City College of Tagaytay-Hospitality and Tourism Management

(Reflection paper)

Last June 22 2021, CCT school of hospitality and tourism had a webinar with the
theme “Shaping the future: Exploring Opportunities in the Hospitality Industry, to mold
student’s future during Covid-19. The webinar last for 4 hours and has 4 speakers.
Aside from it the moderators also make an ice breaker game every other speaker to
give prizes and fun to the audience.

First guest speaker is Mr. James H. De Castro, a manager at UCC cliff house
Tagaytay, with his topic ‘How to equip hospitality students with skills and utilize it for
success’. He shared everything he experience with his restaurant. According to him,
everything starts at home today as Covid 19 given us tough situations that all aspects of
jobs are affected here in our country. He also shared some skills for us to be equip as a
Hotelier and Restaurateur like communications skills, he said that communication is the
key and body language is essential to good customer service in hospitality. Another is
being resilient, to make it through a shift, you’ll often have to endure high levels of
stress caused by constant multitasking, a lot of running back and forth, and sometimes
demanding customers of colleagues. Attitude and initiative that in hospitality it means
actively responding to a customer’s need, impress them and make work easier for
everyone. And left us with a bible verse, Romans 8:28 “and we know that all things work
together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his
purpose”

Second guest speaker is Dr. Lilibeth R. Sabillano, a faculty member at the

college of hospitality and tourism at Trinity of Asia with her topic ‘Important practices in
hospitality industry on how to cope up with the New Normal due to Covid-19’. The cover
of her topic is about health and safety guidelines governing the operations of
accommodation establishments under the new normal. She shared to us the guest
handling policy from health declaration up to the scanning, reception counter and
concierge for the reception counter and desk, precautionary measure including physical
distancing and more, room occupancy policy, housekeeping staff training, room
decontaminations and linen decontaminations in accordance with DOH guideline. And
most importantly the key actions or changes the hospitality industry adopted today like
hotels with updated health procedures, deploying technologies and communication and
social media. I’ve learned a lot from her including some jargons when it comes to
hospitality and housekeeping and left us an inspiration quote saying that customers may
forget what you said but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

Third speaker is Mr. James Mark Balbuena with his topic ‘Visualizing failure
opportunities in hospitality industry after Covid-19’. What I’ve learn to him is he shared
some factors to success, first he said is to commit. We need to build our character, set
our goals, right education, training and personal branding is also needed because lazy
people want much to get little but those who works hard will prosper. Next is purpose,
we can make many plans, but the Lord’s purpose will prevail. We need to know our
purpose while keeping our faith, freedom and prosperity.

The webinar went well based on the program. And we, the audiences, left with a
lot of learnings that we can apply in our daily lives.