Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
The hospitality industry is a business, so we should just teach all business and have some examples of hospitality. And I think that’s a huge huge huge mistake. And the reason is that at the end of the day, the hospitality industry is all about creating incredible guest experience.
Sebastien Leitner
Welcome to the Turndown. This week, I’m exceptionally humbled and excited to introduce you to Doctor Stowe Shoemaker. An industry veteran, a professor, an expert in everything pricing, distribution, casinos. And I have the pleasure, the honor to sit down with him and spend almost an hour with him, diving into the role of hospitality, the future of hospitality, how do we make the job of hospitality interesting again for future generations. Now, with that, can’t wait for you to discover Stowe Shoemaker.
Stowe, welcome to the Turndown. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I can’t wait to pick your brain on everything hospitality, recent trends, innovation, challenges and opportunities that this beautiful industry is facing. Welcome to the program.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Well, thank you very much. I’m very excited to be here, and I love your podcast. So it’s really an honor for me to be asked to be honest. So thank you.
Sebastien Leitner
The honor’s all mine. So I wanna look back at your career and I wanna understand and want our listeners to understand how you ended up in hospitality? Because I’m sure there’s a good story around that. We don’t just wake up one day and say we wanna be working in hospitality. How did you discover this amazing industry?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Well, you know, when I was really little, I used to always plan dinners for my parents, and I would cook with my neighbor, and we would cook these dinners. And I just loved it, and my grandmother used to say to me, you should go into hospitality because you like to play so much. And she’s not realizing how hard a job it really was. But she said you’d love to play, you love people, so you should really think about hospitality.
And when I was in high school, I worked to help afford going to school. I worked in a kitchen, and I just loved it. And so then when I was in college, I worked for the on campus dining and did the catering and just really fell in love with it. And I thought, wow, I can get paid to do something that’s really enjoyable. And I think I have a little, I can’t sit still for a while. So hospitality, you’re always doing something different. And so that, I just fell in love with the industry.
Sebastien Leitner
And generally, right, in hospitality, we have two paths or we have many paths, but there’s two big paths. The food and beverage path and the rooms path. Something tells me that you went through the food and beverage path. Is that right?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
I really went through both. I mean, to be frank, I started in food and beverage and fell in love with it, worked in the summer resort and worked on the hospitality, the room side. And then the person I worked with at the summer resort bought the Middlebury Inn in Middlebury, Vermont. And so that was working on the room side, but then I realized we needed business. So I started doing sales. But sales didn’t sound as sexy as marketing. So I said I was marketing, but I really did sales. And just really just loved the whole business.
But then what was really interesting, I was always curious as to why people make decisions on where they travel. So after eight years in the hospitality business, I left to go study at the University of Massachusetts and earn my master’s in hospitality with really a focus on marketing and consumer research. And then I left that and took a job in Southern California. So I moved from the East Coast to Southern California at like thirty two, called my parents, said you’ve ruined a third of my life. I got out to Southern California, the beaches, the big sky, the sun, and really did consumer research in the hospitality industry. So if you’ve ever had the chicken soft taco, we took that, my company, well the company I worked with, we took that from product development to product launch.
Sebastien Leitner
Fantastic. So I don’t think I’ve had that taco. But now I need to make an extra trip out. Yeah. I’ll be in San Diego in January. So maybe I’ll discover it.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Well, they’re sold all over the world. Taco Bells have the chicken soft taco. But so, yeah, so I just fell in love with the industry.
Sebastien Leitner
And then you became an educator at some point.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Yes. Yes. So when I was in the consumer research business, we did obviously a lot of consumer research, and I’d learned really cool stuff. But we couldn’t share with anybody because it was proprietary. And so I thought I’d love to write. I’d love to publish. And so I thought, well, I’m gonna become an academic. So I went back and did my PhD because I really believe that when you learn something, you wanna share it. You want knowledge to be shared by everybody. So everybody can improve upon it. So an academic career allowed me to publish, learn cool stuff, and then teach others some cool stuff so they could even have better careers than I ever had. So it’s been really, I’ve really been blessed to be frank.
