In 2021, participants tackled two questions—one about ways to accommodate guests who want less human interaction during their stay and the other about attracting former and new employees to pursue careers in hospitality. Prizes of $1,000 were awarded in categories—best data visualization, best digital solution, and best labor solution—in addition to the overall first prize of $3,000. “It’s a really powerful experience for us and for the students—students taking a fresh perspective in looking at real business problems, given the opportunities of real-world tools and data, and taking the opportunity to present in a competitive setting. Presenting in a context like this helps students develop a really useful, real-world skill,” said Petitt.

With students from across the university coming together to participate, the hackathon’s organizers encourage the formation of interdisciplinary teams. “We merge together engineering students and hospitality students,” said Petitt, “and it leads to a really powerful interaction, just like it does in my everyday life and work. How do we compete from a technology perspective? How do we continue to develop the future leaders of our industry to collaborate with engineers or others with a skill set that they don’t have? That’s the great opportunity of the hackathon.”

He concluded, “When people ask me why I recruit from Cornell, I tell them I focus on two things: the passion of a service industry—finding folks who really care about serving others, which isn’t just applicable for hospitality but is pretty much applicable to everything in life—combined with technical skills that I’ve found are an accelerator in making a difference on our team.”

The future belongs to those who innovate, said Linda Canina, co-academic director of the Pillsbury Institute. “Since the pandemic, the amount of new technology that has been adopted by the hospitality industry is more than was adopted in the 10 years before then, and this trend will continue. Helping our students develop an entrepreneurial mindset and the ability to generate hospitality-relevant, innovative ideas is important for the future of the industry.”

Restaurant Management: Serving Up Life Skills

Asked what experiences had stayed with him from his student days, Petitt said one of his fondest memories was working on a team to run a restaurant night for the Restaurant Management class. “We took over the Terrace once a week and turned it into a restaurant,” he recalled. “Each week, a different group was responsible for setting the specials.” Since 2012, the students in Restaurant Management have worked their transformation in the Hersha Center, a multiuse space next to the food labs on the second floor of Statler Hall.

The result is a refined casual-dining restaurant— Establishment—that operates five nights a week for two months during the fall and spring semesters. The course has five sections, each meeting one day; the day of the week that a class meets becomes its Establishment night. A team of four students manages the entire enterprise each night. Lecturers Lilly Jan, Doug Miller, Ravinder Kingra, and Soojin Lee teach the course, but instruction rotates periodically to other members of the food and beverage faculty.

“They create a special menu, which is prepared in addition to an existing, static menu,” explained food and beverage management lecturer Christopher Gaulke, who teaches a prerequisite for the course, Foodservice Management, Theory, and Practice. “They do all of the recipe development, costing, procurement, etc., market the night, and then manage it—and not just their dishes, but the rest of the menu also. So, they’re responsible for making sure that all of the necessary prep and production gets done, on time, as needed.”

The remaining students work front of house, in the kitchen on sauté or grill, or in the pantry making desserts.

“But one night through the semester, they’re on the management side and looking at the operation a bit more strategically,” Gaulke said. “The amount of work that you have to put into your management night—in the weeks leading up to it and after it—is significant.”

Things sometimes don’t go as planned, and when a customer is not satisfied, the student managers get to practice what Gaulke considers the most important part of the entire experience: service recovery.

“Those little mistakes have to be made up for—have to be recovered from—so that our guests leave happy and satisfied and likely to return,” he said. Sometimes a sincere apology is enough, and sometimes an entire meal has to be comped. But the students are taught that there are other steps to try between those. “It’s knowing what it’s going to take to make the customer happy. Giving them free food is rarely needed, and if it is, we talk about when and how to do that.”

Learning to read a customer’s mood and respond to cues like the amount of food left behind is important training for every student. “All of our alumni that I’ve ever really talked to, most of whom have ended up in senior-level management positions, have said that it always comes back to their ability to work with people, understand their needs and wants, and know what to do to improve their experience,” Gaulke said. “Whether you’re working in finance or consulting or food service, that’s the soft skill that this class provides in spades. … It’s the soft skills it teaches that help set them apart in the future.”

Sustainable Development: Engaging For the Good of All

Some courses take experiential learning to the next level, allowing students not only to learn by doing, but also to return a benefit, whether to the client who is helping them learn or to the larger community or society. Senior lecturer Jeanne Varney created and teaches one such course, Sustainable Development. “Engaged learning is mutually beneficial, and it has some sort of civic or community benefit,” she explained.

The juniors, seniors, and graduate students in Sustainable Development are assigned three different projects. First, they work on a consulting project for a hotel client—“a real problem with a real company.” For their second deliverable, they perform an on-site sustainability audit for a hotel client, then write up their findings and suggest improvements. And third, they perform a community service project and keep a reflection journal about what they learned and how the project affected them. “Reflection is an important part of learning,” Varney explained. “Everything—the audit, the project, the community service—it all goes back out to the clients,” she added.

For the hotel projects, Varney’s students often work with HEI Hotels and Resorts, a hotel-investment and third-party management company owned by brothers Gary Mendel ’79 and Stephen Mendel ’82. “Since way back when, HEI Hotels has been focused on sustainability, always,” Varney said. “They have amazing technology and amazing systems in place.” Some of the recommendations the company has tasked students with developing are for “clean water extraction out of the atmosphere; super-efficient networks; the latest and greatest food composter; and programs for things like how to do a farm-to-table event for customers in the hotels.”

Varney has also worked with Jim McGrath ’84, executive vice president at Delaware North, who asked the students to develop innovative ideas for use in national parks. “My favorite idea was a solar phone-charging station for people on bikes,” she said. “The solar panel was an awning, and there were bike racks underneath. Each bike rack had a charging station. You know, if you’re camping and riding a bike, how do you charge your phone? I thought, ‘Ah! That’s so bright.’”

For years, students did their community service projects with the neighborhood elementary school, Belle Sherman, devising creative ways to teach fifth graders about sustainability throughout the semester. With the COVID-19 pandemic leaving the school closed, the class decided to direct their focus onto a pressing current topic—one that is playing out around the world. The students engaged with FAIR Girls, an organization that collaborates with the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA) to combat human trafficking.

“Sustainability is not just about the environment,” Varney said. “It’s the three pillars: people, planet, and profit. When you look at corporate sustainability reports now, it’s always about environment and community, and then there’s usually a part about people, like fair wages or labor surveys. I want the students to understand the full range of what sustainability and sustainable development mean.”

Students have identified resources for survivors and developed training and educational materials for hotel industry employees about how to recognize and respond to trafficking.

The AHLA has made intervention a priority, Varney said.

“Awareness is really exploding,” she said. “It’s something that AHLA is really pushing, for sure, but also the brands. Ten years ago, there was no human trafficking statement on any website. Now, all the brands have one. Even ownership groups are starting to put them out there, especially the public ones.”

Human trafficking can be an uncomfortable subject for students to discuss, much less confront.

“I tell the students, ‘We’re going to work with experts, and you will have a role to really, actually make a difference in people’s lives.’ The resources they put together for this organization were amazing. The work was professional. Our students are just ridiculously talented. The two big partners were so thankful—just so thankful.”

Varney, an Engaged Cornell Faculty Fellow for the 2016–17 academic year, said she loves teaching the class. “There’s so much wrapped up into this course. I tell my students it will be unlike anything they’ve ever done, and it will be a lot of work, but that all they have to do is dive in and engage.”