14 CALIFORNIA LODGING NEWS www.calodging.com ...the most important thing she has found is that with opportunity comes loyalty. HOTELIER PROFILE GENERAL MANAGER, OCEAN PARK INN, SAN DIEGO Vania Rojas-Earp GROWING UP IN THE SMALL Mexican town of Escuinapa near Mazatlan, Vania Rojas-Earp found a taste for travel and for meeting and interacting with people. She didn’t know then that it would lead to a career in hospitality, one that started with a job as a hostess in Mexico and led to her becoming a general manager in San Diego. Rojas-Earp was one of five children with a father, a mechanic, who was determined to send them to college. But there wasn’t money for her to go to a private university, or a school far from home. So instead, she enrolled at the University of Sinaloa and entered its then-new school of tourism. After five years, she earned a degree in Tourism Administration, working as a restaurant hostess and then a country club receptionist along the way. After graduation, she moved to the resort town of Cabo San Lucas, where she did a short stint in timeshares, but soon left for a very different kind of tourism job: working for a sport fishing operator. “I have a lot of wonderful stories about that,” she said, but discovered that it was not a longterm career for her. “I went out on the boat with a couple who had rented it for an eight-hour fishing trip,” she remembers. “I was sick from minute one, for the whole eight hours. I decided not to go out again.” Fortunately, she was asked by an acquaintance to move to San Diego for an office job. While that “wasn’t for me,” she said, it did finally connect Rojas-Earp with the hotel business. She began working in a small hotel in the city, as a receptionist at first and, shortly after that, a manager. That was when she got her real hospitality education. “The owners would often leave, sometimes for months, so I did everything,” she said. “I had to do inventory, I had to do scheduling, I had to make sure cash was where it needed to be. I was in charge of purchasing, night audit, and even hiring.” The property also catered to a range of different guests, some of whom were not the easiest to manage—an experience that prepared her for almost anything that could happen. “When you work in a small property and you get to see all the departments, and work in the location I did, it toughens you up,” she said. While working at that property, she met the man who would become her husband. He had visited the hotel and struck up a conversation, and from then on “kept visiting and brought me food.” It also turned out that he was from a hotel background with a lot of hotel local connections. From those connections, she learned about a downtown San Diego hotel that needed a front office supervisor, and put her name in. Two weeks later, she got a call and was asked instead to apply for an assistant GM role at the Ocean Park Inn. “The next day, they called me and said, ‘We’d like to have you here,’” she recalled. It was a game changing call; within a year, the existing GM decided to retire, and a year later she became the GM. Rojas-Earp pointed out that in the entire time she has worked in hotels, nobody asked her about her education. While her degree set her on the path to her job today, what counted more was to put in the hours, learn the ropes, and prove herself. So, when she looks to hire, she prefers to bring in people who have no previous experience with hotels. In particular, for a smaller property, it’s important for staff to understand the financial realities of the hotel. But the most important thing she has found is that with opportunity comes loyalty. “We didn’t lose many people to COVID, and those people that stayed worked hard,” she said. “Three of our housekeepers did the work of six. We hired students as temporary help for the summer, and now some are working the front desk.” Even when her employees have to move on to move up, she’s still proud and happy for them. “I had a great employee, started as a house man and then worked the front desk and became a supervisor,” she said. “We didn’t have any place else for him to go, so he moved on to the Marriott Marquis downtown, and he’s doing great.” What Rojas-Earp learned along the way is the importance of working with people who want to be part of the business, want to learn and want to grow within the industry. “Working in hotels is a noble career and you can grow if you work hard,” she said. “I’ve been there, and once you hear my story, you’ll know it wasn’t the degree, but more the experience I had. That’s the part I sell to other employees, who didn’t have the luck or luxury of going to college.”
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