There were eight weddings held in 1984 at the Marriott Downtown Providence. That was the year that Director of Catering Donna DiOrio started with the company. This year it will host about 100 weddings – during the summer, there were at least two each weekend.
Under DiOrio’s leadership, social bookings have grown so that revenue is now split about even between weekday and weekend for social and corporate events.
And the amount of social bookings is expected to keep growing, DiOrio said. Just this year, the hotel has also come up with a “better” use of its indoor-outdoor heated pool – the only one of its kind at a hotel in the city – when it created Aqua, a restaurant and lounge.
“It’s very Zen-like,” DiOrio said a few weeks ago.
While the new restaurant and lounge are clad in bamboo and use low lighting, it’s not just the atmosphere that DiOrio sells to clients for private events. The food – including a lollipop-like hamburger – is a draw, too, she said. “It’s absolutely incredible, very different,” she said.
A Providence native, DiOrio at one time had aspirations of being a court reporter. She married young, when she was a Johnson & Wales University student. At the time, she was working for Bachrach Studios and had been taking courses in court reporting. Her husband, Ronald DiOrio, was transferred to a job in Florida and the couple moved south. After four months – when DiOrio was a pregnant 20-year-old – they moved back to Rhode Island.
A year later, her husband was killed in a car accident. DiOrio’s daughter, Renee, was seven months old. “So I moved back home with my parents and, pretty much stayed at home for a good five years until my daughter started preschool,” she said. “My father retired first – I said now it’s time to go to work.”
And within a few weeks she had found a position at the Chateau de Ville dinner theater’s Warwick branch. She was hired as a party planner.
“I went through one month of grueling training, learning what it was like from the back of the house, in servicing guests to running events …” she said. “Before you were able to sell the product, you had to learn how to service it. You had to learn the back of the house so you could move to the front of the house.”
Even now, decades later, DiOrio likes to tell stories about the tough days on the job there. Like the day when a few staffers called out sick and she had to manage three simultaneous weddings without much help. “I don’t know how in the world I made it through that day with receiving lines, bouquets, garters and everything else that went on,” she said, adding, “It was truly on-the-job training for a job that I had absolutely no interest in when I was going to school.”
Nine years and a few regional transfers later, DiOrio was practiced at selling a product. But the job took a lot of time. Twice, she fell asleep while driving home.
“So I said, ‘This is it.’”
Luckily, a former food and beverage director at the Chateau who had taken a job at the Providence Marriott would occasionally call DiOrio – trying to get her to come aboard. So she finally took him up on the offer and found that her background at Chateau de Ville prepared her well.
“Coming from a non-hotel background, I was very much accustomed to soliciting business, developing relationships and deriving revenue,” she said.
In 1984, she was hired as senior catering sales manager. “I had the understanding that [the director of catering] was being transferred within six months,” DiOrio said. “Evidentially not, because she ended up getting fired – I didn’t know that, though.”
So three months into the job, she stepped into her current role and started driving sales. Her first move was turning the hotel from an almost-all-corporate facility into a place where social functions were held. The mid-week corporate business was booming, but there was a lack of weekend events, she said, adding, “That was what I went after.”
She found that it’s an easy product to sell, too. Both the hotel’s executive chef and food and beverage director have been there for at least a decade. “As a director of catering, you’d be an idiot to leave that team,” DiOrio said.
Since May, she has been pulling double duty as the acting director of hotel sales. She’s not sure yet if she wants to take that position full time, although it has been offered to her, she said. “It’s a difficult decision for me, because I truly do love what I do and it would be giving that up.”
Now DiOrio signs every event booking contract – making sure of the date, grammar, pricing and “professional look.” But she also has to put together menus, create pricing and check in on the competition’s offerings. As director of catering, she oversees the entire sales team – both the social and corporate. As part of an executive “task force,” she also has played a role in on-site planning to open new Marriott hotels around the country.
Despite a busy schedule, DiOrio is involved with the Providence Warwick Conventions & Visitors Bureau and tries to be active in the community.
In Providence competition for business has increased, with the growth of boutique hotels and large chain hotels, though demand in Rhode Island for rooms has stayed relatively static, she said.
“We do keep track of [the competition],” she said. “But you have to remember that this is a Marriott property and Marriott customers are very loyal.”
Many companies seek consistency in their bookings, she said. A corporate retreat could cost more than $20,000. Some run as much as $100,000. They want to see DiOrio’s familiar face and know what they’re getting when they’re booking an event, she said.
She added, “There are people who stay here who’ve been coming here for 35 years. We know what they like and they know us.” •