Sebastien Leitner
I also feel that, and you must appreciate that as well, when you read something or you consume information, that’s very different from then telling your best friend or your colleague about it. Right? Like the concept of actually communicating back knowledge makes you appreciate or makes you understand that knowledge, that information very differently. Is that something you share?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
It’s very fair because I think in order to share knowledge, you have to make sure you really understand it. Right? Because you can’t just sort of b.s. your way through stuff because students will ask you, but what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? So you really have to be prepared. Like, I spend a lot of time preparing for lectures and always thinking, what were the questions that students might ask? And how do I make sure I have that knowledge.
And I was very fortunate. I also spent like twenty three or twenty four years in the executive education side at the Cornell University. So there you’re working with executives who really are in the industry. They know the industry. And so you have to think, well, what, how can I teach them something that they may already knew but they forgot, but how to get them to think about things differently? So you really have to spend a lot of time thinking about how’s the best way to present this information that gets them excited about learning it and makes them go, oh, yeah, I remember that, but we sort of forgot about it over time.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. You were based for a good portion of your education career in Las Vegas. You worked at one of the most important hospitality schools in North America. From what, twenty thirteen to twenty twenty three, you probably shaped the minds of hundreds of hotel leaders now?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Yeah. Well, so, actually, I’ve had two tours at UNLV. So I was there from nineteen ninety five to two thousand three. And then my wife at forty, actually fifty, she decided to do a PhD. So we moved to Texas for eight years. And then I came back to Las Vegas in two thousand twelve, and then I became Dean in two thousand thirteen. But so I had huge influence on a lot of students, but as did all our faculty. Wow. That’s amazing.
Sebastien Leitner
And you’ve seen casinos go through substantial changes.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Unbelievable changes. Yes. Because I really started when I moved to Southern California, the gentleman I worked with, we opened a research office in Las Vegas because we did a lot of work as I said with Taco Bell. And so I started coming to Las Vegas in nineteen eighty six, even before the Mirage was getting built. And there was no Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace or anything like that. So I’ve seen Las Vegas just changed tremendously, and the industry has really changed. Now as you know, Las Vegas has become very much a sports town. We had Formula One. We had the Las Vegas Raiders who had an amazing night last night. And we’re gonna have the Super Bowl this year. So the whole industry has changed.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. And Vegas for at least for a good duration of the last twenty years has become a huge conference destination as well.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, we like to say that Mister Wynn changed the face of Las Vegas by building the Mirage and Bellagio. But it was really Mister Sheldon Adelson who changed the foundation and function of Las Vegas. And we moved from a gaming town to really what we call the MICE business, meetings, incentives, conventions, and expositions. And that’s really Mister Adelson’s legacy, because now everything is convention-oriented, which is great.
Sebastien Leitner
You may know this off hand, but especially I recall hearing that Vegas was giving out hotel rooms because the gaming revenue was more important. Like, almost for free or it was accessible. Gaming revenues as a percentage now of total revenue must be minimal. I hear the food and beverage is higher. I hear convention revenues are higher and rooms revenue are proportionately higher to gaming revenues. Is that fair?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
So if you look at the percentage of spend, about thirty percent of a person’s spend is on gambling, and the rest is spent on food, beverage, entertainment. So, yes, gambling has certainly gone down. The revenues in gaming are just tremendous. But yes, room revenue, food and beverage, all that is really hot.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. You’ve been in hospitality schools for a long time. Recently we’ve noticed a few schools removing the name hospitality from their degrees. I wanna get your sense of why that is happening, and is that the right thing?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
So actually, it’s in my view, and the way I’ve really positioned the Harrah College of Hospitality at UNLV, is to move away from that. So I did my PhD at Cornell University, and they took their school of hospitality, and now they’re part of the Johnson College of Business. Michigan State, their hospitality program is in the business school. Same at the University of Denver. Even sort of the famous hotel school in Switzerland where I was fortunate to teach, Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne, has now changed their name to include the hospitality business.
