Hospitality Management Field Trip to Berlin

by Sarah Livingston, Global MBA Student Ambassador 2017-2018 | Hospitality Management Major

For the week of March 4th – March 10th, participants from the Global MBA Hospitality Management major hit the road and headed from Paris to Berlin, Germany for the 21st annual International Hotel Investment Forum (IHIF), held at Berlin’s Intercontinental Hotel.  What a week it was!

For the 60+ hotel company CEOs, 180+ guest speakers, and over 2,000 attendees at this year’s IHIF Conference, this event was a chance for real estate and hospitality professionals from over 80 different countries to meet, network, initiate potential deals, and attend seminars on a variety of related topics.  Overall, it was a chance for hoteliers to do what hoteliers do best: connect.  We got to take part in the action by attending the networking events and reaching out to some of our new connections to meet and find out more about their part of the industry, which helped us work out more of our career details for ourselves and forge ahead in our own future post-ESSEC paths.


Included in the companies that attended were AccorHotels, Barcelo Hotel Group, The Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, Choice Hotels International, Dream Hotel Group, Hilton, IHG, Wyndham, and many, many more. What a roster!  In addition to these impressive companies, however, were also an almost uncountable number of new startups and hospitality brands who were looking to promote their new ideas and expand their company personas.  Several of us had opportunities to sit down with these entrepreneurs, as well as hear their startup pitches at several pitch competitions throughout the week.  We are bowled over by the innovative ideas about to hit the marketplace.

Half-Way Through: Taking Time to reflect on My Experience So Far

By Erin Thibodeau, ESSEC Global MBA Student Ambassador 2017-2018 | Luxury Brand Management Major

As a student ambassador for the Global MBA, I get the chance to speak with many incoming students, be it via ESSEC Talk, in one-off conversations, or at open houses and MBA fairs. One of the questions I get most often is a simple, “how are you enjoying the program so far?”. So, I thought I would tackle this general and yet complex question in a post!

Six months into the program allows me to take pause and be excited for all of the adventures to come and to look back and take stock of all we’ve already learned.

The first four months – September to December – saw us learning a lot of the fundamentals. Finance, accounting, an entrepreneurship course (see George’s post here!), and general strategy prepared us for a new year of tackling complex business challenges and challenged us to creatively seek answers. We dove into the new year with management accounting, operational management, and focused luxury courses that encourage us to build on the knowledge we’ve already gained to inform how we seek answers.

How Big Data is Driving Luxury Growth

This article is a summary of a report published in Luxe Digital by Global MBA students Vaibhav Jain, Jonathan Bernal, and Pranaay Gupta. Their research provides an in-depth understanding of how big data is transforming the business of luxury and how brands that are able to leverage big data will gain a competitive advantage in the future.

Big data, a concept that refers to the technologies and processes used to collect, organise, and generate insights from large amount of customer information, is transforming the business of luxury. 

The IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that 180 zettabytes of data will be created per year by 2025. To manage that amount of data, global tech companies are rapidly building new data centers around the world. In 2016 alone, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft spent over $32bn in data management, up 22% from the previous year.

The quality of available data is changing as well. According to The Economist, the new economy is about analysing real-time flows of unstructured information such as consumer social media comments, influencers’ feeds on Instagram, or customers’ purchase funnel across multiple channels.

The market for data analytics is thus massive. The big data opportunities for luxury brands that are able to successfully take advantage of them will prove critical in the coming years.