Lauren Moyer
International Business Intern
at Hotel Mediterraneo
About Me
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"A problem well stated is a problem half solved" - John Dewey,
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I am an International Business student with a focus in Management and a minor in German at Elizabethtown College. I am a very active and driven person who constantly has a desire and fear to be pushed out of my comfort zone. Examples of this are playing unfamiliar sports, trying unique foods, going exotic places, or learning new languages. One of the greatest achievements I have reached recently was to go abroad for 10 months and live in three countries with entirely different cultures and languages. During the fall of 2019 I studied at the Sant'Anna Institute in Sorrento Italy and in Spring 2020 I will be studying in Vienna Austria and in Marburg Germany. While studying abroad I hope to expand my academic and career goals by taking internships abroad, broadening my knowledge of different customs, and becoming more adaptable to new surroundings.
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International Business Internship
Location: Hotel Mediterraneo - Sant'Agnello Italy
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Supervisors: Francesco Monti, and Alessia Fiorentino
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Tasks and Responsibilities
Hotel and Events
During this internship I had multiple tasks that I was assigned during the high season. I aided in the set up of breakfast in the morning and then greeted guests, I revised grammar and punctuation mistakes on wedding documents such as menus and a Frequently Asked Questions page. In addition to this I created table name flyers for a 50th Anniversary, filed thousands of photos from weddings to show to diverse wedding clients, and modified touches of photos to create better quality pictures.
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Main Projects
Social Media and Evaluation Grid
My main projects of the semester were taking pictures of the cuisines, guests, and atmosphere of the hotel for the social media, in addition to generating hashtags and captions that would capture the attention of new demographics. The second half of the semester I created an evaluation grid of over 20 different wedding venues both globally and locally to determine who will be be an upcoming competitor. The evaluation grid determined the differences and similarities of various wedding venues to find how the hotel could develop or maintain a competitive advantage.
I did this by researching popular wedding destinations in the world and cross referencing them with characteristics that were similar to our hotel so we would be able to have a viable comparison between the venues and find how we could do better. After this I emailed all the competitors and categorized them on the evaluation grid, then determined the top five that were the biggest threats and found how our hotel compared in relation to the competitors.
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Reflection
Challenges That I Experienced:
Problem Solving
Language barrier
Greetings and Goodbyes in another culture
Walking to work instead of using a car
Using programs in an unfamiliar language
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Accomplishments and Skills:
Problem Solving: Located global and local new wedding venue competitors so the hotel can maintain a competitive advantage
Communication: Being in a foreign language and successfully communicating tasks to another coworker without having the same language
Learning a new Language: Using the vocabulary that I learned in the classroom and utilizing it in a work place setting through programs such as Word, Photoshop, and a restaurant ordering system.
Creativity: Captured and modified pictures as well as producing captions and hashtags for Hotel Mediterraneo's social media pages.
There were two main projects that I worked on during the semester and they were capturing photos of the hotel during the peak season to post on their social media pages, and the other one was to determine global and local wedding venues that are competitors to the hotel. The first one, to me, seemed to be a marketing project and the second was a more data focused. In the future, this internship has made me realize that I enjoy working in the background of a management setting rather than working on a marketing project. I enjoyed learning how the hotel ran, the branding, greeting customers, and working behind the scenes to find ways to make the hotel more successful. These projects have solidified my decision to stick to a management focus background and has increased my interest in potentially going for a master's degree in Hotel Management.