Sara Digiesi, Chief Marketing Officer Best Western Italia and Stefano Remiddi, Business Partner AIM Consulting.
Congresses and events are a fast growing area that has increasingly become an asset for hotel groups. In fact, Best Western Italia has over 100 hotels with meeting spaces and its headquarters recently created a department dedicated to helping companies and PCOs organize conferences and business meetings.
MILAN – AIM Consulting signs an agreement to create training courses for Best Western Italia hotels with and meeting spaces. In late 2016, AIM Consulting (strategic consulting company of AIM Group International) launched an innovative project called "Hotel MICE Academy". The Academy offers MICE operators a made-to-order training program based on the long experience of AIM Group in the Congress and Event Industry. Best Western Italia saw a great opportunity and dedicated its affiliated hotels to this exclusive training course.
Congresses and events are a fast growing area that has increasingly become an asset for hotel groups. In fact, Best Western Italia has over 100 hotels with meeting spaces and its headquarters recently created a department dedicated to helping companies and PCOs organize conferences and business meetings.
Like most businesses, the hospitality industry is driven by customer demand and demands are not universally the same. The challenge is to offer a personalized experience, tailored to meet specific needs. This is what the modern day customer is expecting. To this end, AIM’s training program was held in Rome in May 2017 at the Best Western Globus Hotel and featured experts from the meeting industry from various divisions in AIM Group. Over 50 vendors and hotel managers attended the sessions and numerous themes included how to analyze and use current and future trends anticipating their impact on the hotel industry, ethical, training and regulatory aspects of Client Life Science. Also included were case studies about managing small and large Pharma events, identifying and resolving critical points in the workflow with problem-solving processes and using the Improv Prototyping technique.
AIM Consulting knows that memorable learning experiences mean offering opportunities to generate and share new ideas and insights. Different group meeting formulas were used to involve the attendees: plenary sessions interjected with breakout sessions with separate paths for those interested in meetings and those interested in MICE. There were also sessions such as “Spot the Mistake”, Team Building and a session about what we have learned from our extensive experiences called "AIM talks AIM". This session underlined different perspectives whether it is the client’s or the PCO’s plus how to evaluate possible areas of improvement.
As Stefano Remiddi, Business Partner at AIM Consulting comments, "It is vital that newly recruited hotel staff focus on key issues about guests. Gathering data and being able to learn through their many interactions, before, during and after their stay, builds better guest experiences. This greater understanding also allows us to anticipate a guest’s needs and to identify critical areas where effective problem solving processes need to be initiated. Just learning managerial and operational skills is no longer enough for business success".
"Continuous training for our personnel has historically been an asset for Best Western Italia,” says Sara Digiesi, Chief Marketing Officer for Best Western Italia. “Working with a partner like AIM has allowed us to have an in depth experience of the many challenges of the MICE industry, a sector where innovation is essential for development. Our hotels appreciated this opportunity and in particular the programs focused on client retention, process management, and guest relations."
Angelos is the news editor for TravelDailyNews Media Network (traveldailynews.gr, traveldailynews.com and traveldailynews.asia). His role includes to monitor the hundrends of news sources of TravelDailyNews Media Network and skim the most important according to our strategy.
He currently studies Communication, Media & Culture in Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens.
