Hospitality
ManagementCornell

Certificate Program

Every property's finance function keeps detailed records of the daily transactions involved in the running the organization. Periodically, they create reports that allow management, stakeholders and regulating authorities to have insight into the financial health of the organization. As a manager, you need to understand both the metrics that are reported in income statement, balance sheets, and cash flow statements, and how they relate to each other. You also need to understand how comparing numbers across your company, the industry, and from year to year, can help you assess the overall financial performance of the firm.

The in-depth review of sample case studies in this course will provide you with the tools you need to examine your own property's reports. As you make budgeting and investment decisions, your knowledge of how vital financial markers indicate relative health in the organization will help drive initiatives to meet your company's financial goals.

In this course, you will create a strategy to turn a work group into a high-functioning team by evaluating challenges and applying techniques to generate positive team outcomes. Based on the research and expertise of Professor Kate Walsh, PhD, of Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, you will learn how to enable a team to take ownership of its own success and shift leadership roles as the team assumes greater responsibility. 

Using tools provided in this course, you will explore best practices in leading teams, assess case studies, and examine functional conflict. With the completion of an action plan at the end of the course, you will be ready to apply what you learn to your own organization.

Services marketing is often viewed in terms of outcomes, but services marketing is also an ongoing analytic process. In this course, you will learn how to properly analyze frameworks, tools, channels, data sets, customer behavioral data, decision-making factors, and strategies that support broader marketing decisions.

Authored by Robert Kwortnik from Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, this course will teach you how to review the way marketing works in your organization and how to create and apply a services marketing process.

Have you traveled recently? More than likely, you used the internet to search for the “best” price in whatever way you might define that: a combination of room, car rental, and airline seat class prices; discounts; travel dates; length of stay; and so on. Conversely, as a decision maker in the hospitality industry, you cannot escape the influence of search engines, online travel agents, and social media on how you price your product. In this course, you will explore various revenue management, pricing, and internet marketing strategies and tactics that can enable you to maximize revenue at your firm.

Revenue management is about rejecting current opportunities for potential future opportunities while maximizing profit. Pricing has also become an increasingly important mechanism in a firm's profits. In this course, you will begin by examining how to incorporate uncertainty in setting prices along with the trade-offs between demand and price. Calculating breakeven rates will assist you in determining where to set prices.

Your customers have varying appetites for risk; in hospitality, this entails whether they will book now or wait for a lower price. How your competitors react to price changes you make will impact your revenue as well, and you will explore a model for framing these interactions.

Finally, you can optimize your position on internet search results and increase conversions by applying the search engine optimization strategies that you will explore in this course. These strategies can increase your visibility to target customers.

This course includes a pricing simulation game, where you will first compete against the computer to set prices competitively, then you will play the game with your peers. We recommend that you start the game immediately to ensure that you have enough time to experience (and enjoy!) the game in the final module.

Loyal repeat customers are key to the success of any food and beverage operation. They represent recurring revenue and are a great source for feedback and gauging customer sentiment. They can also be your greatest evangelists, recommending you to friends and colleagues, even giving favorable online reviews.

Through careful design, meticulous attention to service processes, and a way to gauge customer sentiment, you can play to your team's strengths and identify opportunities for improving the guest experience to grow your business.

Running a successful hotel today is a highly collaborative process involving many roles.

This course is structured around the four key stages in the guest experience -- pre-arrival, arrival, occupancy, and departure -- and will explain hotel operations, the systems that hotels rely on, and the managers and staff who run them. During the guests' experience, managers and staff will learn how to engage with guests to win and maintain their loyalty.

Professor Reneta McCarthy brings first-hand knowledge of hotel operations to this course, providing insights and guidelines that will give participants a good understanding of the inner workings of today's hotels.

Symposium sessions feature three days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Leadership Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium in which we’ll discuss the ways that leaders across industries have continued engaging their teams over the past two years while pivoting in strategic ways. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to relevant topics for leaders. Throughout this Symposium, you will examine different areas of leadership, including innovation, strategy, and engagement. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from various industries.

Upcoming Symposium: February 11, 12 and 13, 2025 from 11am – 1pm ET

• Tuesday, February 11, 2025 11am – 1pm ET
• Wednesday, February 12, 2025 11am – 1pm ET
• Thursday, February 13, 2025 11am – 1pm ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Hospitality Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll discuss how both day-to-day operations and strategic goal setting in the hospitality sector have rapidly evolved over the past two years, opening up new space for real-time conversations about the future of the industry. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to various areas of the industry, examining the innovations and accommodations you have all had to make throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and strategizing on future directions. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: April 1 and 2, 2025

• Tuesday, April 1, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending
• Wednesday, April 2, 2025 11:00AM ET – 1:00PM ET
  • Session title pending

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Marketing Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll share experiences from across the industry, inspiring real-time conversations about best practices, innovation, and the future of marketing work. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to some of the most pressing topics and trends in the marketing field. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: March 11th – 12th, 2025: 

• Tuesday, March 11, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET
• Wednesday, March 12, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.