Hospitality Leadership Certificate Courses

Core Courses (Three)

Please refer to the brochure for course start times.  All courses are offered either once or twice a month.

Leading Collaborative Teams

Based on the research and expertise of Professor Kate Walsh, Ph.D. of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, this course will teach you how to diagnose your team needs, set expectations for development, find how to utilize conflict to augment change, and build team autonomy. Using tools provided in this course, you will assess the roles and functions of your team members, define your team’s purpose, and evaluate your leadership style. You will also identify your personal leadership brand and values, examine group decision-making, and explore team collaboration - including virtual teams.

Services Marketing Planning and Management

Services marketing is often viewed in terms of its outcomes, such as advertisements and sales promotions. But services marketing is actually an analytic process. In this course, you will analyze modern service-centric marketing: the frameworks, tools, decision factors, and strategies that support marketing decisions.

Understanding Financial Statements

Every company’s finance function keeps detailed records of the daily transactions involved in the running of the organization. Periodically, they create reports that allow management, stakeholders, and regulating authorities to have insight into the financial health of the firm. As a manager, you need to understand both the metrics that are reported in income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements and how they relate to each other. You also need to understand how comparing numbers across your company, the industry, and from year to year can help you assess the overall financial performance of the firm. Financial statements are documents, and this course emphasizes your ability to read, parse, and analyze them. The in-depth review of sample case studies in this course will provide you with the tools you need to examine your own organization’s reports. As you make budgeting and investment decisions, your knowledge of how vital financial markers indicate relative health in the organization will help drive initiatives to meet your company’s financial goals.

Electives
(Choose any two of eight courses)

Financial Management Focus

Mastering the Time Value of Money

In today’s competitive business world, managers are charged with making many project-related decisions, often involving costs or revenues that will be encountered some time in the future. In this course, participants develop a solid understanding of the time value of money to prepare them to make smart business decisions. Using timelines and cash-flow calculations they will learn to project cash flow, calculate payments, establish the value of securities and investments, and determine when it is more cost effective to lease or to buy.

Using Ratio Analysis to Evaluate Financial Performance

The ability of an organization to analyze its financial position is essential for improving its competitive position in the marketplace. Through a careful analysis of its financial performance, the organization can identify opportunities to improve performance at the department, unit, or organizational level. In this course, participants will learn to use several ratio analysis instruments to achieve a comprehensive understanding of a firm’s financial performance. The course then addresses how this financial health information can be used as a foundation upon which to design and implement initiatives for increased productivity and profitability.

Advanced Revenue Management Focus

Forecasting and Availability Controls in Hotel Revenue Management

Successful revenue management strategies hinge on the ability to forecast demand and to control room availability and length of stay. This course explores the role of the forecast in a revenue management strategy and the positive impact that forecasting can also have on staff scheduling and purchasing.

Authored by Professor Sheryl E. Kimes from Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, during this course you'll get a step-by-step approach to creating an accurate forecast as you learn how to build booking curves, account for "pick-up", segment demand by market, group, and channel, and calculate error and account for its impact.

Pricing Strategy and Distribution Channels

A smart pricing strategy is the best way to increase revenue. This course teaches you how to set prices, develop rate fences (differentiate prices by customer type), and use multiple distribution channels to manage price more effectively. You'll also learn about the impact of variable pricing and discounting on revenue  management in the context of price elasticity, optimal price mix, perceived fairness, and congruence with positioning and sales strategies.

Discover the ins and outs of channel management, an essential tool for controlling differentiated pricing, maintaining rate fences, and increasing revenue. Explore various approaches to managing distribution channels including direct sales, agencies, the Internet, and opaque pricing channels. Sheryl E. Kimes, professor at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, will provide you with the knowledge you need to help run a successful organization.

Services Marketing Focus

Building a Resilient Services Marketing Information System

Your services marketing efforts depend on information. Without relevant information, one risks wasting marketing resources targeting the wrong markets with products they don’t want, at prices they won’t pay, and using communications they won’t find compelling. An effective services marketing information system captures, organizes, analyses, and interprets data from a wide variety of sources to create a robust portrait of the ideal customers for one’s service, and the marketing offer that will best satisfy them. With the ideal buyer in mind, one can target that buyer with high-impact messages that share the organization’s brand promise and entice them to purchase the service.

Marketing the Hospitality Brand Through Digital Media

Successful marketing and revenue generation in hospitality requires the management of an array of new media including, social, mobile, and search. While these new media enable marketers to reach customers in ways that were previously not possible, successful use must be anchored by core marketing and demand
management principles. This course provides you with a grounding in brand management and focuses on the importance of identifying and establishing your "brand promise": the experience your guests take away from engaging with your brand as the basis of new media management.

You'll learn directly from some of the heaviest hitters in new media for hospitality - CEOs, search, social and mobile media consultants, property-level managers, and more through interactive projects and compelling video exercises. See first-hand how the successful implementation of new media can help you deliver on
your firm's "brand promise", enabling you to deal with market uncertainties and guide your organization toward sustained profitability.

Food, Beverage & Restaurant Management Focus

Utilizing Income Statements and Operational Data

Amid the swirl of activity in food and beverage service, financial management is a function that loses priority sometimes, despite its crucial function.

Understanding and managing your food and beverage operation's income statement (profit and loss statement) can lead to better decision making and can position you to succeed.

Learn how to get a hold on your organization's finances and make informed decisions based on profit and performance.

Optimizing Your Food and Beverage Menu

Your menu does much more than inform guests about what you offer. It helps to create and communicate your food and beverage operation’s identity, and influences your guests choices.

This course will enable you to evaluate menus and identify changes that will optimize the value and profitability of your food and beverage operation.

You will learn how to identify the key inputs that impact menu decisions, how to evaluate a menu’s content and assess a menu’s pricing and design.