Congrats to Prof. Dr. Willy Legrand.
This year’s recipient of the Raphael Kavanaugh Champion of Education Award is Dr. Willy Legrand, a distinguished member of The HoteliesGuild Academy of Hospitality Arts.
This unique award honors a corporation, organization, or individual who has made a long- standing commitment to and shown a pattern of support for special initiatives that advance the mission of ICHRIE. The recipient of this award is recognized as an outstanding leader in culinary arts, hospitality, or tourism — and has an exceptional record of commitment to education for student and/or employees.
Dr. Willy Legrand is Professor at the IU International University of Applied Sciences in Germany with a specialization in sustainable hospitality development and management. He is the lead author of Sustainability in the Hospitality Industry: Principles of Sustainable Operations (4th ed). Over the past two decades, he has established over two dozen undergraduate and graduate courses on sustainable development in business and hospitality management in Europe, South and North America, the Middle East and Asia. Prof Legrand also chairs the HospitalityNet World Panel on Sustainability in Hospitality with the aim to get sustainability anchored more than ever into the business conversation and decision-making.
Thank you Fran for your kind words!
Following our recent participation at the opening panel of the IHCRIE convention in Washington D.C. we are delighted to pursue now an even closer collaboration with this global institution!
Dear Sheryl, Rob, Mitchell, Frank and Don,
Thank you all so much for your time last week at the 2022 Annual ICHRIE Summer Conference! You lifted our program up from the beginning with your opening panel discussion about the hospitality brand and how we can work together to make improvements.
This can be hard to do in one hour, especially at the beginning of a conference that offered over 185 conference meetings and programs, But you graciously accepted the challenge, and in an overused sports analogy, but an appropriate one for this CEO/Association panel – you knocked it out of the ballpark! I heard throughout the day great comments about your discussion and your impressive knowledge and openness to discuss the continuing industry image challenges, and to share your own case studies of recent business advancement.
As you might know, I am very passionate about connecting the hospitality industry and our global hospitality educators. We worked hard over many months to set the right morning industry keynotes and panels at our 2022 Annual ICHRIE Summer Conference which would help further this work. We wanted our opening morning on Thursday to open the week and our first conference in two years, with a resounding high – which you hit!
We are all looking for ways to find even more solutions to bring back talent to the businesses and increase enrollments to our hospitality schools and programs. I am sure by working together closer, we can escalate the results of all. I personally see as our ICHRIE followup:
ICHRIE to follow up with Rob Gifford at the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation to discuss with him and Dr. Mansour next steps on a working closer to support the NRA work with ProStart and the secondary schools, and to develop a working plan on how we might collaborate more on industry needed research and data from our member university research work and our ICHRIE research journals – Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research (JHTR), Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Education (JHTE), Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Cases, ICHRIE Research Reports.
ICHRIE to follow up with Mitchell Platt and Jeff Morgan at CMAA on some new initiatives already in discussion with our ICHRIE honor society – Eta Sigma Delta for possibly this fall.
ICHRIE to follow up with Don Welsh to set a meeting or call to discuss the expansion of our ICHRIE hospitality and tourism reach and improved shared communication with DMOS globally.
ICHRIE to reach out to Frank M. Pfaller to discuss opportunities for more engagement globally with ICHRIE.
This 2022 Annual ICHRIE Summer Conference remembered our past 75th years but was also very focused on celebrating our future. Our conference had:
over 429 attendees, up 10% from our last meeting in New Orleans in 2019
A mix of attendees from over 147 schools, located in over 40 states in the USA, and 17 countries, Ireland, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Taiwan, Switzerland, Australia, Chile, South Korea, Jamaica, Canada, Germany, Thailand, India, Denmark, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam
Together they represented over 75,000 hospitality students globally this year alone
The traditional college career & job fairs, and brand recruitment school visits were mostly stopped in 2020. While some exist today on ZOOM, linking our students to websites for job searches, and talking remotely to Human Resource Departments on Zoom, clearly doesn’t represent the excitement and wide choice of careers in hospitality. We have a lot of work still ahead, and we look forward to working with everyone to further hospitality branding and enhance hospitality school enrollments.
Thank you again for your time, for your knowledge and for your leadership.
We very sincerely appreciate you.
All my best,
Fran
Fran Brasseux | Executive Director| IHCRIE | fbrasseux@chrie.org