And I think the belief is, well, the hospitality industry is a business, so we should just teach all business and have some examples of hospitality. And I think that’s a huge huge mistake. And the reason is that at the end of the day, the hospitality industry is all about creating incredible guest experiences. Right? And understanding how to think about service, how to think about hospitality really becomes critical. And yes, there’s certainly business components in the hospitality industry. But there’s also the fine arts, right, with the architecture and the atmospherics. There’s also an incredible amount of engineering that goes into putting systems together, technology.
So by becoming a business school with hospitality examples, you don’t really prepare the students for what the industry is all about. And we like to say at UNLV that we are a hospitality school that steals from business. We steal from fine arts, we steal from engineering, and we steal from the sciences in order to provide a great customer experience.
And I’ll just tell one quick story. The thing I always say is people will say, well, hospitality, it’s not rocket science. And I say, well, let’s think about what does it take to launch a rocket? Takes a lot of math. It takes a long lead time. It takes a lot of different people with different skills. You only get one chance to make it correct. And I go, that sounds like a wedding. Right? And so there’s a lot of science in that. And so by pulling from different disciplines, we’ve been able to create a curriculum that really focuses on what’s the core of hospitality, but then students have thirty credits, which is essentially ten classes, of electives that they can focus in meetings and events. They can focus in gaming. They can focus on the entertainment side. And I think that’s, I mean, we’ve either invented the future or we invented the Edsel because most other hospitality schools are going the business school route. We’ve taken a totally different path.
Sebastien Leitner
That’s interesting. I mean, we’ve gone through a terrible pandemic that has seen a lot of people leave the industry as a whole. And depending on who I speak to, it doesn’t really matter who I speak to, hotel leaders, owners and operators, they tell me one thing that worries them is recruitment, staffing, finding that next leader that can either replace them or manage the businesses, if you will. What do we need to do as an industry to make the future generation passionate about hospitality? Just like you were at some point. Right? Like, you joined this industry and you felt passionate about it. I joined this industry, it was my first career, feeling really passionate about my career choices. But what needs to happen in your opinion for us to make it attractive?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
So we have to really discuss, I always say to students, hospitality, it’s not a job, it’s a passion. Right? And I always tell students, look, you either have the gene and the desire to serve and the desire to make other people happy. And so how do we sort of spark that within you? I think is your question.
And I think it starts at an early age. It starts in high schools where you have the culinary academies where kids are learning to be in food and beverage, and they’re learning how to serve and how to cook, and all that becomes exciting. And then I think what we’re starting to do at UNLV is we’re gonna be putting together a summer camp at some point, where we bring high school kids in and they get exposed to the industry.
And then I think when they’re in school, you give them incredible opportunities. Like at UNLV, we built a new hospitality hall building that’s a hospitality space that doubles as a classroom. So we have a coffee shop in here that students run and operate. We feed all the student athletes in another building. We have incredible internships and mentorships, so you expose students to this exciting industry and they see, wow, there’s incredible opportunities. I can work anywhere in the world. Every day is gonna be very different. Yes, I’m gonna work hard, but everybody works hard.
I always say to kids, if you always look at the clock, you’ll always be a hand. Whether you’re a lawyer or a doctor, you never just work eight to five. And so why don’t you do a job that you love and you’re passionate about where every day is different? And there’s nothing better. You know, you were in the industry, there’s nothing better than two in the morning, you finish with this big banquet. And you’ve all been working your butts off to get this right and people are leaving and they’re happy and they’re clapping. And you’re all sitting around and you’re sort of sharing war stories for what happened, like what went wrong and what guests were jerks and what guests were wonderful. And that camaraderie, there’s no, I don’t think there’s any field that has that sense of real camaraderie. And you get kids excited about that, and that’s what we have to do, is we have to get them excited about the industry.
