NEW JOS FOR VATELIENS: Julien now is Regional E-Commerce Senior Manager - EMEA at Melia Hotels International (Palma -Spain). Read about his previous position in the same company.

Are you at ease with figures and new web technologies?

You’ll like Julien Marechal’s job for the Melia International hotel chain!  Let’s meet him.

Why did you choose the hospitality industry?

For the many different cultures and kinds of work that this business has. What clinched the deal for me was:

  - doing many different types of jobs in my life,

  - working with different nationalities and 

  - travelling as opportunities presented themselves.

Why did you choose Vatel?

First of all because the school’s reputation provides outlets for its alumni. When you’re a Vatelien, you’ve already got your foot in the door for many different jobs and places to work.  Especially when a Vatel graduate is the one hiring!

Then because I wanted to study abroad and more particularly in Spain. I applied to Vatel Madrid and started my Bachelor Vatel studies in 2011, two years after the School had opened.

Any memories of your time at school you’d like to share?

This will probably surprise you, but I love the almost military like inspections that some of our professors and supervisors carried out for our Vatel uniforms.

One of them was really strict and wouldn’t allow a student in his classroom who didn’t respect the rules and regulations of the educational values and etiquette and protocol that you have in the hospitality industry, which we were taught.  So I had a lot of fun complying with the school’s “rules of the game.”

Any memories of your internships?

Each hotel in Spain or in England that I worked in taught me something. I would even go so far to say that each department taught me values that I use every day:

• Accommodations and Housekeeping: respect and empathy for the work done by the housecleaning crews.
• The Front Desk: patience and reactivity to manage several requests at the same time, and this for hours on end.
• The kitchens and restaurants: precision and thoroughness.  In a Michelin 2-star restaurant like the Madrid Casino, there can’t be any errors in the menus.

How did everything start with Melia?

As soon as I graduated, I was hired by Global Airlines Contracting, after I applied for a job there. Based in Madrid, for six months I prospected airline companies to offer them solutions in accommodations for their crew members.

Then I worked for a year in e-commerce, for the EMEA marketplace - Europe, Middle East & Africa. 

Management appreciated what I was doing and in May, 2015, I had a job offer at the Melia Hotels International Headquarters in Palma de Majorca, where I would be working closely with decision-making executives. That’s when I became the Digital Marketing Executive – EMEA and then Online Sales Manager France.

Tell us about this job.

The top priority is to generate traffic on our web tools. In other words, to motivate users to reserve directly on our site.

So to do that, I analyze all the communication and promotion campaigns rolled out to see of the goals were met or not.

To be successful in this type of job, you have to be at ease with figures, the web 2.0 and the NICT - new