Kelly Loss Photography
Name: Gabriel C.
Position: Assistant General Manager
Hotel: Courtyard Silver Spring North/White Oak
Dream destination: I would love to go to Southeast Asia and tour different countries. I love nature, and Southeast Asia is home to many different cultures and beautiful natural scenery, and there are a lot of Marriott properties there too 😉
Drink or treat of choice: I love coffee! It’s one of my favorite drinks and it’s easily turned into a social drink as well. Business meeting? Grab a coffee. Catching up with a friend? Grab a coffee. Going on a date? Grab a coffee. Going to work? Bring coffee for the team.
When you begin working in a hotel for the first time, it can feel like staring at a daunting, 1,000-piece puzzle without the box top for reference — you’re excited by the opportunities ahead of you, but unsure of how or where to start. For Gabriel, taking part in Marriott’s Voyage Program was the key that aligned all the pieces, the box top that clearly mapped out the big picture of how a hotel operates.
“I placed an emphasis on learning about other departments’ operations and procedures,” Gabriel says of his experience in Marriott’s development program for recent college graduates. “Having this understanding gives me a good sense of how the hotel runs as a whole.”
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Although Gabriel’s love of food had him first considering a culinary career, Gabriel decided on hospitality, majoring in hotel and restaurant management at the University of Delaware with minors in spa and wellness management and economics. He applied to Marriott’s Voyage Program in the summer of 2021, and, after a couple rounds of interviews, Gabriel received offers for different positions and locations: working at the front office in Kansas City; housekeeping in New Orleans; or as the one he chose, a Modern Select Brands Operations Voyager at the Residence Inn Alexandria Old Town/Duke Street.
“I loved every minute of it,” he says of his first role at the DC-adjacent hotel where his duties included overseeing different hotel areas, but mostly front desk operations.
Courtesy of Gabriel C.
Since then, Gabriel has steadily progressed towards his career goals in record time. Right after he completed the Voyage program, Gabriel got promoted to Operations Manager at the Residence Inn Fairfax City in Virginia. Just when he was about to celebrate his one year anniversary at the Residence Inn, he was offered a new role as Assistant General Manager at the Courtyard Silver Spring North/White Oak in Maryland, where he says he does a little bit of a lot of things in every department, something for which the Voyage program prepared him.
Having the voyage curriculum plus learning the systems and the concepts of running a hotel [through my experience as an Operations Manager] has given me a good opportunity to learn how to manage my time and how to balance what’s important,” he says.
Courtesy of Gabriel C.
Learn more about how Gabriel made the most of Marriott’s Voyage Program and is now applying it in his new leadership role, in his own words, below.
How do you feel about your new promotion?
I’m very excited. I feel that I’m in a good spot and that I’m well prepared. I think there are things that I’ve learned on top of my experience as Operations Manager that have prepared me well for this job.
How did your Voyage experience prepare you for this role?
The Voyage Program is still paying dividends to me even after my first promotion to an Operations Manager. I’ve got a lot of tools in my toolbox from a combination of Voyage and the experiences before and after it. A lot of the things that I learned during the program actually prepared me to do even more than what the Operations Manager position typically does. Plus, the senior leadership at that job were great in answering all my questions and taking the time to invest in me and my knowledge. And that experience is not unique to this particular hotel. I really appreciate that people spend the time to invest in me and invest in my future with the company.
When have you felt supported at Marriott?
I felt supported every time I met with my Voyage Coach. He was a great resource to me, he taught me how to do the job, but more importantly, how to lead a successful team. He made me feel supported at work and outside of work as well. He works very hard to balance everyone’s schedules to promote a good work-life balance. He looks at the hotel as a machine and rearranges the parts frequently to be more efficient and to make as many people as possible happy, including guests.
Kelly Loss Photography
Can you describe a moment you felt like a part of a community at Marriott.
When I was invited to go to HQ to participate in a Voyager photo and video shoot to promote the program. It was a great way to connect with other Voyagers, as well as explore Marriott’s HQ space, and to further the Voyager Program’s success. [Editor’s note: Some of these photos of Gabriel are from the aforementioned photo shoot — fun fact, you might notice that Gabriel’s borrowed name tag says “Richard.”]
How would you describe Marriott’s culture?
I really feel that the core values embody the culture of Marriott. Most notably, “Put People First. Take care of associates and they will take care of the customers”. I always, always, always will put my team first. In taking care of my team, I am indirectly taking care of guests, beyond the ones I directly interact with. This creates a culture of valuing each and every member of the team, as well as having each other’s backs. At my hotel, we all pitch in to help wherever needed. Cross-department communication is strong amongst the teams in my hotel, and we place a heavy emphasis on lending a helping hand to those who need it.
What would you say to someone who is considering the Voyage program?
I would say that the Voyage program is what you make of it. There is a set of requirements, of course, but then there’s the extra stuff on top. You have to take some online courses and things like that but I took it a little further and I did things like asking my General Manager if I could do a shift at another hotel, a Courtyard, during my Voyage Program so that I could learn what it was like to be at another brand. That’s not part of the program, but that’s something that I think is valuable to get experience in a different brand. Or things like sitting in on revenue management calls weekly so that I could learn about pricing and allocating rooms, price discrimination, etc. Stuff that was not necessarily in the Voyage curriculum, but that’s what I do now.
Additionally, I’d tell them to learn to see the big picture versus just doing your job. That is something that I learned during my Voyage Program, and that was pretty much my goal with the experience, to understand how a small action has a big domino effect, that every team in the hotel depends on the other teams. That we’re all a big team in every sense of the word.
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