Sebastien Leitner
And it almost sounds very short, early. Right? Like, they have to be in high school already knowing they wanna go into hospitality.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
And then what we try to do is also people who were in other areas, get them excited about that a degree in hospitality can fit into any areas. Like, I just wrote a book called Hospitable Healthcare, which brings hospitality principles into healthcare. So let’s say you wanna be in a healthcare profession, well, you should know something about hospitality. So then some of those kids who start working in healthcare go, oh, wow, it’s not really for me, but I love the whole idea of service. And we get them into hospitality.
And even kids with our industry being so diverse as you know. So someone might love mathematics. And, wow, I could work for a company like MGM to do data analytics. Right? So I’m in the industry. I’m learning about how to make people have a better experience. So that gets me in the industry, but lets me focus on the mathematics that I love. Right? So instead of learning how to sell more cans of soup, I’m learning how do we create great experiences.
Sebastien Leitner
That’s fascinating. How has the curriculum changed in forty, fifty years? When you think of hospitality, what you taught back in nineteen ninety three when I think you first joined UNLV, albeit two tours, to when you started as Dean, which I believe was twenty thirteen, you must have seen some evolution.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
The curriculum’s really changed. I remember when I was looking at doing my master’s degree, I interviewed at Cornell. I decided to go to University of Massachusetts as I mentioned. But I remember even at Cornell the food courses, you’d have food science classes where you spent a lot of time learning the food science of cooking. And we kind of moved, we definitely moved away from that.
But I think the way the curriculum’s changed is that it’s still a pendulum. So we became very, early on hospitality programs were very operationally driven, food and beverage, rooms divisions, all those kinds of classes. And then over time, we became much more of a business curriculum where we made sure we had marketing, finance, accounting, human resources and all that. And that trend has continued, and we’ve had less of the operational side.
So when I became Dean at UNLV, UNLV was going to that same trend because Cornell was doing it, everybody was doing it. And we got together as a faculty and we said, well, wait a minute, are we really going in the right direction? So we put out an event we called Hospitality Twenty Twenty Five. And we brought in all the industry leaders in town and our alumni. And we had this whole day event of what is the future of hospitality? What is the future of education? What are the needs that you see the industry is gonna have? And how do we redesign our curriculum?
So we worked with a consultant and the faculty. Everything in the university is driven by the faculty. Our faculty got together and said, okay, let’s really think about how do we make sure that we’re a hospitality school and not a business school with hospitality examples. And so we’ve actually gone back now and as I mentioned earlier, we have thirty credits of electives, so we have the core classes in hospitality where we’re focusing on food and beverage, we’re focusing on services. We obviously have some basic finance and accounting classes and certainly HR and leadership classes. But we also are bringing in a lot of classes in those ten courses in electives that could be really operationally driven. We have a thousand hours of required internship work experience. And then we have internships that students have to take. And so all of that is bringing the operational side back.
And I think that’s critical because what happens is if you’re a business school with hospitality examples, you don’t know how hard the industry is. Right? So you get out and you go, oh my god, this is a lot of work. Where if you’re really involved in it all along, you know that it’s hard work and you know you’ll stay in the industry. So we’ve kind of had this pendulum where now most hospitality schools are business oriented. We’re trying to go back a little. And you have the separate schools like the Culinary Institute, which are very much very operational, cooking driven. But they’ve even started to move by offering management classes.
