . I got to wear a muumuu . . . and it was glorious. Tomorrow I’ll be working from 10-6, so we’ll see what’s in store for then!

Kapaa

On Saturday I got to go to the wonderful town of Kapaa, which is the closest big town to Princeville. I had driven through it a few times before, but I had always wanted to take more time to explore it. I jumped on the trusty Kauai bus from the Princeville shopping center and headed to Kapaa (ka-PAH-ah).

I was dropped off at the local craft fair and got to explore all of the local crafts, including things like wooden bowls, different kinds of Hawaiian clothes/wraps, and a ton of jewelry. Kapaa is basically built revolving around the main highway (which is also its Main Street; reminds me a lot of Pullman), so I decided to check out all of the local shops and restaurants down the street. Of course being the incredible foodie that I am, I literally stopped and looked at every single restaurant’s menu. Half of the time they would have menus outside, but sometimes it would be a little café or local spot and you would have to go inside to look at the menu. When I did go inside to look around and then turn around to go back out, I think people must thought have that I was little looney. Oh well, food will do that to you. There was an interesting selection of restaurants, a bunch like your local burger shops (except you could get interesting add-ons like kim chee or spam), Asian restaurants, Mexican, specialty coffee shops, and even your all-vegetarian restaurant and vegan café. Kapaa also had a roadside fruit stand and you could get mangos, pineapple, ice cold coconuts (to drink out of), and sugar cane (as a snack). For lunch I went to the House of Noodles and got a good Saimin noodle dish that was excellent. After exploring a little more, I decided to head back to the bus stop and head back to Princeville. It was neat on the drive back, because they took a different route off of the main highway and I got to see some more of the inland towns.

It felt great to leave Princeville on my own and do things on my schedule and get a better feel of the island culture. I’m hoping to make it to other towns in the coming weekends as well.

Today was great too. For breakfast I had some papaya and tried the Taro pancakes with bananas and coconut syrup (what a surprise ;) ). Then I just bought some snorkel gear and hit some of the coral reefs right outside of the hotel. Great end to a restful/interesting weekend. Oh boy this week I’ll be working at the front desk! And wait till you see this uniform . . . you guessed it a muumuu.









Sittin' at the Noodle House

the new and improved blue chip

After considering a few things, I decided to quit my job at Café Hanalei. As I mentioned earlier, here I have to face many things that I have never had to before. One of those would be truly acting as a manager/superior and working as a busser does not portray the managerial position that I would like to. Plus now I will be able to actually have weekends off and get to explore the island. Also I’m hoping to visit my friends on Hawaii (the big island), without having to worry about work. Even leave the hotel property! This weekend I’m hoping to go to Kapa’a and do a little exploring there.

Today went great! I worked on Jay’s grand slam golf package and finished finding price quotes. Once I got all of the price information I was able to put it into an excel spreadsheet and I was excited to get a chance to put my education to use. I even threw in a couple formulas and when I showed Jay, he was floored by them. Of course compared to the kids in my MBA class it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary that our professors wanted us to use, but out here it’s pretty cool. Plus I thought it was fun to play around with excel and make something they could really use. This was also typically a project that took other interns took a lot longer to complete, but I was able to finish it in about a day’s work.

I went to eat at the fabulous seafood buffet tonight and even got to sample some of the famous chocolate fountain. The food was pretty incredible and it was nice to be out of the employee cafeteria for a while too. The weather was incredible today, so I’m hoping it will continue to be clear for the rest of the weekend so I can catch a few rays ;)

new from sales

My second to last day in sales went very well. Today I got to meet with a few different managers in particular positions that I was not too familiar with. The first person I met with was Jennifer who is in charge of catering and weddings. I have some experience in catering but I was very interested in the weddings area. Hawaii, and specifically Kauai, is very popular for your honeymooners and/or weddings and therefore the potential revenue from this market could be huge. Jennifer was telling me how some of her brides plan out up to 2 years in advance or could come the day of and without any notice ask for her to put together a wedding that very day. Like I had mentioned earlier, when I first arrived I noticed multiple weddings taking place simultaneously on the beach. Jennifer told me that the hotel never has more than one wedding at a time and the ones I noticed were probably people just using the property for their wedding. The hotel has a specific boundary and there are certain parts of the beach that do not belong to the hotel and therefore open game to anyone. They are not sometimes the most ideal places for weddings, so planners will sometimes try to get on property but avoid the site fee (which means using Princeville’s property which can cost $2500) and will just try to “sneak” their wedding on the property. Most of the pool staff monitors who is allowed to have their wedding on the property and if they see someone trying to sneak on without the site fee the staff can ask them to leave. Jennifer was telling me of a situation where a pool attendant (in aloha shirt and all) had to interrupt a wedding and ask the party to leave. Of course the bride and groom had no idea that they “sneaked” onto the hotel’s property and as she described it they were pretty upset/embarrassed with their wedding planner. I’d be pretty upset too considering how much they must have been paying the planner!

After Jennifer I went and sat with the PR/Advertising manager of the hotel, Stephanie. She was really cool and she showed me the pile of clippings and magazine articles that the hotel had in one way or another been featured in. I was very interested to see that although Princeville does not handle their own international sales force, they do have Stephanie monitor their international PR and advertising. Princeville, through Starwood, hires a “clipping collector” company who they pay to find articles, editorials, and any kind of mention of the Princeville hotel, clip it out, and send it to Princeville. They record all of the received clippings and then record the value that the equivalent article space would have cost Princeville as an ad rather than an article/editorial. I always wondered how companies kept track of their PR and it was interesting to see it specifically in the hospitality industry.

When we finished, I worked with the director of sales and marketing to try and put together a hotel and golf package. Jay told me about how Kauai hosts the golf grand slam every year and he gave me his idea of creating a package that included rooms, breakfast, lunch, rounds of golf, gift basket, and bus service. Once I had the list of things he wanted to include, he assigned me to figure out the base cost of the package and how much they could charge. Before this I had no idea what the golf grand slam was, but I learned the winner from the four top golf matches come and play each other on a course in Kauai. So for the rest of the day I worked on the package and tomorrow I will be turning it in to Jay and finishing up my week in sales!