Resort manager

Diana Thorp

As more hotels place golf courses, spas and leisure clubs on the recreation menu, demand for staff with the skills to manage the diverse offerings is increasing.

After more than three years as vice-president of operations at the five-star Celtic Manor Resort in Wales – which includes three golf courses, two leisure clubs and a spa – Matt Stephens knows such facilities require specialist knowledge.

“Now the resorts [are] being built with golf clubs and restaurants and spas and leisure clubs and all sorts of things as well as residential homes,” Stephens says.

“At the minute in Australia there is a huge lack of managers who know how to operate golf courses and leisure clubs and spas in addition to the accommodation and food and beverage, because traditionally hotels have been food and beverage and rooms.”

Stephens, who recently returned to Australia, is helping the Blue Mountains Hotel School develop a new unit in management principles for specialist resort facilities (golf-spa) for its new associate degree in hotel and resort management.

A former graduate of the hotel school, Stephens says higher education qualifications are becoming more popular in the hospitality sector.

“From my point of view I’ve had a lot of people report to me over the last 10 years who were crying out for undergraduate or postgraduate qualifications,” he says.

“People who have got up to middle management level, they’ve done a skills or hotel management diploma, got to a middle management level, but really don’t have the knowledge or skills to get any further than that. You really need a degree or a masters, but it really needs to be applied, it’s not something you can learn at university behind a desk, so I think the school is bang-on with where they’re going with the resort management.”

Next year the hotel school will offer two new higher education awards, a one-year diploma of food and beverage management and a two-year associate degree in hotel and resort management.

New units include spa management, golf management and operations and environment management.

“Most of the five-star hotels worldwide now are built with a spa facility or a golf facility or both and what you actually need to know as a hotel manager or resort manager is [how to] understand those two parts of the industry,” hotel school principal and chief executive Guy Bentley says.

“You don’t have to know how to do a massage, but they are a very different business to what the traditional hotel manager was learning.”

Students will be able to continue their studies up to a bachelor of commerce, conferred by the University of New England if they wish. Bentley says the school is in the process of accrediting an associate degree in tourism and leisure management, which it hopes to introduce in 2007. He says the upper management industry is looking for graduates with bachelors’ degrees.

The new courses – constructed with industry research and in consultation with an industry advisory body – allow the school to deliver an international qualification. About 70 per cent of students at the school are international.

Bentley, who is also chairman of the Association of Australian Hotel Schools, says the new courses have been internationally benchmarked and received Hotel and Catering International Management Association accreditation.

The delivery mode of the school – where students live on campus for part of the courses and take on different roles running the hotel school as a hotel and also undertake industry placements – could not be replicated in a university.

Australian Council for Private Education and Training chief executive Tim Smith says the mainstay of the Australian private provider system is business, hospitality and allied programs. Courses range from vocational certificates to professional doctorates. The most common courses are vocational diplomas and higher education degree courses.

Smith says private providers offering higher education qualifications are “very much a trend”. It’s a trend he believes has been accelerated by demand from overseas for Australian degree courses as well as by the federal Government’s new FEE-HELP student loan scheme, which applies to higher education courses offered by private providers.