Sebastien Leitner
I must share a personal experience. I traveled to Southeast Asia in September. And it was refreshing to stay in some of the luxury hotels in Thailand. And I was reminded what, and it sounds really horrible because I don’t wanna say that most American or European hotels are on a different scale, but in Thailand luxury, where hospitality is different. I had so many staff members approach me before me even opening my mouth and say, how can I help you? Right? And it was a very different experience. And it was really nice, but what I also found when I sat down with the hotel owners and operators, they own and operate the properties end to end. There is no franchisee. There is no management company. It’s owned and operated by everyone. So where they put the money, the investment, they decide this themselves, and they’re defining their operational standards. And I thought that was quite refreshing. Do you think that our ownership structure in North America has shaped some of the educational curriculums at hospitality schools?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Yes. Absolutely. I think so. If you take a look, so for the listener who may not be quite aware, the whole strategy of hospitality companies are now known as what is called asset light. In other words, we don’t really own the properties ourselves. We’re just really a branding company. And that really started in the late eighties when Steve Bollenbach was the CFO of Marriott, and he split Marriott into two companies, Host Marriott, which owned the asset, and then Marriott International, which basically managed the asset. And the idea was that Marriott could grow by having entrepreneurs who wanted to be in the hotel business buy their brands. And that is now the standard of all the operating companies.
So Cornell took a huge advantage of this. It really is the leader in teaching hotel investment, asset management, things like that. Michigan State has a very strong program. We’re starting to develop that at UNLV with working with the Lee Business School, who has a great finance and real estate division. How do we bring those two together? We’re not at the level yet that Cornell or Michigan State is, although we do have kids who graduated who are very much owners and operators of properties.
But as the mentality changes, the owner is more of an entrepreneur who wants a steady investment. It’s not about the service as much as it is about how do I get the best return on that asset. And so I think the business hospitality schools have taken them and moved into that direction. But I think there still are people who own and operate hotels, even though there may be a Marriott franchise, who really wanna provide that great experience. And so there’s always gonna be outliers, but you can find great service experiences.
And I think what the brands have done, they’ve tried to create that culture, what it means to be a Hilton. And they’ve incorporated that in all their training programs, all their evaluations, so that you’re staying at a Hilton that may have a different ownership, but you still have that Hilton promise. And I think the brands have, that’s what they’ve really done, is how do we create what it means to be at a Hilton, what it means to be at a Marriott, and how do we design our standards and systems in place and the culture so that’s what it turns out to be.
Sebastien Leitner
No. It does. It does. I’m curious about your future vision. You talked about the Hospitality Twenty Twenty Five. Let’s fast forward to sort of the next milestone, which could be twenty thirty five. What do you see happening from a travel behavior perspective? What’s changing?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
I think what’s changing is that people realize they need travel. I think coming out of COVID, we talked about revenge travel. But I think people realize that I wanna have fun. I don’t wanna work all the time. I wanna have fun. So I believe that travel is just gonna become even more and more important. Especially with the millennials, the kids who are working in tech, they’re working when they kinda wanna work. They work all the time. My nieces are both in tech. And I mean, they travel all over. They’re like nomads, but they work twenty hours a day. But when they wanna play, they wanna have fun, and they wanna have experiences.
So we’re seeing very much more moving further along to those experience economies. And how can we, when we think about the hospitality industry, how can we create environments that are authentic, that are unique, and give a guest what he or she wants at a time and place that they want it. And so I think our industry is always gonna be evolving to create these great experiences.
And you think about the traditional hotel room. I was with some folks last night from Panasonic and what they’re doing in the projection systems where you can have a little projector in your light. So you turn on the light, and you can change what your wall looks like. So I think we’re gonna see more of that kind of, I’m gonna customize my hotel room for the kind of pictures I want and not just sort of that standard stuff. So we’ve gone from maybe pay TV to bring your own account. You can bring your Netflix account. And the point is technology in room will evolve so that you can actually design your own look and feel of what the hotel room will be.
Because at the end of the day, everybody says I wanna have great experiences and wanna try something new, but they also wanna eat their American breakfast when you’re in Europe. They wanna eat the kind of food they like. They may try something unique, but they kinda wanna be comfortable. They wanna watch the TV shows that they like to watch. And so it’s giving them some great experiences, but also providing it so they’re not totally out of their comfort zone.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. There’s comfort in the things you know. Right? The things you’re comfortable with. Like, we probably joke, but we sleep the best in our own bed. The bed could be as fluffy and as beautiful and as heavenly as some of the brands promote, but it’s still not home.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Yeah. And if we can put our phones on and project our phones onto the TV there, we have that sense of comfort. But yeah, I think so. I think the innovation that’s happening in our industry is gonna be incredible, certainly on the technology side, but even on the building side where you can see not just double doors that kind of open up into a room, but how do we make it so the rooms could become really bigger or smaller by just removing walls. And I think there’s a lot of excitement happening.
