María Teresa Gozalo has directed Les Roches Marbella since this prestigious institution of Swiss origin opened its center on the Costa del Sol in 1995. This Les Roches branch campus, where hotel and golf course managers have been and are being trained, has recently been rated by the industry as the Best School in Spain for training tourism professionals.
1 -Tourism is the first sector that is going to pull the cart out of the crisis. Do you think this industry will be basic in the world economy in this sense?
-I firmly believe this and it is underlined by the data presented by various institutions. The global hotel, restaurant and tourism industry is expected to generate 303 million jobs worldwide by 2020, which represents one out of every eleven jobs. In addition, the twenty leading hotel chains estimate the opening of more than 8,500 hotels, with an average annual growth of 20 percent, offering more than 1.1 million additional rooms by 2015.
2 -Define Les Roches: is it a tourism school or something else?
-Les Roches Marbella is an international School of Hotel Management created with the purpose of training managers in the international hotel sector. But we are not only that: we are also a truly transnational space, with students from more than fifty countries who live together and share experiences in a very enriching way in a privileged environment such as Marbella.
3 -Your students enter the labor market with sufficient and accredited knowledge of the sector. Are they being sought after by companies?
-One of our great added values is the interrelation between the School and the business world, including hotel establishments, both city hotels and resorts with golf courses as well as companies linked to the world of hospitality on an international scale. Each semester these hotel companies visit Les Roches Marbella and incorporate our students into their productive structure. On average each of our students receives three internship offers per semester and currently eighty percent of our students are successfully working in the international hotel industry and related sectors.
4 -Is it true, as it is said, that to work in tourism you have to be of a special breed, to have a certain attitude?
-If one could draw a sketch of the 21st century senior hotel management professional, it would allude to a person with an attitude of service to others, international mobility, multilingual capacity, managerial and leadership skills, personnel management, accounting, purchasing, mastery of hotel IT management tools and accumulated and proven experience in leading international hotel establishments. In short, a professional who is made of special stuff and has a very defined attitude towards his work.
5 -With 32,000 golf courses around the world, Les Roches could not forget this segment. What do you think golf represents within the tourism industry?
-Golf is much more than a sport, it is an important complement to leisure and entertainment tourism. Golf brings added values such as: promotion of “quality” tourism, including aspects such as event organization, projects, facilities, media, tourism. Golf has important aspects in common with the world of hospitality, it is also a service in which it is offered as a complement to the other.
6 -You do specific courses for golf course directors and managers. Please explain to me succinctly what they consist of.
-The golf industry has followed the same guidelines as the hotel industry. The companies related to the world of golf currently move in an environment of great complexity, which is determined by their own internal structure and the dynamism demanded by the relationships with other sectors directly and indirectly linked to the golf industry: suppliers, partners, employees, clubs, proshops, tour operators, etc. As a consequence of all these aspects, a new need arises: the need for professionals capable of managing and making all these resources profitable. This is how the notion of Golf Management appears as a truly strategic concept…
Given this state of affairs and in order to qualify golf professionals, Les Roches Marbella decided to launch its Postgraduate Course in Golf Course Management. This is a postgraduate course, which starts in January 2012, aimed at university graduates and professionals with a minimum of five years of experience in the industry who want specialized business training in the management of golf courses and golf-related businesses. It has been designed to combine theory, personal development, management and leadership, and course catering management in order to broaden the range of career opportunities available.
7 -The Costa del Sol is a leading destination for golf holidays in Europe. What advice would you give to the sector to maintain this privileged position?
-It is necessary to continue in the line of a golf offer that bets on quality in all its aspects: facilities, services, prices…. In addition, in parallel, we must improve the training levels of all the people involved in this industry that has a growing specific weight throughout the Costa del Sol.
8 -What do you think is the key to being a good golf course manager or director?
-I believe that the golf industry is increasingly demanding managers with a solid background who have the ability to respond creatively and professionally to the new challenges of the sector and to identify and analyze problems, applying appropriate solutions and focusing on customer service. In short, they must combine those factors to which I alluded before when I referred to our Postgraduate: leadership skills, teamwork skills and a set of knowledge that combines theory and practice.
9 -What differentiates Les Roches from other educational institutions of this style?
-I believe that Les Roches Marbella presents the best possible combination of elements: the great Swiss hotel tradition that comes to us from our parent company Les Roches; the efficiency of the North American educational system, for which we have our accreditation by the New England Association of Schools & Colleges (NEASC) in the USA; our ability to offer an education entirely in English that integrates theory and practice; our commitment to elements such as multilingualism and sports; and, as a culmination of all of this, having a modern campus in Marbella that integrates theory and practice.Our ability to offer an education entirely in English that integrates theory and practice; our commitment to elements such as multilingualism and sports; and, as a culmination of all this, having a modern campus in a paradigmatic place for the tourism sector such as Marbella.
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