MICHAELA Priesner, the new resident manager of Marco Polo Plaza Cebu, is a bundle of energy and joie de vivre with a passion for people, interacting with them, getting to know them, their stories.
An Austrian, she said she wanted to be a nurse when she was a teenager. During summer school vacations, she would work in cafes and restaurants where she got to meet different people of all kinds, races and work backgrounds. She got hooked to this kind of life—getting to know people—so she bade goodbye to her nursing dreams and pursued a career in the hospitality trade, getting a hospitality diploma from the American Hotel and Lodging Educational Institute.
Michaela has worked in the trade for over 20 years, starting with an apprenticeship that familiarized her with all the different departments of a hotel like housekeeping, kitchen, front office and accounting. She has worked for a year in a cruise ship and has since looked for work in warm places with temperatures “above 25 degrees.”
“In Austria, snow starts to fall in October and it may still be snowing by April the following year,” Michaela said.
She found work in the Middle East for 11 years where she started her hospitality managerial career in the Embassy Suites in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. She was in Thailand the past two years, before she came to Cebu, which she finds more culturally similar to her background as the Middle East is Muslim, Thailand is Buddhist, while the Philippines is predominantly Catholic (which she is) and English is widely spoken. English and her native German are the only languages she knows.
The weather here suits her perfectly and she finds the people—the staff and guests—open and outgoing. The nearby beaches are an added attraction for her to be in this place she now calls temporarily her home, where she can also hear “concerts” almost every night from the karaoke singers in the communities around the hotel.
To be a resident manager, she says, is in effect to be an assistant manager to act in place of the manager if he has to be somewhere else. The job entails seeing to the smooth operations of the hotel, from engineering, to kitchen, to front office, to gardening, to housekeeping, whose staff report to her. The business side—accounting, marketing—is taken care of by the manager.
To be good in the hospitality trade, Michaela says one must have the passion, the love for it, because it can mean forgoing Christmas and other holidays, being on the job often beyond nine to five.
“You must be concerned about your job, your staff and last of all yourself. But there are also perks to the job: it can take you to many places, you get to know many people and you have access to great food,” the last she particularly relishes. In Cebu, she likes the crispy skin of lechon and the local fish kinilaw.
For those who want to be in the hospitality trade, Michaela’s advice is, “to be patient, to be open-minded and to be passionate. Otherwise, you have no chance in this job.” She is the best example of her advice: patient, passionate and open-minded, which have put her where she is now, resident manager of Marco Polo Plaza Cebu.