Meet Jason Campbell

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Campbell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason below.

Hi Jason , we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
Continuous development and the giving back to others. I’ve found a lot of benefit in continuing education of varying magnitudes, whether it was participating on my university’s Alumni Board of Directors and taking a leadership positions as the VP of Careers for graduating students, enrolling in Certificate Programs at Cornell for Hotel Real Estate and Asset Management, participating at industry conferences or attending the Culinary Institute of America for a boot camp. These varied experiences help expand ones network, develop new and refine current skills, and keep a pulse on industry trends to understand where your strengths and opportunity areas are in comparison to competition. By staying ahead of that curve and connecting with those within your discipline, once can more rapidly understand their value, contributions and advantages, as well as develop a success is never final mentality which will allow continued growth and development.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I have been with RED Hospitality & Leisure for four years, beginning as a market manager in KW, growing to oversee Operations across all of our locations, transitioned into building our Sales, Marketing and Brand divisions and now lead the growth engine of the company to continue to expand our global footprint. The unique positioning RED has is there are no other luxury and experiential watersports companies who provide the level of products and services we do, accompanied with core partnerships with the world’s leading hotel brands, owners and management companies. This combination allows us to offer a wide range of support to these hotel partners, extending their operations team and enhancing the customer experience in unique, authentic and fun ways.

We are continuing to innovate our offerings and learning from our growth, such as when we purchased Alii Nui and Maui Dive Shop early last year — a wonderful brand and group of hospitalitarians — who pioneered a five star dinner cruise on board their catamaran. We have since begun to scale that offering, bringing it to our Ritz-Carltons properties in St. Thomas and Turks and Caicos, as well as Frenchman’s Reef. This is a great example of how we can support the growth of team members, grow sustainably and improve our go-to-market strategies while innovating our offerings.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Communication (written and verbal)

Relationship management

Financial acumen

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
Great question. I think both are effective. Over my career, I’ve focused on being more of a generalist than a specialist, while having a select number of areas I can go really deep into expertise. For me, the experience in opening new location, leading teams and project management have allowed me to be effective in various disciplines. The beauty of the hospitality industry is you can work across so many disciplines – from the culinary arts, finance and accounting, room operations, security, legal, human resources, valet, retail, the list goes on. For those interested in pursuing a career in hospitality, I recommend they cross-train as often as possible throughout their career, because the more you know about the various departments, you can better understand the guest’s journey, allowing you to provide more strategic thinking to running these types of business from a senior or executive level.

Contact Info:

  • Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-campbell-hospitality/
  • Other: I wrote a few articles during COVID about the future of travel through my consulting firm, Next Generation Hospitality, which readers may find interesting and goes back to always finding ways to promote your brand and learn through research.

Image Credits
Jason Campbell, RED Hospitality & Leisure

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