Course list

Luxury is eternally evolving. In this program, you'll gain a thorough understanding of luxury service management and the specific challenges of marketing to today's luxury consumers. Marketing luxury services requires specific principles to enhance and preserve the image of finest quality, exclusiveness, and hedonic value. You'll sharpen your knowledge in marketing by contrasting traditional versus luxury-specific marketing principles within the service sector. You'll explore and actively participate with your peers through a mix of cases, readings, and videos.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • What Is Luxury and How Is It Changing?
  • Wednesday, May 4, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Who Is the Luxury Customer and What Do They Want? How to Get Insights Into Their Behavior
  • Wednesday, May 11, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • How Is the Marketing Mix for Luxury Different? What Are the Anti-Rules of Luxury Marketing? Can Luxury Be Mass-Produced?
  • Wednesday, May 18, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Elevating Your Service Experience: The Aesthetics of Luxury
  • Wednesday, May 25, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Innovation is a hot topic these days, and there is a plethora of information regarding how to transform, change, or revolutionize your hotel. But many hotel GMs find the application of technology and product innovation methodologies just do not apply to services. In this course, you'll learn what it takes to create and execute sustainable, service-based innovation programs. You'll zero in on the role of HR in innovation and examine how to integrate your entire staff into the innovation process. Through interactive case studies and active learning exercises, you'll walk away with a clear path to innovation.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • What Makes Service-Based Innovation Unique
  • Wednesday, March 8, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • The Workforce as a Key Element
  • Wednesday, March 15, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Value Proposition Design
  • Wednesday, March 22, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Business Model Innovation
  • Wednesday, March 29, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

General managers face an array of complex communication challenges. This program provides both seasoned and new GMs with actionable communication strategies they can use at the property level and when communicating to ownership groups. Participants will better understand their own communication style, learn professional storytelling frameworks, polish their presentation skills, and practice giving and receiving constructive feedback. Through interactive lectures and engaging activities, you'll explore how to enhance your leadership presence and communication effectiveness.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • Improving Your Personal Effectiveness
  • Tuesday, August 9, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Presenting Your Ideas With Clarity
  • Thursday, August 11, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Preparing Professional Slide Decks and Reports
  • Tuesday, August 16, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Giving and Receiving Feedback Successfully
  • Thursday, August 18, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

In this program, you'll gain insights about competitive trends and influences in the global hospitality industry, and you'll identify the priorities and operational implications for your organization. You'll examine the most current and important economic, demographic, and social challenges within the global hospitality industry and distinguish the ways in which your organization's HR function can be leveraged to address your specific needs. The sessions will involve discussion and analysis of current events along with a formal audit of your organization's key HR policies and practices as a basis for developing a customized improvement plan during the in-person session at Cornell, “Creating Customized HR Solutions.”

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • Labor Markets and the Evolving Hospitality Workforce
  • Wednesday, February 1, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • The Future of Work and Implications for Functional Structure and Job Design
  • Wednesday, February 8, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Technology and Making Your Life Easier
  • Wednesday, February 15, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • The Human Dimension: Going Beyond Engagement
  • Wednesday, February 22, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Good strategy creation and execution are the key ingredients in a hotel's recipe for success. This mini-program focuses on how GMs can formulate strategies to guide their hotels in creating a sustainable competitive advantage. The goal is to develop a mastery of the analytical tools to evaluate your hotel's competencies and the factors critical to its success as compared to your competitors. We will explore how to examine trends in the competitive landscape, develop a clear and compelling strategic direction, and establish strategic priorities. Our emphasis will be on building strategic thinking, formulating strategies, stakeholder analysis, performance measurement, and developing a viable strategic implementation plan. We will rely on case analyses as well as a toolkit of analytic mechanisms to evaluate your own hotel.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • The Strategic Management Process and Strategic Thinking Tools
  • Friday, October 7, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Analysis of the Industry, Key Environmental Trends, and Organizational Competencies
  • Friday, October 14, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Direction Setting and the Key Elements of Formulating Business-Level Strategies, Operational Objectives, and Priority Analysis
  • Friday, October 21, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Putting Strategy Into Action: Accountability and Empowering Execution, Fixing Broken Processes, and Reviewing Performance
  • Friday, October 28, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

