Undergraduates from IFTM continue to excel in international hospitality-related competitions organised for higher education students. The latest example was IFTM student Qi Xiaotong at the annual Young Hoteliers Summit. Qi was placed in a team composed of members drawn from across the world, and the group finished the event’s main competition in second place.
The Young Hoteliers Summit is the largest student-run hospitality summit in the world. It is hosted annually by students of École Hôtelière de Lausanne, in Switzerland. The event welcomes top executives and officials from the tourism industry as speakers, and it is attended by student delegates from leading higher education institutions in the field of hospitality from around the word.
This year’s Young Hoteliers Summit was held online between 22 March and 25 March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Qi, a Year 4 student in the English-language stream of the Hotel Management Bachelor’s Degree Programme, was one of the 2 IFTM delegates to the event.
For the Young Hoteliers Summit Challenge, student delegates were randomly sorted into small groups comprising of 5 team members each. “All my teammates were from other countries: Australia, Germany, Romania and Guatemala,” Qi says. “I introduced the history and culture of Macao to them, which raised much interest from the group.”
This year’s competition was supported by global hotel chain IHG Hotels & Resorts. It was titled: “The Sustainable Guest Room” Challenge.
For the contest, each group was required to put forward an innovative idea – a product, service or marketing campaign – that could further build on IHG’s ‘sustainable hotel room’ concept. Any solutions proposed were expected to add value to the firm’s guest experience while having a positive impact on the environment.
“Our group came up with the idea of fitting a water-usage tracker in the shower devices, to record water and energy consumption per room,” Qi explains. “The tracker was solar-powered and had a display monitor to show the water usage and energy employed for heating the water.”
Qi’s group also proposed a promotional programme to encourage hotel guests to participate in water and energy consumption reduction, based on the tracker attached to the shower device. The scheme proposed that, according to their savings, participants could get small gifts or receive extra benefits as part of existing IHG loyalty programmes.
Joining the competition meant Qi had to stay up until late each day during the Young Hoteliers Summit. The event was held using as reference Switzerland time, which is 7 hours behind Macao.
“During the event period, once I had finished coursework at IFTM, I needed to quickly prepare for attendance at the event online, which lasted until midnight each day Macao time,” Qi says. “Although feeling tired after a whole day of classes, the content of the summit really made me inspired and excited, as many experts and officials from the tourism sector shared valuable opinions and discussed hot topics.”
Qi says taking part in the Young Hoteliers Summit was a “valuable experience”, as he could build ties with students coming from some of the world’s best hotel schools. “I was also able to get a closer look at the hospitality industry from an international perspective,” he states.
