Hello, ICHRIE

Fran Brasseux, Chief Executive Officer, ICHRIE

Dear ICHRIE Members,

Welcome back to school!

It is hard to believe that we are already in September! And while it probably surprised us all, it does lead to the fall and the holidays!

In July, we had a very successful 2024 ICHRIE Global Conference in Montréal, Québec, Canada, which was supported by many of our amazing institutional members and industry partners shown below.

Thank you to those conference sponsors for their contributions to the continued positive impact and ongoing contributions to hospitality and tourism education. We celebrate you and know your support keeps, not only our registration fees lower, but raises the quality of our host hotel and our overall conference and city experience.

Montréal was ICHRIE’s first international conference in many years, and we were fortunate to partner with Institut de tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec (ITHQ) to help us make our way across the border to Canada! Thank you to the entire team for their warm welcome and assistance in our planning and during our stay in Montreal.

Here are some highlights from the organizational side of the conference:

The ICHRIE team worked with our Director of Conference, Catherine Johnson, to introduce a new IPOSTER digital presentation model.
Our special ITHQ partnership leader, ICHRIE Past President, Joy Dickerson, to innovate and advance the ICHRIE conference partnership school model.
Our Immediate Past President, Chrystel Masdupuy, Institute Lyfe, introduced us to Birgitte Hvingel Jorgensen of the University College of Northern Denmark who shared with Chrystel and our former Interim Director of Education, Cynthia Mejia, University of Central Florida, a passion for balancing our programming with more pedagogy. Their collaborative work brought our first ICHRIE Creative Teaching Lab to our ICHRIE Global Conference with over 20 innovations in teaching presentations made inside the Florida International University’s hosted Hospitality Experience lounge.
This year, we also contracted a very knowledgeable professional meeting planner, Paige Kscionska, who works as full-time meeting professional at a Fortune 500 company. We hope she will join us for the 2025 ICHRIE Global Conference in Indianapolis on June 18-20, co-located with HFTP – Hospitality Finance and Technology Professionals. We will be sharing all the special benefits of that co-location in an upcoming newsletter.

Now that the first half of 2024 is now behind us, we are reminded of the move our office made this Spring, after 20 years at the previous location. Our new location at 3900 Westerre Parkway, Suite 300, Richmond, Virginia, 23233 is in the same county and state, but many updates and upgrades were made during the transition:

We migrated all our financial system support to a new outside group, RCG, on the retirement of our former 16+ year contractor, Lyall Shank, CPA, Mission Critical Support.
Both the office move and the financial change impacted our general work processes and took significant time to accomplish in the January to May time period.
In the move, we also took the risk then and the reward now, to change our very outdated phone system, and solve our frustration with our former IT support company, by moving to a new one –LogicIT. The very good news is our costs are lower on rent, phone service and IT support!

NOTE TO MEMBERS: Be sure to check with your accounting office to make that address change on your university system ICHRIE profile or advise our office what your policy is for address change on approved vendors.

We have also hired a new full-time ICHRIE staff member, Jennifer Herdt, whose first day is in fact tomorrow. So please give her a shout out welcome at [email protected]. She will be based in our Richmond office and has the title of Administrator and Membership Specialist. She will need time to better understand ICHRIE and in doing so help us improve some of our processes, so please know we are “in training” until the end of September! We are very excited to have her talent and knowledge join our team.

We look forward to working with our new President, Kim Williams, our new Vice President, Perry Hobson, all our new ICHRIE Board of Directors, and our new Federation Boards and Committees.

Best wishes for a great fall,
Sincerely,