Join the Suite Spot in this episode of TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl featuring Florida Atlantic University! FAU Professor, Dr. Peter Ricci, joins the episode to shine a light on the FAU hospitality program and tells viewers why it is one-of-a-kind and how it prepares its students for success in the hospitality industry.  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. Welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, and this is the second part of our TMG Hospitality Campus Crawl series. If this is your first time listening to this brand new summer series, we just launched this, we've talked about it before. Right now we're going through somewhat of a staffing shortage. We're gonna get into that a little bit into this episode. But what we're trying to accomplish with this particular series is talk to the people and places that are educating and preparing the next generation of hoteliers, the next generation of hospitality workforce. So, very excited to just move a little on up I 95 North to Boca Raton. Im a bring in my next Suite Spot guest, clinical professor and director Dr. Peter Ricci of FAU's Hospitality and Tourism Management program. Dr. Ricci, thank you so much for joining the Suite Spot today. Dr. Peter Ricci : Great. Nice to be here. Thank you. So I started sitting back here so you can see my lovely FAU owl. Now I can, move in a little bit. Thanks for having me. I love to see you and I know you're a Rosen grad. I did my doctorate there, so it's great, great to spend some time with you. Ryan Embree: Well, you have, you've got such an extensive and unique journey and, and I was talking to you off camera, how about that is one of my favorite things about our industry is, you know, sometimes our hospitality journeys take us all over the world. Sometimes we fall into hospitality as a career. Typically we meet a couple mentors along the way. And for your particular journey, you've been kind of in and out of academia. Share with our audience a little bit about your journey and the path that led you to FAU. Dr. Peter Ricci : You know it's interesting that I'm spending time with you today. Yesterday was 47 years since I moved to Florida. So I moved here as a little boy and tourism was a part of my life growing up. Always. because we had visited here first. My family also was in California, so we spent a lot of time traveling. And I've always had a love and passion for meeting people and traveling. But as a boy, you don't realize that. You just think Florida's cool because you can swim all the time and you can go play. And so my experience here growing up in middle and high school was fantastic. And, um, I started working as a teenager in a fine dining restaurant and happened to have an absolute amazing mentor who was a self-made millionaire and owned fine dining restaurants all over South Florida. And this was in the eighties when fine dining was all the rage with the flambe, tableside and fancy cocktails before they were called craft cocktails. And he was all about guest service. And of course I didn't know what that meant at that time. He was just instilling me like an etiquette. I'm kind of a casual guy, but I wouldn't say kind of, I'm a casual guy. I don't like suits and ties, but I'm all about treating people with the utmost respect, welcoming them, feeling warmly about hospitality and inviting you into my environment. So hospitality was like a natural thing for me. Undergrad, I worked food and beverage all through college. I fell in love with what they call trip directing, where you would go on a trip as the liaison to the confe...