Articles
Filling minds, rooms with educational programs
7/28/2000
Hotels are using some homegrown talent to capture bookings and attention
By Judy Colbert
With shrewd planning, shoulder season or off-peak times aren’t necessarily a drag on a seasonal hotel's bottom line. Instead, many hotels are taking advantage of their on-staff expertise and empty rooms to stage classes for the public.
Culinary programming draws the foodie crowd
Hotels known for their culinary prowess can take advantage of slow times to show off by offering evening, weekend or longer courses in cooking and wine tasting. At the Inn at Essex, in Montpelier, Vermont, Whisk Away weekends help fill a property that otherwise would have a vacancy rate of 50%-55% during some periods. “With the culinary weekends we can take 50-100 people, depending on the type of classes, making our occupancy 90%-95%,” says Jim Lamberti, general manager. That helps the hotel maintain steady employment for a stronger base of staff as high season approaches.
The New England Culinary Institute--which also runs restaurants at the Inn--operates the culinary courses. Four to six classes are held a year, with a cook book author, perhaps a celebrity chef, and field trips to such local food producers as Lake Champlain Chocolate Factory or Cabot Cheese. "It has been great for the hotel because we can schedule these at 'softer' periods of the year and they are not weather dependent, like sports or other events," Lamberti says.
If people don't think of mountains when it isn't ski weather, they certainly don't think of the desert in the summer. To counter that, several resorts turn summer to their benefit in luring business during this slow time. The Arizona Biltmore runs interactive cooking classes (not just a mirror over the cooking area) in the resort kitchen with hands-on instruction from the executive chef and the executive pastry chef. From September through May, the kitchen and the chef would be much too busy to give such personal attention.
Chef Jeffrey Beeson conducts cooking classes at A Different Pointe of View located at another Phoenix resort, the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs. It's an outreach program linked with an upscale market, AJ's Fine Foods; the hotel promotes the restaurant and resort to locals and their families, who often send their out-of-town guests to the resort. The promo includes signage in the market, an in-store demo, recipe cards and a card for the market offering discounts on the recipe items. Summer cooking classes are $75 per person and include a four-course meal and wine.
Food programs aren’t always so formal: The Hilton Rye Town in Rye Brook, New York offers a barbecue class with chef David Haviland teaching students how to prepare marinades and grill fresh vegetables, leg of lamb, fish, chicken, steaks and chops. The $95 tuition includes a free toque and apron.
The hotel as classroom
Food doesn't need to be the primary focus of attempts to fill a hotel in slow times. The Hyatt Regency Scottsdale Resort at Gainey Ranch in Arizona offers “experiential vacations" that focus on the four elements of the destination: flora, fauna, history and geography. Programs are aimed at children, families and adults. Among the activities developed to make a summer vacation more meaningful are creating cactus gardens, playing Native American stickball, designing copper sculptures and compiling nature notebooks.
Guests who visit for these special programs sometimes end up booking additional stays, meetings, conferences, reunions and weddings. Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite National Park in California offers a winemaker dinner series four or five times per year to prospective group clients. The wineries, including Cakebread Cellars and Silverado Winery, present the wine at each course and explain how it is made and what types of food it complements best.
Publicity about the special weekends can generate even more business. An adventure sports weekend at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, California has drawn notice from Fortune magazine and interest from other media.
The oceanfront hotel has a fitness center but also offers deep ocean running, roller skiing, mountain biking and rock climbing during the weekend. Conducted by Eco-Challengers Tony and Valerie Molina, owners of Adventure Fitness Training, the classes range from one hour to half a day. "It is as if we added a new, enormous fitness center that stretches from Malibu to the Marina and from the Pacific Ocean to the Santa Monica Mountains," says GM Armella Stepan. "Our guests can stay in shape while taking advantage of a large menu of activities that offer new adventures and challenges." Shutters' Fitness Adventures start at $110 per hour for mountain biking, rock climbing and surfing.
Sometimes classes provide benefits that can't actually be tracked to a bottom line, but improve the knowledge and morale of the employees who in turn provide a better experience for all the guests. Such is the case at the Hyatt Regency Kauai Resort & Spa, where “sharing classes” led by Stella Burgess, manager of Hawaiian culture, began this past spring. These classes provide employees with a wealth of information about Hawaiian legends, place names of Kauai, the history and culture of the ahupua'a (land division) of Pa'a (the area on which the Hyatt rests), as well as the geography of Hawaii and Kauai. The ultimate goal of the classes was to give employees a true "sense of place" in their work environment.
Among some other creative options for hotel “schools”: etiquette (for children and adults at the Hilton at Short Hills, New Jersey), quilting (at the St George Hotel, Volcano, California), flower arranging, creative writing, foreign language immersion programs, genealogy, gardening, art appreciation (perhaps in conjunction with a local gallery featuring a current or upcoming exhibit), ballroom dancing, photography, film studies, interior design or even the latest exercise or relaxation program.