An increasingly complex global business environment requires general managers to think strategically to make smarter business decisions. This program offers participants innovative, practical, and profitable solutions for dealing with global trends in order to improve revenue, profit, and customer loyalty. Through presentations, discussions, case studies, and real-life examples, you'll explore the latest practical and fast-paced lessons in the application of strategic thinking to challenges and opportunities facing the hospitality industry. “Best in the business” (and some worst!) case studies and examples will be drawn from businesses worldwide. At the end of this program, you can expect to take away ideas for implementation in your own business.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • The Big Picture: Explore the key trends affecting hospitality and leverage them into better business practices
  • Wednesday, November 9, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Analysis and Application: Identify the most important trends for you and define action steps to test on your organization
  • Wednesday, November 16, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Presentations, Discussion, and a Plan of Action (Part I): Present your action plan and discuss actionable business ideas
  • Wednesday, November 23, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Presentations, Discussion, and a Plan of Action (Part II): Present your action plan and discuss actionable business ideas
  • Wednesday, November 30, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Traditional hotel pricing hinges on ensuring rooms are available for late-arriving, higher-yielding guests while building base demand with other consumer segments through the use of historic demand patterns. In today's reduced demand environment, however, revenue management needs to rely less on historic demand patterns, focusing instead on pricing by capitalizing on digital marketing opportunities to ensure hotels drive demand while avoiding rate dilution through excessive discounting actions. Using a strategic pricing simulation, you'll develop an understanding of the interplay between pricing and digital marketing in low-demand markets and refocus on profit versus revenue.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • The State of Revenue Management Today
  • Tuesday, December 6, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Competitive Pricing
  • Thursday, December 8, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Digital Marketing With Google, Meta, and OTAs
  • Tuesday, December 13, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Profit Optimization Through Integrated Marketing and Pricing
  • Thursday, December 15, 2022: 10am - 1pm (ET)

The hospitality industry has always been dynamic, whether it's the rise of new distribution channels in the digital economy or new lodging products in the sharing economy. But the COVID-19 economy has accelerated transformation in ways that even the most seasoned hospitality leaders could never have foreseen. The changes wrought by the pandemic have strained the hospitality industry — but also revealed opportunities for those organizations that are nimble and innovative. This mini-program looks toward a positive future for hospitality and the role marketing will play in creating and communicating value for tomorrow's hospitality consumers.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • The New Travel Consumer: Changing consumer behaviors and expectations
  • Wednesday, April 5, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Innovation in Hospitality to Drive Demand: Explore product and service changes necessitated by COVID-19
  • Wednesday, April 12, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Marketing to the New Travel Consumer: Examine new digital marketing approaches through conversation and virtual experiences
  • Wednesday, April 19, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Market Planning for Uncertain Times: Develop a roadmap for hospitality marketing that's adaptable for reopening and recovery stages
  • Wednesday, April 26, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

This program focuses on how to use the tools of finance to evaluate capital investment ideas and sell them to hotels owners and brands. We begin by identifying capital investment opportunities in your property. We then assess the attractiveness of capital investment projects using both simple and sophisticated financial approaches. Finally, we demonstrate ways to use financial analysis to appeal to owners, brands, and other stakeholders.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • Uncovering the Value in Capital Investments
  • Wednesday, May 3, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Using Financial Acumen to Sell Your Investment Ideas
  • Wednesday, May 10, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Optimizing Recurring Investments
  • Wednesday, May 17, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Putting It All Together and Selling Ideas to Stakeholders
  • Wednesday, May 24, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

The way consumers interact and engage with food both at home and out in the world is rapidly evolving. Consumers are looking at food as more than just something to eat: It's a way of life, an expression of values and identity, and a means for engaging with larger social and cultural concerns. This course will offer insights into changing consumer food trends across market segments. You'll explore the future of menus and restaurants as well as the ways in which those trends and changes inform how you can meet the needs of your current and future guests.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Session 1:

