When SportsMark’s Walter Dobrowolski interviewed a Beijing college student for a hospitality job last year, his first question was how long the student had lived in Beijing. The student rambled through a 20-minute answer detailing his commute to a Beijing hotel.
Confused, Dobrowolski asked, “Well, how long would it take you to get to work at the Westin Hotel?”
“Seven years,” the student said.
Dobrowolski chuckled. It wasn’t the first time a potential employee had heard the words “how long” and answered the wrong question. Students were sharing SportsMark’s interview questions with each other and answering without listening to the entire question. Their efforts highlighted both their eagerness to work and their limited English-language skills.
“That’s what’s had us bring in a whole new concept of training and reinvent what we do for these Games,” Dobrowolski said.
Once a fairly simple process with fairly simple requirements — hotels, employees, buses, tickets — Olympic hospitality programs in Beijing have presented agencies and sponsors with unforeseen challenges and demands.
Those challenges can be seen in everything from the elementary English skills Dobrowolski encountered to the unfamiliarity with Western service standards; from the new approval process for national Olympic committees to a scarcity of event tickets. Perhaps most importantly, from the increased demand that the Beijing Games have generated across the board to the diversity of options that sponsors want.
Anheuser-Busch’s Club Bud, which got the party started at the Torino Olympics, will be back in business at the Beijing Games.
During the 16 days of the 2008 Games, several dozen corporate sponsors and hundreds of national organizing committees will entertain thousands of key clients and staff in Beijing. Sponsors will spend between $5 million and $15 million on hospitality, some of which will be passed on in the form of buy-in packages, while other portions will be complimentary.
Throughout the Games, clients and staff will be scooped up at the airport, whisked away to five-star hotels, escorted to Olympic competitions and offered cultural tours of the city, all the while negotiating unprecedented cultural and language barriers compared to past Olympics.
Preparations for their arrival began as early as 2002, shortly after Beijing was selected to host the Olympics. One of the first and most immediate challenges that agencies and sponsors encountered was insufficient language and service-industry skills.
SportsMark and Jet Set plan to hire 300 and 1,500 employees, respectively. In the past, they had been able to recruit a strong staff from colleges and universities in host cities such as Athens or Turin with little trouble. But in Beijing, students lacked sufficient English skills.
“All the kids speak decent English but have no flexibility to think differently and comprehend English not taught in the universities,” said Sead Dizdarevic, founder of hospitality provider Jet Set Sports.
Compounding their insufficient English was an unfamiliarity with Westerners. Most had never traveled outside China, stayed at a hotel or interacted with foreigners. That’s created a need for some basic education for potential employees.
One of the most simple examples occurred at the China Lounge, which Bank of America has reserved for athletes and their families as its Hometown Hopefuls Family Center. To meet the bank’s needs, SportsMark had to teach the restaurant staff what an American salad bar is and how to stock it.
To eliminate other areas of confusion, Jet Set and SportsMark have launched training programs for Chinese employees. Jet Set opened an Olympic Hospitality Academy, where 1,500 employees are required to take classes, offering them lessons six days a week from 4 to 8 p.m. SportsMark, on the other hand, has hired full-time employees to educate its staff over a five-month period.
To avoid the challenges of staffing locally, the U.S. Olympic Committee plans to rely on U.S. volunteers already overseas, who it will gather through an application process. The USOC has encountered other unique challenges in arranging its Beijing hospitality.
Above: The Torino USA House Budweiser Deck from 2006. Top: Beijing USA House dining area. Below: Beijing USA House lounge area.
The Beijing Organizing Committee (BOCOG) has required more information than any previous host city from national Olympic committees. All national Olympic committees were required to go through a formal approval process for hospitality plans. They answered questions about the location of hospitality centers, planned activities and who they would entertain.
BOCOG is the first organizing committee to require such information, said Jerri Foehrkolb, USOC director of marketing and event services. Traditionally, the USOC merely kept the organizing committee apprised of what it was doing.
Though none of the USOC’s plans were spiked by BOCOG, there was some question about whether the USA House was within security fence lines. Had BOCOG considered it inside that fence, the USOC would have had to scrap its plans and find a new location after several months of work.
“That gave me a little anxiety beforehand,” Foehrkolb said, “but we were approved last August.”
The anxiety the USOC experienced matches the unease many sponsors have felt as they have awaited ticket allotments. Though sponsors are guaranteed upward of 80 hotel rooms a night and 15,000 to 20,000 tickets for a variety of Olympic competitions, many sponsors were disappointed with their initial ticket allocation from BOCOG.
Anheuser-Busch, an Olympic and USOC sponsor, initially didn’t receive enough tickets because domestic demand for the Games was so high, said Bruce Hudson, the company’s director of international sports marketing. But Hudson met with BOCOG in October and recently got the tickets that Anheuser-Busch needed.
“You’d always like more tickets to opening and closing ceremonies, but there’s a high demand and it was spelled out in black and white in our agreement what we got,” Hudson said. “We’re happy with what we have now.”
The demand for tickets mirrors an overall increase in demand for Beijing hospitality, which has put added pressure on sponsors and hospitality agencies.
Unprecedented interest forced Anheuser-Busch to expand from two waves of 200-plus international guests to four. Jet Set has tripled its Athens bookings with 36,000 VIP programs, and the USOC anticipates as many visitors as it had in Salt Lake City, the most recent North American Olympics.
The combination of high demand and limited tickets has led agencies to offer sightseeing tours of the city for the first time in several Olympics. Many SportsMark and Jet Set packages mix one to two Olympic events a day with a tour of the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City or another famous site.
“Basically, everybody is using everything to the max,” Dizdarevic said.
