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!