  • Exploring Consumer Food Trends
  • Wednesday, August 9, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 2:

  • Tracking Industry Adaptations
  • Wednesday, August 16, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 3:

  • Aligning With Consumer Identities and Communities
  • Wednesday, August 23, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

Session 4:

  • Looking Internally
  • Wednesday, August 30, 2023: 10am - 1pm (ET)

The General Managers Program Capstone is the on-campus component that results in the completion of this program. It takes place twice annually: in January and in June at the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY, at the renowned Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. The next two sets of program dates are January 15-20, 2023, and June 18-23, 2023 (choose one option).

Over five intensive days, you will tackle hotel management issues and collaborate with a network of peers to expand the foundation of your hospitality knowledge. You'll hone your strategic thinking skills to take on today's most urgent business challenges and opportunities.

SCHEDULE

  • Day 1 (6:00pm - 9:00pm) 
    • Opening Reception and Orientation Dinner
    • Statler Hotel, Cornell School of Hotel Administration
  • Day 2 (8:30am - 5:00pm)
    • Strategizing for Your Success: A Focus on Your Leadership (Kate Walsh)
      • In this session, you'll strategically plan for your success as a leader. Through experiential activities, personal assessments, and interactive feedback, you'll enhance your understanding of your individualized leadership approach and strengthen your ability to lead, inspire, and build success with others in your hospitality organization. This includes the key role you play in shaping a high-performance culture for your team. You'll also review ways to inspire your service-level staff through developing the leadership skills of your direct reports. Finally, you'll explore ways to leave your mark as the leader.
      • TOPICS INCLUDE
        • Truths and myths about leadership
        • The role of emotional intelligence
        • How to motivate both outstanding and challenging employees to higher levels of performance
        • How to turn work groups into inspired teams
        • The power of organizational culture
        • Creating your leadership brand
      • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
        • Assess the strengths that are key to your personalized approach as a leader
        • Define and practice applying motivational concepts and techniques to draw exceptional performances from others
        • Strengthen your ability to lead all types of employees at the individual, group, and team levels
        • Explore how to use work values and the organization's culture to create sustained, enhanced levels of performance
  • DAY 3 (8:30am - 5:00pm) 
    • Creating Customized HR Solutions (J. Bruce Tracey)
      • This session will provide you with an opportunity to develop customized, property-specific solutions to address top HR challenges. Based on information generated from a comprehensive pre-session HR audit, you will engage in hands-on development activities that can be used to refine and/or create new HR policies, practices, and procedures that can be implemented immediately. The development process will incorporate industry best practices and thought leadership, and utilize peer-based feedback and assessment to ensure that the solutions are strategically aligned and operationally actionable.
      • TOPICS INCLUDE
        • HR value creation
        • Major functional HR roles
        • HR best practices
        • Strategic and operational HR assessment
      • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
        • Discuss current challenges facing hospitality HR
        • Develop context-specific solutions for HR challenges
        • Design a process for guiding continuous HR improvement
        • Create an action plan for implementation of new ideas
  • DAY 4 (8:30am - 5:00pm) 
    • Co-Creating Value Through Customer-Centered Brand Marketing (Robert Kwortnik)
      • Marketing — more than any other business function — creates value by driving demand to connect consumers to hospitality companies. Marketing identifies profitable target markets. Marketing crafts competitive positioning strategies and articulates the brand promise. Marketing listens to the voice of the customer to guide service experience design, value co-creation with customers, and measurement of key customer outcomes such as satisfaction, engagement, and advocacy. It is therefore critical to understand how customer-centered brand marketing integrates the activities of hospitality organizations to create value for guests — and for the business.
      • TOPICS INCLUDE
        • Brand-Based Strategic Marketing
          • Identifying, understanding, and targeting profitable market segments
          • Mining marketing information from customers, competitors, and the marketing environment
          • Driving visible value through service innovation
          • Building experiential brands that align the people, processes, and physical evidence strategies of the hospitality organization
        • Communicating Brand Value Through Digital Marketing
          • Articulating brand promises through integrated marketing communications
