The next episode in the Suite Spot: Road Trip series takes travelers to the newly renovated Marriott Pompano Beach Resort in Sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida! The resort's General Manager, Leslie Weil, sits down on the podcast to share with audiences the transformative renovation, unique dining options, and enhanced guest experience. Tune in now. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree as you can tell, we are not in our Suite Spot podcast studio. Instead, we are on site at the beautiful Pompano Beach Marriott Resort. I'm here with GM, Leslie Weil. Leslie, thank you so much for hosting us here at your beautiful reimagined property. We're gonna get to it today. Leslie Weil: Thank you for having me. Excited to have you. Ryan Embree: And this is kind of a combination, of a couple different series and we're gonna share why that is special. Your alma mater, which we're gonna talk about in a moment. But we've got so much exciting stuff happening right here on property. But before we get into that, we always love to hear kind of the background of hospitality professionals. Sometimes you're jumping from place to place, sometimes you're local, born into the industry. Tell us a little bit about your story. Leslie Weil: So, I was not born into the industry, but I knew very young that this is what I wanted to do. At 15 years old I said I wanna study hospitality and I've stuck to it for over 30 years now. I absolutely love what I do and I'm from Peru. I was born and raised there. And then after high school, I studied for one year in Peru and I moved to Miami to study hospitality in FIU. FIU is a wonder for a school. It gave me a really great beginning in the industry and I have not looked back ever since. I've worked everywhere from hostels to luxury hotels at all over Latin America and the United States. So really I was lucky enough to start in housekeeping and in the kitchen and then I just got to grow to be in a GM and I love it. Ryan Embree: I love hearing that story. It's something that we're actually hearing more of now. Are people going to school for hospitality? Before it was, I fell into the industry, fell in love with it, and now we're seeing that intentionality into hospitality. I think it's because of stories that you hear sometimes from mentors about seeing and obviously just the love of travel. Right? I think that that's, that's comes with it. Leslie Weil: I really think the love of travel and the love of meeting people. Always merging into what can I do with those traits? And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, hospitality. And I think as a career, hospitality is a career that offers a little bit of every career into one. Yes. And hospitality is a world of sub worlds. So really it is true that still, I feel like there's a lot of people that fall into it. Like, you need a summer job and often sudden you love it and decide that that's what you're gonna do with your life. Yeah. But I think being able to study it and understanding all the components from a hospitality standpoint really gives you an advantage as you start your career. Ryan Embree: And a lot of transferable skills as well. Where you know, you can be at a property in the Midwest and then move to a beautiful property here right on the beach right behind us. And that's what we're gonna talk about next. Leslie, is this complete, we've visited at the perfect time, right? You would say the complete reimagining of your rooms, your suites, amenities, your pool restaurant. Talk to us a little bit about this project and kind of the journey that got you here. Leslie Weil: So I have not been here for as long as the renovation has been but my team has. And it was definitely, a very long but very well thought of project. It was fully reimagined.