Pictured below is our KTN team celebrating ResSTAR Trainer Colleen Tuttle's birthday as well as our move to new offices in Downtown Hollywood, FL.  Pictured behind her are Kris Jorge, ResSTAR Trainer, Danielle Whatley, Marketing Admistration Manager, Ali Lief, ResSTAR T rainer, and Donna Grizzle, Accounting Manager.

                                    



August began the same way July had ended for me, with back-to-back bookings.  First up was an opening keynote presentation for the GM/DOS conference of Concord Hospitality, which was held close by in Miami.  Having worked with Concord over they years when they were a client of ours at HSA, I knew what a great company they had and figured it would be an over-the-top event.  Yet when I showed up that morning I was even more impressed with how they had organized and conducted this joint meeting.  The room as all abuzz to start the morning with awards presentations for their top sales staff and directors, which preceded my keynote on “Building Revenue and Increasing RevPAR Through Effective Front Desk Sales.”   For the rest of the morning the group listened attentively as we worked through a half dozen ways in which they can train their front desk staff to not only capture new sales, but also to yield more out of their existing reservations by maintaining the revenue fences at the front desk.

I really enjoyed working on all this with Kevin McAteer, their corporate VP of Sales, who along with their other executives pulled off one of the best GM/DOS conferences I’ve ever participated in.  Since I accidentally set my digital camera to “video” by accident for the volunteer who took the picture, I don’t have a photo with Kevin but will soon post a picture of me presenting. 

Later that day I headed back up to Hollywood to help my new staff start moving into our new offices at KTN before heading off again. 

Next up on the schedule was another cross-continent trip, this time to Santa Ana to conduct training for the agents at the 20-seat call center for Tarsadia Hotels.  This was an especially rewarding engagement for several reasons.  For one, it was another case of Déjà vu, as Tarsadia also was an early client of ours when I co-owned HSA training,  and I’ve always admired Pat Patel (the VP of Marketing) for being one of the brightest minds in hotel sales/marketing.  I can still remember the day Pat showed up with over a dozen of his staff at our San Diego regional seminar at the Hotel del Coronado in 1993.  It was also rewarding because Tarsadia had for the last several years been using the services of another reservations training company, which had historically been HSA’s well-respected competitor.  After numerous attempts to steal them back from our friendly competitor over the years, I guess the timing was good as they seemed ready for a change in their sales strategy, despite that they already have a top-notch operation there which speaks well for our old competitors I must say out of respect.

En route to do their seminar on the plane I spent most of the time listening to dozens of recordings of actual calls from their call monitoring system, and after reviewing more than 20 calls I did not find a single “bad” example, and overall I have to say that this call center is one of the best of its size/market in the entire industry.  That being said, it was especially rewarding for me to see how well their agents responded to the new customer-focused sales approach we espouse in Reservations SAILS 2006!  It seemed everyone was ready to move away from the scripted, linear sales models and into discovering and fulfilling the caller’s situational needs and wants.  Besides meeting some great personalities among their agents, I also bumped into two old client contacts in Mea, their assistant manager who showed me a certificate of completion she still has from my class in 1996, and Ed Martinez, VP of Rev Management, who I first met in the early 1990’s when he was with Westin. 

But the best part was meeting my new friend Charles Young, their Director of Reservations.  When it comes to finding someone who is as enthusiastic and passionate about reservations sales process excellence as me, I think I have finally met my match! Not only did we stay late every evening talking shop, but we also had some great chats over lunch about things like parenting, and even “tabu” subjects like politics, and religion.  Charles, I’m sure if we lived in the city we’d become best friends as would our families. 

Here’s a picture of me with some of my new and “old” friends from Tarsadia Hotels (from left to right):  Dana Budde, lead agent trainer, Charles Young, Tori and Mea, who are the assistant managers for the call center.