Melià Hotels International is the leading Spanish hotel chain as regards numbers of rooms and the second-largest if you count the number of establishments. It has ranked between 15th and 18th in the world over the last few years.
This hotel industry superpower had training needs that posed a major challenge: what was the most efficient way to train hundreds of professionals located around the world?
Online training was obviously the answer to this question.
We spent considerable time preparing two Revenue Management courses totally adapted to the needs of this prestigious client, which we started teaching in 2018. The content of the courses took into account Melià’s own procedures, segments, and work systems. Even the language has been adapted. Even the practical cases have been selected from the chain’s own experiences.
During the year we organized three meetings, which all active workers with Melià could sign up to. The ratio of students who satisfactorily complete the courses is high and more typical of a classroom course than an online course.
The initial challenge, which started in 2015, was to create a Revenue Management course for Melià’s internal training and promotion program, which a small number of professionals would participate in. However, over time, the idea evolved towards a broader and more ambitious approach.
The enormous potential of online training became clear: the initial effort of creating personalized content could then be used to reach a virtually unlimited number of students, and Melià considered it more profitable and beneficial to extend the Revenue Management culture to all its staff, rather than just to a privileged few.
- To condense the main concepts of Revenue Management into two three-month courses.
- To create personalized content based on the experiences of the Melià hotels reflecting the company’s culture and personality.
- To structure the courses to comply with FUNDAE’s requirements, thus allowing for a bonus for students hired by a Spanish company belonging to the Melià group.
- To provide the customer with an online platform that enables them to expand the training with other courses offered by Hotel-lo, if they so wished.
- To enable them to grow in a solid, consistent, and sustainable way.
With respect to other online courses, our courses don’t provide peer-to-peer assessment, and so the students’ achievements are demonstrated through closed tests or open tests corrected by the Hotel-lo’s Revenue Managers.
In fifteen years of experience teaching Revenue Management, we have developed a methodology based on a very operational approach, in which practical cases feature very heavily, and are at the centre of what we teach.
The process of adapting existing content and creating new material has been a long one, and was carried out in constant communication with the client. Without the collaboration of several Melià departments, it would have been impossible to write the practical part of the course, as this came from their own direct experience.
We chose to create two courses, one basic and one advanced, lasting approximately three months each. Both courses are offered in Spanish and English. There are three enrolment periods each year for the students to complete their training in Revenue Management.
In the summer of 2018 we made some changes in the teaching material, which we considered necessary after the first two enrolment periods. However, in any case, at the end of each course we make corrections and additions to the content based on the feedback we receive, and these updates are consistent.
We all know that the completion ratios of an online course tend to be comparatively low when compared to courses that take place in classrooms. And, they’re even lower when the participants are company workers. However, Melià Academy courses tend to have successful completion rates of between 60 and 70%, which, for us, is ample proof of their success.
Other statistics to highlight are the students’ grades, which average out at 3.7 out of 4, which is quite impressive considering that this was based on a sample of 100-150 students per enrolment period.
