DISCOVERING
     HOSPITALITY

River cruising is evolving beyond scenic views and leisurely excursions. Discover how leading cruise brands are redefining hospitality through adventure, cultural immersion, personalization and purposeful travel—and what industry professionals can learn from the shift.

Gen Alpha is gaining influence over family travel decisions, including hotel choice. Allan Chan explores how hotels can turn young guests into loyal advocates through personalised experiences, playful rewards and family-focused loyalty programmes.

When a hotel system crashes during her temporary promotion, a young Filipina must rely on the lessons she learned at her family’s sari-sari store. But a costly mistake and the loss of her acting supervisor role teach her a deeper lesson about leadership, accountability, and growth in the hospitality industry.

What does the future hold for Philippine hospitality? A seasoned hospitality leader shares insights on leadership, AI, career development, education and preparing Filipino talent for a changing global industry.

Around the world, the colour of the wine on the table now says as much about a guest's age and the occasion as it does about taste, and the gap between Asia and Europe is wider than most wine lists admit. The global picture looks balanced.

Martin Aguilar has a young yet impressive career in the Philippine Hospitality Industry starting as sales manager for The Legend Hotel in Puerto Princesa, Palawan. He then moved as pre-opening front office chief of the Pangulasian Island Resort of the El Nido chain. His final posting was as operations manager of S’Maison, the luxury mall within the Conrad Manila.

The properties that win are not necessarily the ones spending the most on advertising, but the ones creating content worth discovering, understanding their guests deeply, and delivering experiences worth talking about.

One of the most rewarding discoveries in teaching is realizing that the subject, Green Buildings, Resorts, and Hotels, is no longer confined to architecture students. Today, it serves as a core course for Sustainability Management majors and an elective for students of International Hospitality Management.

Housekeeping rarely gets discussed in the language owners use for the decisions that actually move an asset's value. It gets discussed the way a utility contract gets discussed: as a cost centre to be minimized.

Ceviche finds its character between raw fish and sharp citrus. Ají brings heat without erasing the ingredient beneath it. Across the Andes, altitude can transform what grows, how people cook, and what eventually reaches the table.

Every general manager who has sat through a vendor pitch for front-desk automation has heard some version of the same promise: faster check-ins, lower labor costs, happier guests, all from a single kiosk or chatbot rollout. Some of that promise is real. Some of it is marketing. The hard part of the job, the part no vendor slide ever quite covers, is figuring out which is which before signing a contract and reorganizing a team around it.

Recent incidents involving dangers in Philippine educational institutions have intensified conversations around campus safety, prompting schools to reexamine how they protect and support students.

For decades, the hospitality industry treated wellness as an add-on: a spa visit booked in advance, a yoga class on a printed schedule, a treatment room tucked away from the rest of the property. That model worked well enough for short leisure stays, where a guest might carve out one afternoon for indulgence before returning to normal life. It works far less well for the growing population of travellers who are not visiting a destination so much as living in it for weeks or m

The more interesting question is not whether AI can perform the receptionist's tasks. It is which tasks hotels will decide no longer require a receptionist at all—and what happens to the role when those tasks disappear.

In the Philippines and the world over, food is defined by the what, by the how, and by the who! A couple of decades back, “the who” did not matter so much as it matters now. Oftentimes, it matters more now.

Anyone who has ever been into an English pub or lives in England will surely have heard of the pub brand Wetherspoon, fondly referred to as Spoons. They took the UK by storm with their innovative approach to an English way of life that is centuries old.

Traveling around England for the past month taught me a lot about cheeses; although I knew some things, there was still some info that was new to me. Here are some of the things I learned about these delightful ones that I simply had to enjoy with a glass of chilled white.

Understanding how these two humble preservation techniques evolved into one of gastronomy's defining partnerships says as much about the history of trade and hospitality as it does about flavor.

For decades, red wine drinkers have been handed the same instruction: serve at room temperature. It is advice that made sense once, in an era of stone floors and unheated parlours, and makes considerably less sense now, in centrally heated kitchens with the pasta water already at a rolling boil. Historically, room temperature meant something closer to cellar temperature, somewhere between 12°C and 15°C.

The third part of a student of Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Management's personal recount, overcoming her parents’ objections, empty pockets, and years of doubt, proving that passion, persistence, and a little help from government support can unlock even the heaviest doors.