Top Service Innovations in Hospitality, with Caitlin Wischermann Ornitz, VP Strategy at Champagne Hospitality

Caitlin describes how the hospitality industry can innovate for the guest of the future. Her insight on building true connections between locations, guests, and locals contains wisdom for leaders in all consumer-facing industries. 

Welcome to Elevating Brick and Mortar. A podcast about how operations and facilities drive brand performance. 

Today, we’ll hear from Caitlin Wischermann Ornitz, VP of Strategy at Champagne Hospitality, a luxury boutique hotel brand with the purpose of preserving and celebrating local culture and heritage. As members of the communities where it operates, Champagne Hospitality is deeply committed to environmental stewardship and to the wellbeing of its neighbors, greater communities, guests, staff, and our planet. 

Guest Bio:
Caitlin Wischermann Ornitz is the Vice President of Strategy at Champagne Hospitality, a luxury hotel collection with properties in Champagne and Burgundy in France and St. Barths in the Caribbean. She is a fourth generation hotelier and applies a strategist mindset to the industry where she has her roots.

She was formerly a strategist at McKinsey & Company where she provided management consulting services directly to clients and industry insights to the public through the think tank McKinsey Global Institute. Her time was spent primarily with finance and real estate clients on topics related to growth and sustainability. Caitlin lives in New York and joined McKinsey after completing her MBA at Columbia Business School. Caitlin graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University, College of Arts & Sciences as a triple-major in Economics, German Studies, and Comparative Literature. 

Guest Quote:

“How do you take care of your investments? And I think that takes the ownership side of things to have a committed investment to maintaining your asset, right? Making sure that you're putting capital into taking care of it. On the operational side, though, it’s the people who work with us. They care about the product itself.”

Timestamps:

00:42 - What Champagne Hospitality does

01:55 - About Caitlin’s role

04:35 - Caitlin’s background

09:19 - What brings customers back?

19:35 - Why it’s important to build with the community

24:08 - Being genuinely sustainable

28:19 - Who’s the customer of the future?

35:24 - The future of hospitality

39:19 - Sid’s takeaways

SPONSOR:

ServiceChannel brings you peace of mind through peak facilities performance.

Rest easy knowing your locations are:

• Offering the best possible guest experience
• Living up to brand standards
• Operating with minimal downtime

ServiceChannel partners with more than 500 leading brands globally to provide visibility across operations, the flexibility to grow and adapt to consumer expectations, and accelerated performance from their asset fleet and service providers.

Links:

• Connect with Caitlin on LinkedIn
• Connect with Sid on Linkedin
• Check out the ServiceChannel Website