Tisch Center for Hospitality (GLHT1-CE)

The event sector covers a wide range of event types, businesses, and employment opportunities. This course, through a review of the key characteristics of business, leisure, and cultural and social events, will provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the full scope of the sector, which is an important prerequisite for career success in this competitive industry. Topics covered include the nature, range, types, and characteristics of events; the main buyers and suppliers for events; and the role events play in society.

Event design is at the heart of successfully achieving each event’s objectives, whether it is a cultural festival or a product launch. The successful integration of the program, technology, décor, setup, and catering requires great logistical skill and detailed planning. This course will review the planning strategies, production realities, and technology involved in staging a variety of events or meetings. Topics to be covered include event needs assessment, budgeting, planning and coordinating, design and preparation, staffing, equipment management, video and film production, and vendor negotiation and contracting.

Regardless of an event’s size or budget, financial goals rank high in importance for meeting sponsors. This course looks at this financial management process—from developing a budget to analyzing the return on investment. It discusses the many forces at play in successful financial management for meeting managers. Topics to be covered include fixed and variable cost controls, exploration of a variety of revenue streams, and the strategies for managing the variances in profit-and-loss expectations. Using Microsoft Excel, students are exposed to tools that track expenses, create data reports, and format a proper budget.

All types of events—whether a small meeting or a large conference—involve contracts and risks, and event managers need to be knowledgeable and accountable to ensure that all scenarios can be dealt with in the most appropriate manner. Topics to be covered in this course include health, safety, and security considerations; insurance requirements; licenses and permits; intellectual property protections; and contracts. By the end of the course, students will have the skills to develop a comprehensive risk assessment and risk control plan for their events.

This introductory course provides an overview of the dynamic hospitality industry. Participants will learn about the different sectors; develop an understanding of the social, cultural, and economic impacts of tourism; and take a macro view of the overall tourism and hospitality system. Topics will include tourism products, transportation and access, destination marketing organizations, hotel ownership structures, and an overview of operational departments.

This course reviews the nature of hospitality operations and their distinct operational structures and guidelines. Participants will analyze hotel segments and service offerings. They will be given the opportunity to apply principles of organizing, staffing, and managing the different departments of a hotel property. Participants will apply the skills and qualities that are sought when staffing a hotel property. Finally, participants will apply the principle that each and every employee plays a role not only in the guest experience, but also in the overall revenue and profit generation activities of the hotel.

The hospitality industry is rooted in the concept of delivering exceptional customer experiences to all customers. In this course, participants will enhance their hands-on experience by building on concepts they learned in the introductory course. Participants will deepen their understanding of what makes for good service, how to deliver it, how to expand it, how to recover from bad service, and how to guarantee quality. They will analyze customer service from a business perspective and identify effective customer relationship management strategies. They also will discuss basic principles of emotional intelligence as they examine the evolution from first-time consumer to passionate fan.

Today, consumers have more choices than ever when it comes to traveling. The hospitality industry continues to expand, and it is the goal of destinations, hotel brands, and restaurants to be a part of consumers’ decision-making process before they even know they want to travel. This course examines the consumer decision-making process and explains how hospitality operators try to stay competitive and profitable. Participants will examine the evolution of the distribution of hospitality and tourism products and the increasing complexity and sophistication of distribution. By the end of the course, participants will be able to define and address some of the issues and challenges associated with successful channel management, including sales and marketing, revenue management, distribution intermediaries, channel optimization, pricing integrity, dynamic packaging, competitive distribution analysis, and integration of marketing in distribution outlets.

This course takes a business approach to building a powerful connection among financial statements, concepts, and decision-making toward the goal of profit optimization. Participants will learn how hotel business performance in the form of revenues and profits is achieved, and they will gain the skills to effectively manage assets and liabilities, which is instrumental in generating revenues and profits.

This course is offered for midlevel hospitality managers in Japan who aspire to grow their career in the management of upscale and luxury hotels. Content will focus on experiential, problem-based scenarios of real-life hospitality situations, which require prompt and responsible decision-making that ultimately favors the guest, as well as the hotel. Because decision-making that considers both hospitality and profitability is complex, content will consider all operating areas of hotels and resorts, including front desk and front service, housekeeping, food and beverage, maintenance, spa/fitness, and any other customer-contact functions.

Revenue management is one of the key business strategies that hospitality managers are expected to put forth and implement. In an increasingly crowded market space, hotels constantly must reinvent themselves to stay foremost in the perception of their customers. Having a clearly thought out and executed revenue management function is a necessity. This course takes a yield-based approach to examine how hotels can derive revenues with the goal of delivering optimum profitability. The course will focus on guest room and restaurant revenues (the two major bread winners for hotels) and ancillary profit centers, such as spas and health clubs.

While achieving revenues is foremost in a hospitality setting, an often neglected but important area is hotel procurement. Hotel procurement initiatives can boost bottom lines as much as revenue generation can. Ensuring a hotel always maintains a continuous supply of goods and services at the quality standards it sets forth is a powerful and strategic role that is entrusted to procurement. This course principally covers this topic in the context of an already operational hotel, but it also provides an overview of procurement for hotels in the preopening stages. The course underscores the point that hotel procurement initiatives are as strategic as revenue generation.

Fueled by a booming tourism industry, ambitious government targets, and the prospect of integrated resort legislation and international sporting events, tourism and hospitality are rapid growth areas in Japan. The hotel and hospitality industry offers a range of exciting new career opportunity for people of all ages and backgrounds. This course, taught in Japanese, will help students navigate the hotel industry, covering hotel supply and demand, hotel departments, and career mapping for hospitality. The course equips students with the basic knowledge, skills, and confidence to enter the hotel and hospitality industry in Japan, including career mapping within the hospitality industry and an understanding of positions and responsibilities.