In a sea of more than 1,000 schools offering hospitality courses in metro Manila, Dusit Hospitality Management College (DHMC) stands out as an institution that offers hotel courses designed for supervisory and management levels.
The graduates will also have the potential to continue learning and progressing into a senior management position in five to seven years, said Lars Eltvik, managing director of the school. Six years ago, Eltvik was also at the helm of Dusit’s first tourism college in Bangkok.
DHMC will be a fully-integrated hotel school with “high-tech, high-touch balance”, occupying the first nine floors of Dusit D2 – The Fort Hotel and Serviced Residences. While the school starts operations next month, the hotel – which features 135 Scandinavian-designed rooms and 129 serviced residences of 40m2 to 80m2 – will soft open in January 2019.
Eltvik, who will also manage the hotel – one of the eight that Dusit International has signed in the Philippines – said that to guarantee its “relevance”, DHMC will try “to fill the gap between what the industry needs and what the schools are producing” as “the academe is slow but the industry is moving fast”.
Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne will certify the four-year bachelor degree in hospitality management, while Institut Paul Bocuse is the partner for bespoke culinary programmes. There will also be short courses teaching English and French languages, and maybe Mandarin for the fast-growing China market, elaborated Eltvik.
Marco Polo Ortigas Manila’s director of sales and marketing Pearl Peralta-Maclang noted that aside from producing a more qualified pool of young talents that the industry needs, it is also more affordable for students to study at DHMC in Manila as compared to Europe.
“It is also an opportunity to attract foreign students to study in the Philippines… so that is good for the economy,” said Peralta-Maclang.
Golden Phoenix Hotel Manila’s director of sales and marketing, Christine Urbanozo-Ibarreta, agreed that the industry as a whole stands to benefit from the opening of DHMC, as graduates are not limited to working at Dusit only, but at other hotels as well, in the future.
“It is the best of both worlds combining Thai and Filipino hospitality,” Urbanozo-Ibarreta remarked.
