I spent my first 15 years running hotels and my last ten years selling training to hotels. My area of expertise has always been in the sales and marketing arena for hospitality. I have recognized so many technology opportunities for the hospitality industry and so I recently decided to learn a lot more about what is possible. My goal is to develop some applications that will enable hotel owners and operators to increase their revenues and reduce their expenses by putting better tools in the hands of their sales and marketing teams.
As the chair of the digital marketing council for HSMAI I have had the opportunity to hear from the digital heads representing the big hotel brands, the larger management companies, individual resorts, hotel website developers and other tech vendors to the hospitality space. This unqiue perspective has made me aware of what is missing in the world of digital for hotels and given my background, I will be able to contribute to filling those voids.
Wanting to know how things work, I enrolled in a six month coding bootcamp which is an intense study program for full stack developers. Completed in April, 2018, I am proficient in HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, MongoDB, mySQL, React.js and Node.js. I have also become familiar with Git and Heroku, Express, Handlebars and generally reading documentation and learning new platforms, frameworks, APIs, etc. I have also learned how to work with a coding team as we have had several group projects. The experience has been helpful in rounding out my skill set.