          • Driving demand and conversions with website optimization
          • Co-creating content that builds customer engagement
          • Monitoring the return on digital marketing investments
      • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
        • Adopt a customer-centered, strategic branding orientation
        • Develop a keen sense for how brand marketing influences nearly every aspect of hospitality experience production
        • Acquire a new lens for seeing how guests perceive the hospitality experience
        • Enhance guest loyalty by communicating the guest experience through digital media channels such as dynamic websites, content-fueled social media, and branded video
  • Day 5 (8:30am - 5:00pm) 
    • Financial Management for Value Creation (Steven A. Carvell)
      • To be successful, general managers must maintain positive working relationships with owners and the owners' representatives. In this session, you'll learn how to understand the hotel and its management from the owner's perspective. The first step in this process is to understand value creation from the standpoint of the various stakeholders in a hotel. You'll then explore specifically how owner objectives within the framework of value creation differ from those of the brand, the guest, and the associates, among others. You'll define and identify how to maximize the value of a hotel for the owner by understanding the interplay between the operating and real estate investment within a risk-return environment as well as how PIP and other property-level investment plans should be viewed when considering the owner's perspective. You'll discuss various owner/manager structural relationships and learn about the pros and cons of each from the owner's perspective. You'll examine conceptual and specific examples of measuring and creating value for the owner using operational benchmarking, space utilization, and the interplay of pricing and frequent-stay programs. You'll explore how an individual hotel's value can be impacted from the owner's perspective and how to reallocate resources within a hotel company to maximize the property's ability to create value.
      • TOPICS INCLUDE
        • Defining value from a stakeholder perspective
        • The owner's perspective of value creation
        • Agency conflict issues within the hotel
        • Value measurement and creation from the owner's perspective
        • How the hotel can create value for the owner
        • Owner's investments in a competitive capital environment
        • The owner's view of operations and real estate returns
        • Measuring hotel performance through operational benchmarking
        • Space utilization and value creation for the owner
        • Value to owner (VTO) analysis
        • Benchmarking to improve VTO
      • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
        • Explore the competing interests within a hotel to understand the concept of value creation from each stakeholder's perspective
        • Measure the creation of value for a hotel as well as how to enhance the hotel's ability to create value
        • Discover how the hotel's operations and real estate interact to enhance the value proposition within the hotel
        • Examine the hotel from the perspective of a stand-alone investment as well as from a portfolio perspective
  • Day 6 (8:30am - 5:00pm) 
    • Leading Innovation and Strategic Change (Cathy A. Enz)
      • Now more than ever, your success as a leader and the performance of your hotel requires agility in adapting quickly, introducing new ideas, and helping your team adjust to the evolving “new normal.” In this session, we'll explore how to implement and manage change using a multi-step process and action planning. You will practice introducing transformation under several simulated circumstances as well as focus on revisions you wish to make to your property. Many companies around the world have formulated innovative new ideas or practices but fail in implementation. We will explore why as well as what it takes to successfully lead change efforts. Our session will combine simulation, case study, action planning, and facilitated discussion to ready you for the complex challenge of building an agile and effective operation while dealing with uncertainty and resource constraints.
      • TOPICS INCLUDE
        • Building strategic action planning for the introduction of change
        • Understanding the psychology of change and how to manage resistance
        • Introducing innovations through a change implementation process
        • Why transformation efforts sometimes fail
        • Tips for overcoming the cultural and political barriers to change
      • WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
        • Examine the keys to successful change management to increase your odds of successful implementation
        • Practice introducing change in a hospitality setting through an interactive computer simulation
        • Devise an action plan for the successful introduction of large-scale transformation
        • Develop a multi-step change strategy process to apply back home
        • Explore a set of skills to manage resistance on the change journey
    • Reception and Celebration Dinner (6:30pm - 9:00pm)

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