I wish I was younger and just entering the industry. It’s fantastic. It’s gonna change. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing is we’re giving customers great service. We’re providing them with memorable experiences. And that’s exciting.
Sebastien Leitner
That is exciting. And I love your comment also around this, we have to eventually travel, but it’s gonna be sustainable travel, meaning this need to travel will continue to exist and will continue to grow because we’re realizing how important travel was in those two or three years, depending on where you were, that you couldn’t travel, that you couldn’t go around, that you couldn’t catch up with friends and family or discover new things and have great experiences.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
I was just gonna say one thing. And I think the one thing that’s really changing the industry too is we’re becoming much more concerned about sustainability. I was just in London in October with the Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, which is made up of all the major hospitality brands around the world, really looking at how do we become more sustainable. How do we be concerned about food waste and how do we make sure we rescue food to give to others? How do we make sure we’re not wasting water or lighting and all that? And that’s a real challenge.
And I think that’s exciting, and that’s where our industry steals from engineering. I could be in the hospitality industry taking courses in engineering to learn about electronics so I can see how I can minimize my use of energy, all that sort of stuff. And MGM has built one of the largest solar plants in Nevada so they could heat a lot of their buildings. So that’s another trend I wanna just throw out.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. And it’s so super important, right, because by us moving around, we have a footprint, whether we like it or not. By us leaving the house, getting into a car, making it to the airport, you have an impact. And how do you control the impact that you have in a way that is sustainable?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Yes. I sold my private jet so I could just fly commercial because I knew it was better for the environment.
Sebastien Leitner
Fantastic. Fantastic. I do wanna talk a little bit about your book and hospitable healthcare because I love the connection of healthcare and hospitality. And why the two are, I guess, need to come together in a way, and maybe I’d love to hear your perspective.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
So if you ask anybody to think about their last healthcare visit, but think about their experience, everybody has some horror stories that they would love to share. And I was very fortunate, when my wife went back to do her PhD, we moved to Texas. And she went to Texas A&M. And when I was in Texas, I did a big project with Memorial Hermann Healthcare, really starting to bring hospitality principles into healthcare.
And then I ended up having a joint appointment at MD Anderson, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. And they approached me and said, we have people who are really sick, cancer patients. And we’re not sure we’re giving them the best experience possible. We’re giving them great care. But they said we’re not sure we’re providing them with making them feel like they’ve had a great experience, and how can hospitality help them.
And so I got really excited about that. And so we did a big project to really look at how do we bring hospitality principles into healthcare. And when I started to research, we did a lot of in-depth interviews with cancer patients, with physicians, with certainly with the staff, the nurses, and everything. And my wife was involved in that project as she was working on her PhD. And her PhD was in communications and negotiations. And I would come home and I’d say, oh, yeah, are they guests? Are they patients? Are they customers? And my wife said, well, let’s really talk to them. What did they think about it?
And so what she found in the research was that people wanted to be loved family members. They wanted to be called loved family members. And that just really changed my view on everything, and it changed the view of the hospital. And so everything we did at Anderson was how do we make people feel like loved family members. And when you translate that into hospitality, we want people to feel like they’re coming home. They’re coming to our hotel, they’re coming to our restaurant, and we wanna treat them like we would treat our own friends who are coming to visit us. And so the research I did changed my life because it’s fun to do research with hospitality firms. But thinking about people who are in their real needs, how could we help them was really truly revolutionary. And so I saw this real connection between bringing hospitality principles into healthcare. So that’s why I got so in love with it.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. That makes sense. And is it, I mean, I would have the hypothesis that by bringing these principles into healthcare, you can extend life expectancy. You can actually improve their experiences, make them feel better about themselves and hopefully give them more time. I don’t know whether you have data around that, but I’m curious whether you’ve noticed an impact of bringing these hospitality principles into healthcare.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
So essentially what happened was, my co-author is a guy named Peter Yesawich. And Peter had a big advertising agency, and he sold that advertising agency, and then he ended up working ten years for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. We ran into each other at a conference because he had helped me on a couple of other books, my marketing textbook. And we ran into each other at a conference. And I said, Peter, what have you been doing lately? He said, oh, I’ve been working for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. And I said, oh, I’ve been working for MD Anderson.
