In 2003, Philippe Escuer graduated with his Postgraduate Degree in Hotel and Tourism Management from Vatel Bordeaux. And what’s happened since then?

Since then, he’s been managing the Lucien Barriere Casino in Briancon in the Hautes Alpes region of France. Philippe is going to tell us how he went from promotion to promotion, upping the ante each time, until he was appointed to his current position of General Manager.

“Before I started studying at Vatel Bordeaux, I graduated from high school, having specialized in Hotel Services and then I did a two-year associate’s degree at the Sainte-Anne High School, located in Saint-Nazaire in the north-west of France, in a specialized hotel management school. Then I decided to enroll in Vatel to continue my training, but above all, to learn how to be a senior manager.

I loved these two years of my Postgraduate Degree where my fellow students and I were all very close and complementary. We came from different types of schools, cities, countries, and built on one another’s strengths and differences by exchanging our ideas and ways of working, which varied greatly.

I did my final internship for Vatel in the Administrative and Financial Management Department of the Lucien Barriere Group* in La Baule, on the seaside, where I specialized in Management Control, and was able to continue working in this field in the Barriere Casino in Biarritz, in the south of France. I wanted to work in this prestigious group and was attracted by the variety of jobs that exist in Casinos; I consequently applied for a license for leisure activity venues, where I mixed practical work and theoretical aspects for another year. That allowed me to have “a good hand of cards” and to work as a manager at the Barriere Casino in La Baule for two years.

My job consisted in:

-       participating in managing the Front Office and Technical Operations services,
-       drawing up marketing projects,
-       making sure action plans were correctly rolled out,
-       organizing schedules.

I then worked for three years in the Barriere Casino in Cassis before being appointed as Games Manager for the Briancon Casino, and then General Manager on October 1st, 2013. Managing a casino is quite like managing a hotel. Customer satisfaction is at the heart of our daily work. I’ll be tackling this new challenge and opportunity both with serenity and enthusiasm. I’ll succeed in this job if I continue to apply the values that have always inspired me: humility, transparency and an eye for details.

* The Lucien Barriere Group is the leader in French and Swiss casinos as well as one of the key players in this market in Europe. It is also a benchmark in the French luxury hotel sector and is very well known for the quality of its restaurants and catering departments and of course, its leisure activities.