The first thing you should know about me is that I like to write!  You probably have guessed that from the length of this posting.  Don't worry though, people often tell me that the things I write are easy to read and interesting enough to follow.  I don't know if that's true or not, since I am always interested in what I write, so I guess you will have to be the judge of that.  Please keep on reading!  I'll try not to bore you!



Most of you already know me and have heard me talk on and on about Chile, my job at Holiday Inn in Santiago and my life in California before that.  If you don't know me all that well or if you don't know me at all, here's the quick summary: born in Chile, moved to the US at 15, went back to Chile, went back to the US, went back to Chile, worked at a hotel and now I'm here.  Short and simple.  The truth is that I would've stayed in the US, but when I graduated from Film and Television Production, my visa ran out and the only place I could go to was Chile.  I already knew then that I wanted to come to London, but my South American passport did not allow me to do much other than visit places and I had no money for that.  So I moved back to Chile and looked for a job in anything that I could find that would give me enough money to come to London.  That's when I got hired as a Guest Service Manager at a Holiday Inn.  I had no experience in either guest service or management so it wasn't exactly an easy job, but in time I learned the ropes and I realized I really like working in tourism.

I lived and worked in Chile for 3 years.  After my second year there I decided that the easiest and fastest way for me to be able to move to London would be to go back to school and get a masters degree.  That said, when I applied for the International Tourism Management program I was more interested in living in London than I was in going back to school.  I applied one year before I moved and by the time I came I did not even remember what I was going to be studying at all.  You can imagine that the first couple of months I had a hard time readjusting to being a student, especially since the last time I was a student I studied something completely unrelated that required neither reading nor writing; at least not as much as we have had to read and write here.  I felt a little lost and I often wanted to just go back to work!

Soon, however, I began learning many concepts and ideas about tourism that I didn't even know existed.  Since the school year started until now I have learned about so many places that I would like to visit, and have thought of so many projects that I would like to work on, that choosing a dissertation topic has become surprisingly difficult!  When I first chose to study tourism was because I enjoyed my job at the hotel and I knew that jobs in the hospitality industry became available fairly often so my plan was always to do my dissertation on a topic that was related to the hospitality industry.  Yet, I find myself torn between many options and I don't want to end up choosing something that is going to be either too boring to work on for 6 months but useful for my career, or something very interesting but useless for my career.

This leads me to the main point of this posting, and this blog for that matter.  I have a few ideas that I am toying around with based on my interest, and maybe some of you would be able to help.

1. The first idea I have been wanting to research has to do with the hospitality industry.  During the three years that I worked at the hotel, I had to deal with people coming and going all the time.  Normally you would expect that from a hotel but when I say "people" I actually mean employees not guests. It was so hard to keep employees that after only three years on the job I was a dinosaur in that hotel!  Many people would argue that the reason employees kept leaving was that most of the jobs were not well paid and yet required a lot of work that included weekends and bank holidays.

Those two simple facts sound like enough to make people look for another job in the short-term.  My theory, however, is that those were often not the main reasons why employees left.  Part of my job was to supervise the staff of the hotel in general.  That meant that I got to spend a lot of time with them when the hotel was busy and when it wasn't.  I got to know the people behind the jobs which is why I believe that most people that quit their jobs did not do it for the money, or at least that was not their main reason for leaving.  I believe it all came down to motivation and recognition.  This is why my top choice for a dissertation topic right now is exactly this.  Causes of hospitality turnover: the case study of Holiday Inn Santiago Airport.  I could interview some of the people that have left since I am still in touch with many.

Another angle would be to see the point of view of the customers and the effects that turnover has on overall service.  During the three years that I was there we were always understaffed in one area or another so it was like a circus! The show had to go on and I believe we mostly managed to make people believe that the hotel was working just fine when instead I often ended up performing all kinds of jobs, from waitressing, to checking people in, to even making beds and cleaning bathrooms.  I didn't do it every day, but I had to do things like that more often than I should have been doing them. So how badly understaffed does a hotel have to be before it reflects on the overall service that the guest receives?  I'm not talking about the random complaint here and there, I'm talking about many bad reviews.  That would be another option, though it seems harder to research.

2. My second idea has to do with female leadership in the hospitality industry.  Holiday Inn in Chile is a franchise, which means that they abide by all the rules that Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) establishes, but the chain in Chile is owned by a Chilean company.  This is an important fact to mention because Chile is still a very sexist country where men are usually given more managerial opportunities than women.  However, at Holiday Inn they always preferred hiring women for managerial positions.  In fact, they usually hired men to be either night receptionists or waiters at the hotel's restaurant and they had little chance to advance to better positions, while women often did move from being a receptionist to being a junior manager of some sort, to being an assistant manager and even a hotel manager.  Most managers were female.

I am not exactly sure about what the approach could be here.  One option could be to write about the emergence of female managers in the hospitality industry in Chile, and I can interview managers at my hotel and other hotels as well.  I am not sure what the question would be here, though... I am open to any ideas that you may have.  So far I've thought about these managers juggling their careers and their family life.  Maybe that could be an angle that I could explore.  I'm not exactly sure yet, though.

Other ideas that I have come up with but have not given much thought yet are:

• Film tourism - A case study of Highclere Castle, the location where they shoot Downton Abbey, a British show that has become popular world wide.  This location used to be open to the public a few times a year but now they are also requiring that you book tickets given the increase in the number of visitors since the show started.
• Disaster effects on tourism - Chile's tourism decline and recovery after the 2010 earthquake.
• Disaster effects on tourism - Chile's tourism increase after the issue with the trapped miners.

These last three are not related to hospitality so they may be less useful to my career but they are interesting issues to research.

Anyway, writing does help to get ideas sorted!  I think I am a little bit more clear on my first idea than I was before I started writing about it.  I hope I didn't bore you too much!  I will try to keep the next few postings a little shorter.  Now it's time to focus on the literature review.  Still, any thoughts or comments are really welcomed and encouraged!