So we chatted about that, and then he called me. He said, hey, Stowe, we should write a book bringing hospitality principles into healthcare. And I thought, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, but we didn’t wanna be two guys with an opinion. So what we did is we said, okay, if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it right. Let’s take an academic approach. So what we did is we went out and we did twenty five in-depth interviews with people from the Mayo Clinic, people from the Cleveland Clinic, people from Geisinger Health, but then we also interviewed people like Horst Schulze from Ritz-Carlton, and we interviewed people from the Dorchester Collection. And we really said, what’s kinda happening in your areas that are creating great experiences? What are you doing?
And then what we did is we surveyed twelve hundred consumers across the US who had visited a hospital, a walk-in clinic, a doctor’s office, gone to a restaurant, and stayed in a hotel. Because everybody says, oh, people are more dissatisfied in healthcare than they are in hospitality, anecdotally. So we went out and said, yes, that’s actually true. So we identified kind of like eighteen similar points of what happens in both fields. And we had things like the invoice and the bill I receive is easy to understand, the provider appreciates my business, the people I interact with make me feel welcome. These kind of attributes that are in both. And we found out that healthcare does not do as well as hospitality.
So we wanted to go back and we said, well, why is that? What has hospitality done? And so we went back and we actually started looking at hospitality from the time that Kemmons Wilson took his famous drive from Memphis to Washington DC, came home and created Holiday Inn. What did he do and how has the industry changed over thirty years? And then all of a sudden, where is healthcare in that same journey? And that’s how we kind of put the book together.
Sebastien Leitner
It does. It does. I’m gonna go check it out now. I love the principle and the combination of both. I think both industries can learn from each other, but maybe your hypothesis then, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that healthcare can actually learn a lot from hospitality.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
What we did is we came up with what we called the PAYER model, kind of a play on words because in healthcare, they talk about the payor. So we came up with PAYER. And essentially, we thought, what is it that hospitality does that can be translated into healthcare? Well, one, the first is P, we prepare for the customer’s visit. Before you go to a restaurant or hotel, we’ve prepared for your arrival. So when you show up, we know exactly who you are. We anticipate the angst that a person’s gonna feel. Because even when you’re going on your vacation, you’re wondering, oh my gosh, is it gonna be any good, will there be WiFi?
And then we engage, we prepare, we anticipate, but then we engage. That moment of truth when the customer meets the employee. But then after the stay, we also evaluate how well are we doing. And we also reward for their behavior. So we took this PAYER model and for every chapter in the book, we give examples of what well-known healthcare providers have done on preparation, what well-known hospitality companies have done, and recommendations for each one. And so that’s how we really designed the book. So the book is filled with lots of examples, and a little self promotion, that’s available on Amazon. There’s also a Kindle version.
But getting back to your earlier question, will it make people feel healthier and get better? I did some additional research for a gentleman named Jeff Arnold, who created WebMD, and Jeff has created a new company called Sharecare. And part of the Sharecare division is they have what they call WeCare. And most companies give employees savings accounts so they can pay for their medical expenses. But what WeCare does is they give travel credits. So in other words, if you take your medicine, do all the things you’re supposed to do, you can earn points, and then those points can be used for travel.
