ABOUT US
About US
Our Story
HotelBSchool was founded by Holly Zoba and Dan Wacksman, hotel industry veterans with over 50 years of combined experience in the travel and hospitality space. Together they identified a need in the industry that they hope to fill.
In 2018 Holly founded her company, Scout Simply to address the specific needs of hotel salespeople. Her training programs, both digital and live, were extremely successful and have been adopted by independent hotels, branded hotels, and entire brands.
As she worked with the various hotels and brands it was clear that there were many more areas where industry-specific training could be used.
In 2019, Dan founded his company, Sassato, to help hotels optimize marketing, distribution and technology. In working with numerous hotels and brands, Dan also saw that there was a deep lack of knowledge and training resources specific to hospitality in these and other areas.
Their first foray into this was when they decided, in conjunction with the Hotel Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI), to develop the Hotel Digital Marketing Essentials Course (HDME). The HDME class has been taken by hundreds of industry professionals and has been private labeled for some of the largest hotel brands and management in companies.
The HDME has become the industry-leading course for digital marketing.
Soon Holly and Dan started getting requests to create other courses from hotels and brands, and at the same time getting requests from experts to help them create courses of their own.
This, along with the success of the Hotel Digital Marketing Essentials course and Holly’s sales training validated their thesis that there was indeed a need in the market for a high-quality industry specific training platform.
In 2022 Holly and Dan began working on this idea in earnest and decided to create HotelBSchool to solve the following challenges:
“Practitioners, not professors”
Existing education is not hotel specific, too theoretical and not being taught by active practitioners
HotelBSchool training is practical and is taught be the people in the trenches. People who work in these areas and understand the challenges and solutions in depth.
“Addressing Real Challenges, With Real Solutions”
Existing online training either doesn’t exist, or is often of poor quality
HotelBSchool has strict quality control, ensuring only the best training and instructors’ content is available. HotelBSchool works with instructors to develop, edit and produce the training to ensure it meets our high standards.
“The one-stop site for Hotel Training”
Existing online training is hard to find and access
HotelBSchool will aggregate Hotel training in one easy to use platform and offer those in the industry who want to share their knowledge a platform to do so
Our Name
HotelBSchool stands for Hotel Business School. But the “B” also represents the intransitive verb, To Be. We believe the courses we develop or handpick for our portal will give hoteliers the knowledge and skills, to “B”:
- More Knowledgeable
- More Capable
- More Confident
- More Marketable
- …. and just more!
OUR FOUNDERS
Holly Zoba
Holly Zoba has 15 years of experience in hotel Sales and Marketing, with Hospitality Partners and the Aurora Foundation, both in property level and corporate roles. She has also spent the last 10 years in hotel training and development as the SVP of Signature Worldwide and now as the architect of Influencer Sales Training. Recently she received a certification as a full stack web developer, MERN stack, and has contributed to the development of several web applications. Her company, Scout Simply, provides digital sales training through her Influencer Sales program as well as sales and marketing employee development through education, coaching, consulting and audits. Holly is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has also authored multiple articles in industry publications.
Dan Wacksman
Dan has over 25 years of senior level experience in hotel marketing and travel distribution. In addition to being co-founder of HotelBSchool, Dan is CEO of Sassato a company that is focused on helping hotels improve their performance in marketing, distribution, technology, and implementations. Prior to this, Dan was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Distribution for Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, where he oversaw Marketing, Digital, Loyalty/CRM, Contact Center Operations, OTA relationships, and overall distribution strategy. Previous roles include Managing Director for GTA China and Regional Director for GTA Asia, where he had overall responsibility for offices throughout the region (at the time GTA was one of the world’s largest travel wholesalers), General Manager of Aoyou.com, an Online Travel Agency based in Beijing, and Director of Strategic Development for Travelport where he was involved in acquisitions and strategic initiatives.
Our company is a collective of amazing partnerships striving to build delightful products.
We learned that we can’t be the best resource for all companies for everything, but we can recommend who is. We have been in the hospitality industry for over 25 years and have met an amazing number of remarkable people and companies along the way.
When we started HotelBSchool, our goals were to keep our focus specific – provide relevant hotel-specific courses with sound adult learning principals. As a result, when we come across a project that is outside of our area expertise, instead of learning it (!), we find an outside resource to work with or recommend. This enables us to continually evolve while providing our clients with the best programs. Here are some of our best partners.
