Monday, October 09, 2006 Everything new By Jenara Regis Newman
A PASSION for service is what led Carmel Stella Maris (better known simply as Maris) Mercado to a life-long career in the hotel industry. After graduation from St. Theresa’s College, she initially wanted to take up food technology but had second thoughts and took up hotel and restaurant administration at the University of the Philippines Diliman, instead. The course was then relatively new.
With that degree, she easily landed a job as desk clerk in Cebu’s then premier hotel, Magellan. Rising from the ranks, she rose in nine years to become sales manager by the time the hotel burned down.
She moved on, with the preopening team of Park Place Hotel, then with the Manila office of Pathfinder Hotels in Cebu – Cebu Plaza, Park Place and Alegre. After this, she was with Century Hotels in Saigon, then Jakarta and Davao. With the ACCOR group, she was with Novotel Hotel in Beijing. She went on to Holiday Inn in Tianjin and then to Panda Hotel in Hongkong. Back in the Philippines, she was with the Manila office of Club Panoly in Boracay. In between all these stints, she helped set up an office for an Italian tile company, and a Thailand firm in Manila.
When she took up hotel and restaurant administration, it was mostly to “be able to see the world.” And see the world she has. She has been all over Asia, the United States and Europe. Her way of unwinding is to go to another place, to have a change of scenery, and her favorite travel destination will always be Paris “because you don’t run out of places to discover, to go to.”
Maris has and offers to move up the corporate ladder in her years in the hotel trade. But she has chosen to be where she is, with sales, because of the service it entails, and the chance of being “with different kinds of people. You get to develop yourself when you meet people. You learn a lot from these people coming from different fields, places and culture.” She has been so engrossed with work and more work she has not found the time or the inclination to look for a Mr. Right in her life.
Now that she’s back in Cebu, as Director of Sales and Marketing of Marco Polo Plaza where her expertise is surely an asset to the hotel. She finds the changes in Cebu surprising. When she left, there was no mall culture as Cebu has today, with the malls’ numerous shops, eating places and coffee bars. There are so many more hotels, too, and restaurants. Still, she finds Cebu charming and this will always be her home, where she grew up and first started to work, along with Manila, where her parents originally came from.
