I’m torn between the Cornell Service Excellence certificate (6 weeks, January cohort) and the Forbes Travel Guide refresher modules, and I’d love to hear which gave you more usable moments at the desk. My goal is finer personalization — especially pre-arrival touches and graceful recovery after a miss — so if a course reshaped how you build guest profiles or follow up post-stay, what changed for you?
Did both last winter; FTG refreshers gave me more at-the-desk wins fast, while the Cornell 6-week January cohort was great for frameworks but slower to show up. > especially pre-arrival touches and graceful recovery after a miss — so if a course reshaped how you — FTG had us send a 48-hour pre-arrival one-question text and tag the reply in Opera to trigger one anticipatory touch, and after a miss do a 24-hour callback with a concrete make-good plus a future-stay note.
Quick example: after the FTG ‘graceful recovery’ piece, I added a 3-line follow-up in our PMS — ‘We missed X; I’ve fixed Y; may I suggest Z for your next stay?’ and it cut my post-stay back-and-forth by half. Cornell’s January cohort gave me a simple profile tweak (add one ‘avoid’ tag and one ‘timing’ note to every arrival), but , it took a few weeks to become habit.
@isabel_jones92 What moved the needle for me was adding a tiny ‘tell’ field in the PMS plus a 48‑hour follow‑up trigger — FTG gave me the phrasing, while the Cornell 6‑week run pushed me to formalize the tags. Example: guest mentions oat lattes and late swims, we queue barista credits and extend pool access for the next booking, then my note says, ‘caught this, queued that — anything else you’d like next time?’ Small caveat: FTG is quicker, but without the tagging discipline I took from Cornell the gains didn’t stick.