"We all know what good service means, but it's very hard to find the hotel management personnel necessary to ensure good service to our patrons," said Fang Gongyu, chairman of the board of directors of the Gingko Restaurant and Hotel Group, which runs the most luxurious restaurants and hotels in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province.

But now Fang has found a way to be sure that he will get the knowledgeable personnel he needs. He has founded the Yinxing International Hospitality Management School, which is to recruit about 400 students in hotel management, marketing, computer application and English this autumn.

The school, attached to Chengdu University of Information Technology, is believed to be the first privately invested hotel management school in China.

"I don't need a school to make me extra money - I even expect it to lose money in the first few years - but I do need trained personnel to keep my hotels and restaurants going in the face of the increasingly fierce competition," he said.

"Without properly trained personnel, my restaurant may survive for five to 10 years, but no longer. If you want to make a table, you have to start by planting a tree."

The founding of the school is a response to the lack of hotel management graduates in China, as well as to the inability of graduates from schools that do exist to apply the theories they have learned to put into actual practice, said Jiao Wei, president of the China Tourism Management Institute based in North China's Tianjin Municipality.

A recent survey published by the China Tourism Bureau shows there are today less than 10 universities and colleges offering hotel management majors. Among them are China Tourism Institute, Xi'an Communications University and Guangzhou University.

There are also more than 60 universities, colleges and schools with tourism management majors, which often offer courses in hotel management but focus more on the management of tourism agencies and tourism sites.

"The number of graduates in hotel management is not enough, if we consider there are about 230,000 hotels in China, including more than 6,000 starred hotels," said Jiao Wei.

"These graduates prefer larger cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which makes it very difficult for hotels and restaurants in the western regions of China to find properly trained management personnel," said Fang.

"What's more, I often find during interviews that many graduates are not ready to handle responsible roles in my hotels. They have good theories, can easily point out the problems in the hotels, but don't seem to have the training to enable them to come up with practical solutions to these problems."

Fang cited the example of personnel training. All the graduates he interviews tell him that to improve services he has to offer more training for his staff, and that he should send his staff to training courses offered at universities and colleges.

"But what if these people don't come back after their training courses?" he said. "No one has ever mentioned this possibility. What I need are trained professionals who have an overview of the enterprise as a whole, and can, as a result, link personnel training with relevant regulations regarding human resource management."

"I cannot expand my hotels to Beijing or Shanghai because I don't have the necessary trained staff to manage my hotels in those markets where the competition is fierce. Today, many private enterprises like mine are not as thirsty for funds as they were 10 years ago, but we are all extremely thirsty for good managers."

Fang believes "helping to build a good but not necessarily large school with an academic atmosphere, which is not driven just by the smell of money" is the best thing he has ever done in his life."

Fang has set the tuition for the school at 4,000-5,000 yuan (US$480-US$600) a year, which is about the same as that for most public universities in the country.

The school is in a four-storey building on the campus of Chengdu Information Technology Institute in the center of the city.

Fang has invested 5 million yuan (US$600,000) to decorate the building, equip every classroom with multi-media facilities and to build a lecture hall and a sports centre.

The school will employ professors of hotel management from the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Technology and the Shanghai Tourism College, revealed Han Yong, president of the school, who was formerly a professor of enterprise management and dean of the management department of Chengdu University.

Han and his colleagues also plan to co-operate with hotel management schools abroad, bringing in professionals to teach and do research in the Yinxing School.

"We will provide funds for the research projects, which will be open to both teachers and students," said Fang.

The school has organized an academic committee, which will decide the research topics to fund and the teaching programs to offer.

To give the students more choices, the school has signed agreements with 27 hotels, travel agencies and tourism sites to provide student internships.

"Our students will not necessarily become hotel managers in the future, but they can learn from these various research projects and internships what they are really interested in," said Han. "Self-discovery is one of the best things we intend to offer at this school."

(China Daily June 25, 2002)