A seat at the same table

A few months ago, I found myself at a conference table attending a general membership meeting. With a coffee in hand, I was about to be seated beside an executive from a hotel that competes directly with ours. On paper, we had every reason to keep our distance; we bid for the same MICE events, chase the same guest demographics, fight for the same guest loyalty and had its own trade secrets to keep.

And yet there we were, saying our hellos, easing into conversations on workforce retention, guest expectations and where Cebu’s next growth opportunities might come from, as easily as two old colleagues catching up.

Looking around, I noticed the same thing happening. Conversations of general managers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, educators, suppliers, all people who spend most of the year competing for the same peso, now sitting shoulder to shoulder like allies. For few hours, the daily scramble for market share simply didn’t matter.

That morning was a meeting of the Hotel, Resort, and Restaurant Association of Cebu (HRRAC), now led by Mia Singson-Leon, GM of Crimson Mactan, who is taking the reins as the association’s president. Together with a board of fellow GMs, academe leaders, and allied suppliers, all navigating the industry in the same direction.

That encounter lingers with me because it pointed to something easy to forget in the daily grind of running a property: individual hotels are built to compete, but the destination they all belong to survives on collaboration

We love to celebrate the brand that outperforms its comp set. We rarely celebrate the institution quietly raising the floor for everyone else—that’s HRRAC’s work in this city. It’s the platform where competitors cross-pollinate ideas, where the industry sets benchmarks it can measure itself against, and where operators gain a collective voice on issues no single hotel could push for alone.

That last part matters more for Cebu than most people realize. No individual property, no matter how large its footprint, can fix a shrinking talent pipeline, lobby government policies that favor the industry, forge partnerships, or shape how this destination manages its own growth.

Cebu’s position as a premier regional hub isn’t something any one brand can protect on its own. It needs an organized industry moving in lockstep, and that’s precisely the role HRRAC has stepped into.

One part of that work is personal to me. I spend weekdays inside this industry and weekends teaching students who are about to enter it. It has shown me how essential HRRAC’s link between industry and academia really is. The problems we wrestle with in boardrooms today should reach the classroom while they’re still relevant, before the textbook catches up.

It is also why HRRAC’s more visible programs—culinary showcases, skills competitions, professional development seminars, excellence awards, even its biennial sportsfest, carry more weight than usually given credit for. They set a visible bar for the talent coming up behind us, push established teams to sharpen standards they might otherwise let it slide. Membership, in other words, has its privileges.

What HRRAC does is raise the level at which that competition happens, giving Cebu’s hospitality industry one unifying voice when policy shifts threaten to hit everyone, and carrying the problems too big for any single operator to shoulder alone.

Healthy competition keeps individual properties sharp. But the city grows stronger as a destination when its industry leaders pull up a chair to the same table, set the rivalry aside, and invest in something bigger than their own bottom line. That’s not a compromise. In this business, it might be the smartest long game there is.