And so we did research to see if in fact that’s true. Would people do that? And it was amazing that you could use travel to be healthier. And so we think with the book, bringing hospitality principles into it, rewarding people for doing the things you’re supposed to do, it makes a lot of sense. And it’s funny that I had to go out and do all this research because I remember when I was little, every time I brushed my teeth, I’d get a star. And if I had enough stars, my mom would give me an allowance. So it’s really just the old brushing your teeth star symbol.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. Yeah. That’s fantastic. Now I’m curious what you spent the money on when you were young. Was it candy or was it something? There’s no travel.
We didn’t start this podcast with my typical question, but I’d like to end it with it. If that makes any sense, which is, what is keeping you up at night as you think of hospitality?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
I think what really keeps me up at night a lot is how do we continue to attract kids to enter this amazing industry? What can we do to bring more people into the industry. That is one thing that really is important to me.
Another thing that’s really important to me is how do we provide an opportunity for people who are working in the industry to get a college degree? Because a lot of kids start in the industry, and they never really go back to school. And they start working. They’re making good money, but they know that they need more knowledge. And how do we make it accessible for them to earn a college degree?
One thing I’m really proud about is we’re working very closely with the Panda Restaurant Group, which owns Panda Express. And Panda Express has what they call Panda University where they teach all their employees all the critical things they need to learn. And we’re so excited that we worked very closely with Doctor Chern and Mister Chern, the founders of the company, where our faculty went and spent really a week learning everything that they’re teaching their Panda employees.
And now we had a faculty member who was very involved with the curriculum. We went back and we mapped what Panda University is teaching their employees. How does that map back to our curriculum? And so now employees who are working for Panda Express can earn university credits. So instead of having to take a hundred and twenty credits to get a degree, they only maybe need to take a hundred credits. And because we’re offering our program online, now kids who are working in industry can get credit for what they’ve already been doing. And then they can learn new things. And we think that is the future.
And what keeps me awake is how do we make sure we do more of that? And you think about diversity, equity, inclusion, we have a fair amount of diverse people working in the industry. How do we make sure that they have educational opportunities? And we think that our work with Panda Express is really gonna be the model for the future that we’re most excited about. So all that keeps me awake in terms of how do we make that happen.
Sebastien Leitner
Alright. Final two questions. One is all time favorite casino, past or present, whichever it is. And then second, I’d love to know where you’re traveling to next. So wherever you wanna start.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
Okay. Well, I loved the Cosmopolitan when I was in Las Vegas. One of my sort of students that I’d been one of my favorites from all time, a woman named Colleen Birch. She was there for many years, really part of the team that turned it around to make it a beautiful place. Now she’s just moved to become the CEO of the Fontainebleau. So I think the Fontainebleau will become one of my favorites.
But I love MGM Resorts. I think they’re doing some great stuff under Bill Hornbuckle, who’s one of our graduates. I love all their properties, I think they’re great. So I am a big fan of all of those. I go where my students work.
Sebastien Leitner
Fantastic answer. And where are you traveling to next?
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
I think my next trip, well, so my next business trip will probably be to Ithaca, New York. But I think my next big trip is my wife and I, it’s gonna be a couple years away because you have to book these things way in advance, but we’re actually gonna take a trip from Canada to Greenland.
But I think my favorite place in the world is Iceland. And that’s because I have some really good friends that live in Iceland, and I just love the people there. But I’m kind of like a dog, really. I’m happy wherever I am. Every destination I go to, I love because I have students that live there and I see them and I’m just happy to be able to be fortunate enough to be able to travel. I count my blessings every day.
Sebastien Leitner
Fantastic. So on that, thank you so much for joining the program. Thank you so much for joining the Turndown. And yeah, I can’t wait to hopefully cross paths in person and catch up with you at an upcoming event.
Dr. Stowe Shoemaker
I hope so too. I look forward to meeting in person. Thank you very much. It’s been an honor being on the program.
Sebastien Leitner
Likewise. Thank you for listening to the turn down. Don’t forget to subscribe and tune in next week as we discover new exciting guests.
