24 June 2009
BEIRUT: Lebanese need not go abroad anymore to learn the intricacies of hotel management in a state-of-the-art facility, said Tanios Kassis, the dean of faculty of hospitality management at Beirut's Sagesse University. Kassis is visibly proud that his faculty has recently, at last, produced its first batch of graduates after it began offering a unique education program four years ago in hospitality management to teach hotel professionals.
The program is unique, in part, because it is the first and only one in Lebanon entirely dedicated to training hotel managers.
But more importantly, it challenges the long-established idea that catering schools should be limited to offering only practical training, or the more novel notion that hotel management should focus on teaching students theoretical concepts in the conventional setting of classrooms. "I want to show people that the profession has changed and is not like it used to be," said Kassis.
The result is a hybrid campus, housed in an imposing eight-floor building in the Beirut district of Achrafieh that has all the characteristics of the Dubai five-star hotel in which many graduates will end up finding work, as well as the corridors and classrooms of a standard university campus.
"The student that enters the lobby of our faculty must have the feeling that he is entering to begin his profession as the employee of a hotel," said Kassis.
The lobby is decorated in the posh and elegant style specific to hotels that seems meant to provide the feeling of a home away from home. A few floors above, a series of hotel bedrooms border a long corridor. "We are preparing a new room that will be an exact copy of a hotel room at the Phoenician Hotel," explained Kassis, as he walked into a room currently being renovated.
But the many elegant rooms and the gastronomic restaurant are not only meant for leisure and rest; they are, first and foremost, pedagogical.
"We have five-star rooms, but also three-star ones in the same corridor, so that students can see the difference between the two," explained Kassis, as he walked from one bedroom to another.
The rooms and the restaurant are almost like a theater set serving as a facade to the backstage where students and professors train, said Kassis. They cannot come to life without the efforts of students, and it is they who are tasked with running the show.
"Students are like actors," said Kassis, "and they learn about bringing hospitality."
Their curriculum consists of a wide array of academic disciplines that will make a good hotel manager, such as finance, human resource management, marketing and law.
It also comprises hands-on training, whereby students must learn the noble skills of wine training and gourmet cooking, but also dirty their hands in the laundry room, or serve capricious clients - often their colleagues on a break - at the tables of the restaurant.
The aim is not to discourage the students, said Kassis, although he admits that many are surprised by the intensity of the program in the first year of their training.
"We train our students to become managers," he insisted, "but they must learn all the facets of the trade."
Copyright The Daily Star 2009.
