THERE are three millennial beauties at Waterfront Airport Hotel and Casino who are making work easier for its general manager, Benhur Caballes.
The trio—ages 22, 24 and 26—are Korina Gabucan, Fritzy Jozhua Yañez and Kristel Alexa Sormillon.
Korina “Nana” Gabucan, the youngest of the trio, is the conventions and events coordinator. She started out in Waterfront as an HRM intern (she took up Bachelor of Science in Hotel and Restaurant Management at the University of San Carlos’ School of Business and Economics, graduating cum laude). She is known as the hotel’s social butterfly as she knows the people from the different departments, which is essential for her job in coordinating hotel events. She started as server, and after five months became food and beverage secretary. After four months, she was transferred to the sales and marketing department as convention and events coordinator.
Nana considers the hotel as her second home where she is comfortable working with people who have been with her for two years as a professional hotelier. Born in Cebu City, she was raised in Consolacion and belongs to the Mandaue Cortes clan and Cebu City’s Gabucan family.
Fritzy is the marketing communications officer. She hails from northern Mindanao. Her family moved to Cebu where she took up Masscom in UP Cebu. Tall, slim and beautiful, she was a ramp model for Models’ Association of Cebu while in school but stopped modeling after graduation to work in Singapore as sales executive for Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. She was unhappy there so she came back to Cebu and found work during pre-opening for the Cebu Safari as marketing and communications executive. But this work meant she had to wake up at four in the morning for a two-hour commute to get to her work place, and she would be back home by nine in the evening.
The commute was time-consuming. So when she was offered a job in Waterfront she quickly took it. From a two-hour commute, she now needed only 20 minutes to get to her work place. A plus factor is that when she joined Waterfront, everything had already been in place, working with sales, with the GM and with the corporate communications head in Manila. All she needed essentially to do was to follow what had been already set in place.
Kristel, fair and petite, is a Lapu-Lapu City native who finished her business administration degree major in financial management at the University of Cebu Lapulapu-Mandaue campus. Early on, she realized she wanted to be in sales because in banking and finance, one would have to be, in a sense, cooped up in an office. In sales, she said, one would meet a lot of people. And so she landed in Waterfront the day she graduated, as sales account manager.
Currently she is assistant sales manager-OIC.
For the three of them, hotel work is challenging but rewarding. And in Waterfront, they have the chance to continue to learn every month as there is a workshop they have to attend. They have to undergo mandated hours of training monthly, so they continue to learn. And they like and appreciate that.
Kristel has been with Waterfront longer than Fritzy and Korina. She sums up their work: “Hotel work is really service. We learn to manage complaints to make them into compliments. Whatever the complaint we have to smile just the same.”
She continues: “And yes, it’s good to be in this industry, as people in the hotel business don’t seem to grow old because we always have to take care of our bodies, our looks. And we have to keep on smiling.”