133 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Talene Staab

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Brand Leader of Home2 Suites by Hilton, Talene Staab, is named a TMG Hospitality Trailblazer and joins the Suite Spot to discuss Home2 Suites and the incredible developments taking place for the brand. From designing the hotel to finding new ways to improve the guest experience, this episode covers the key aspects that make the Home2 brand special. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. 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 and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. So excited to bring you another episode in another part of our Hospitality Trailblazers series. If this is your first time, we've been running this Hospitality Trailblazers series for almost two years now, and we are interviewing some of the best and brightest in our hospitality industry, some of those people that are trailblazing a path forward, and we certainly have a guest today that fits the bill. Talene Staab, Brand Leader of Home2 Suites by Hilton, Talene, thank you so much for being on the podcast with me today. Talene Staab: It's great to be here with you today. Thank you so much. Ryan Embree: And we're excited to talk about the Home2 Suites brand and all the innovative and exciting developments that are happening with that brand that you were the head of. But before that, although this is not the first time I have met you, we were just talking off camera about how we met at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference, had the pleasure to meet in person even though we're doing this interview virtually. With this being your first time Talene, tell us a little bit about your hospitality background, the journey that led you to Hilton and ultimately the brand leader for home two suites. Talene Staab: Sure. My family, my parents had a little diner that was like a breakfast lunch diner in the Boston area, and I worked there in high school and it was one of those places that was like, cheers, where no one ordered their food. They kind of like walked in and everybody knew, oh, Ryan's here. We might not have known your name, but we knew what you would eat for breakfast. And it was like that sense of building community around a small business really stuck with me, even though it was hard work and I just loved it. But I started working in hotels and then my family actually moved from Boston to San Diego and relocated, and they stayed at this Embassy Suites and they called and they were like, you will not believe this hotel. And this was like 30 years ago. So the brand was relatively new. They were like, you get a suite in every room, you get free breakfast and free cocktails. And I honestly didn't believe it. They're like, you gotta work here. So I did. I actually was a smart sales manager there, um, became a DOS and then eventually joined the corporate team. And then when the corporate office moved to McLean, I moved back east with my family, young family, and we kind of looked at it as like an adventure. Let's just see what happens. And it ended up being a really good move because from there I took on a ton of different jobs that kind of took me out of the brand and sales world into more operations. I got to be on the Canopy team. I joined like a week before we launched the brand. So learned about new brand development, learned about owners. Development was the big learning curve for me, which was really exciting. And then that set me up to be, the VP of owner relations owner experience. And that was really cool because I got to see what Hilton looked like from the owner's point of view, like the whole elephant, you know. Ryan Embree: Yeah, yeah, we're gonna talk about that.