Loews Hotels Leadership Development Program: how it works and what two American hoteliers say about their own trainee years

The Loews Hotels & Co Leadership Development Program is the structured way into Loews for a hospitality graduate: a 12 month training program inside one Loews hotel, recruited by property and by track, that rotates the trainee through a division’s departments, puts them in leadership and management workshops, and gives them regular mentor feedback before a first leadership role. This page describes the program as Loews presents it in its own listings and on its careers site, and then turns to what no listing can tell you, which is what two American hoteliers in my books say about their own trainee years in hotels much like the ones Loews runs.

The program, as Loews describes it

Loews has no single landing page for the program. It recruits through listings on the Loews careers site, one per hotel and track, and the Food and Beverage trainee listing at Loews Regency New York is the one I have drawn on, with a second listing from Loews Arlington in Texas as a check. Both describe an “intensive, structured training program” that “will take place over 12 months” and say it is “designed to prepare graduates of accredited hospitality programs for their first leadership roles in hospitality.”

The shape of the Food and Beverage track is clear. Roughly six months of rotations through restaurants, in room dining, bar and banquets, with Arlington adding its grab and go outlet; “workshops and training sessions focused on leadership and management”; work alongside managers and division leaders; and regular mentor feedback, which the listing frames as the trainee assessing and reflecting on their own performance and progress. The stated outcome is that graduates leave “prepared with the necessary leadership skills and knowledge to advance into a leadership role within the company.” Rooms trainee listings have appeared at other Loews hotels, Kansas City among them, so the two tracks I can confirm are Rooms and Food and Beverage.

Who it is for is spelled out: a “college senior or recent college graduate of a hospitality program,” motivated to apply what they studied, and willing to relocate “depending on program offerings.” You apply to the listing itself. Pay, start dates and the exact rotation at each hotel change, so I have left them out; each listing carries them.

One thing to know before you search. The learning page on the Loews careers site does not use the words Leadership Development Program for its graduate route. It describes Aspire, “our 12-month paid early career hospitality program,” with on the job learning and coaching from senior leaders in Rooms, Food and Beverage, Culinary, Finance and Human Resources, and a possible leadership role afterward. The length and the purpose match the listings, and the Culinary, Finance and Human Resources tracks named there do not appear in the listings I found. Whether Aspire and the Leadership Development Program are one program under two names, or the newer name for the same thing, is not something Loews’s pages settle. Ask the recruiter, and search the careers site for both names.

What two American hoteliers say about their own trainee years

No one in my books came up through Loews. Two of them, though, built their careers in the American hotels Loews competes with, in the cities where Loews has its flagships, and both began the way a Loews trainee begins.

George Cozonis was general manager of The Plaza in New York when I interviewed him, a few blocks from Loews Regency. He grew up in Athens, spent a summer being shown around the Grande Bretagne by family friends who treated him “with kid gloves,” and arrived at hotel school with the wrong idea.

“After studying hotel management, I truly believed I would be hired as a general manager upon graduating. It was a wakeup call when, in my first job as a management trainee, I could barely keep up answering telephones at the reception desk.” George Cozonis, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

His training program was at Boston’s Parker House, “the oldest continuously operating hotel in America,” and the first leadership role it led to was not the one he had pictured.

“I was then offered the position of laundry manager at the same property. This was a very special unit of the hotel. Not only did it have a stable and dedicated crew, but it also employed individuals with developmental disabilities. They had been there for years and were great at what they did.” George Cozonis, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

It taught him, he says, that there is a place for everyone in the industry, whatever the role. What the laundry taught him next is the lesson a rotation is for. “Every person’s work is not only useful, but essential. Imagine if there weren’t clean pillowcases, bed sheets, or dinner napkins. The hotel would come to a complete standstill.” A Loews trainee rotating through in room dining and banquets is being shown the same thing about a Food and Beverage division.

Brian Gullbrants was president of Wynn Las Vegas and Encore when we spoke and is now chief operating officer for Wynn Resorts in North America. He grew up in the back of his family’s restaurant in Chicago, took his first luxury hotel job as a server at The Ritz-Carlton, Phoenix, and later ran The Ritz-Carlton, Orlando, Grande Lakes, in the city where Loews operates its Universal Orlando hotels. His first leadership role is the one the Loews listing is preparing you for.

“My first leadership role was as a room service supervisor. It was a humbling experience that I thought I was ready for. However, one morning, more than half of my team called off their shifts, and even after calling a couple of people directly, I couldn’t get anyone to come in. I decided that we would all work harder and faster to get the job done, and that was a very poor choice. When orders were endlessly backing up, I learned that no matter how good you think you and your team may be, you cannot win a war without soldiers. Good intentions only go so far. You need a solid team, and from that point on I was never understaffed.” Brian Gullbrants, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

That is what the “first leadership roles” in the Loews listing look like from the inside: a morning when the schedule fails and the supervisor finds out what kind of manager they are.

American hotels as a training ground

Both men became the kind of general manager who runs a program like this, and both describe what they look for in the people coming through. Cozonis puts it in terms of culture. “In this industry, every colleague must have, in his or her heart, a spirit of service. In practice, this means that the entire team must consistently adhere to a set of behaviors, standards, and good habits that serve the guests, the employees, and therefore the organization.” Gullbrants traces his own standards to what he was taught as a server in Phoenix.

“I was taught the basics of how to anticipate the needs of guests, how to provide genuine care, and how to focus on every aspect of the guest experience. I also learned how important all five senses were to delivering that experience. I find myself today relying on many of those concepts, standards, and values that I learned long ago.” Brian Gullbrants, in A Wealth of Insight (2017)

The six months of rotations in the Loews program are where that teaching happens, if it happens. The workshops and the mentor feedback are the company’s way of making sure it does.

What to take from it

Apply to a hotel and a track, since that is how Loews recruits, and search the careers site for Aspire as well as Leadership Development Program so you do not miss a listing. Treat the rotation as Cozonis treated the laundry: the departments you did not choose are the ones that will teach you what a hotel is. Expect your first leadership role to arrive with a morning like Gullbrants’s, and ask in the interview who your mentor would be and how often you would actually sit down with them. And read both Voices pages above before you go in. Chapter 2 of The Luxury of Attention, The Apprenticeship, is about exactly these years.