When Bob Bowlby called T.F. Green Airport to make sure his elderly mother – who no longer has a driver’s license – would be able to pass through security, he was pleasantly surprised by the service he received from the attendant who answered the phone at the Warwick airport’s information booth.
“The call was answered on the first ring. I did not have to work my way through a phone menu. My call was answered by a very friendly, knowledgeable voice,” he said in a letter he wrote to the airport about his encounter. “My experience may be typical for people contacting your office, but it is certainly not typical for the vast majority of consumer calls to a customer- service information booth.”
It was a Johnson & Wales University student who answered the call. The information booth at the airport is staffed entirely by JWU students seven days a week, 363 days a year. They man the booth from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., through the Hospitality College’s travel and tourism internship program.
The program, which is required for students in the travel and tourism major, is one way that JWU is preparing its students for the work force.
“Its imperative,” said Dale J. Venturini, president and CEO of R.I. Hospitality and Tourism Association, of hospitality students doing internships, which aren’t required at many colleges. “They are the practical part of what the job is really like. You can learn all the theory and all the background knowledge you can, but until you implement it, you’re never going to know if it’s the field you want to be in, and if you have the skills needed to do the job.”
Johnson & Wales mandates that you go out in the field of your choice and learn what it’s about, said Venturini. From an industry perspective, such internships give students the practical knowledge they need and proves to the employer they’re going to hire the right person.
“I wish all schools mandated it,” she said of internships.
In the JWU program students rotate between four job sites over an 11-week trimester, giving them a unique opportunity to learn about jobs in different corners of the travel and tourism industry, and to apply the skills they have learned in the classroom to real-world situations.
JWU junior Mary Gray had such a great experience with the internship program, she volunteered to be a teaching assistant after her internships were complete. She now trains new students who work in the program at the airport.
“You’re interacting with people all the time, it really broke me out of my shell,” she said.
At the T.F. Green information booth, students answer all incoming telephone calls, checking the status of flights, paging passengers, answering passenger questions, dealing with limo drivers and handling panicky relatives. They get questions during snow storms, flight delays, and on anything else that someone walking up to the booth might ask of them.
The students deal with “a myriad of issues and they do it well,” said Patty Goldstein, the vice president for public affairs for the R.I. Airport Corporation, who oversees the program on the airport’s end. “They are trained so well, and the partnership has been excellent.”
In addition to the airport, students also work at AAA of Southern New England, where they learn about group and auto travel, assisting AAA in marketing strategies to increase membership among “Generation Y;” Colette Vacations, where they learn about operating tours for domestic and international group travel; and also at the Statehouse, where students learn how to give guided tours to the public.
The JWU students also go on a school-sponsored trip abroad and are put in charge for one day. They give bus tours, wake-up calls to hotel guests, provide information to travelers, plan dinners, and basically operate an entire trip with actual guests. The students are evaluated on their professionalism, their dress, time management, and a variety of other things as part of their grade for the course.
The internship program is a springboard for students, said Sandra Tremblay, director of the travel and tourism internship program at JWU. It gives them work experience, allows them to use their skills and to develop new ones, like managing their time, and working directly with the public.
She recalled a case where one of the students staffing the desk reached in her own pocket and gave money to a young woman whose wallet had been stolen and didn’t have any money to get out of the parking garage. The young lady’s mother was so pleased, she wrote a letter to the student and reimbursed him for the money he had lent her daughter.
“The students go through an unbelievable maturity,” Tremblay said. The internships help them build confidence, people skills, and all the necessary elements needed to start a successful career in travel and tourism.
“It’s a life-changing experience,” she said. “They not only learn about other people, but also about themselves.” •
