The 5th Cebu Tourism & Hospitality Awards
There is a particular kind of nervousness that comes from building something backstage that has never existed before, with no way of knowing if anyone will show up.
I remember it clearly — the first Cebu Tourism and Hospitality Awards (CTHA) back in 2022. I was behind the scenes helping former bai Hotel GM Alfred Reyes execute the idea he had dreamed up as HRRAC president: that Cebu’s hospitality workers, who had spent the pandemic showing up anyway, deserved more than a thank-you note. They deserved a stage.
I didn’t know then that I was helping build something that would still run five years later — without Janelle Suico and Alexis Gabuya, my former staff, I would have gone crazy trying to pull it off. I didn’t know that with my former creative head Venge Villarin, I’d help design the logo that would carry it — built around Cebu’s landmarks, because an award for the city’s hospitality industry should look like the city. Nor did I know that in 2023, and again in 2025, I’d be nominated myself.
What I do know is how it feels to sit in that room on the side, waiting to have your name read for the work you do. It is a strange, humbling thing, being seen for the parts of the job you never did for applause.
Now, I’ve been asked to help shape the awards again for its 5th edition, without GM Alfred to see it. He has since passed, and there is a particular grief in knowing the man who dreamed it up will never see how far it’s gone.
Sitting with these memories, I understand his vision. It was, and still is, a recognition body — a bigger platform for the people in this industry to finally be seen for the work they do, spanning categories from front and heart-of-the-house staff to service and leadership, even educators shaping the next generation.
Good service, by definition, works quietly, which is exactly what makes the people who deliver it easy to overlook, underpay, and lose to another industry that claps louder. The founding HRRAC board understood — Cebu’s hospitality sector was bleeding talent. The industry needed its people to believe it still believed in them.
From 31 nominees when it started to 59 this year, it is proof that recognition, done consistently, grows. CTHA has become closer to an institution, a place where competing properties cheer for each other’s staff — everyone understands the same truth: a rising standard at one hotel makes the whole industry look better.
The businesses that last make recognition a routine. People stay where they feel seen. Build a version of CTHA inside your own four walls, where the only agenda is saying thank you out loud. Because morale, unlike a marketing budget, doesn’t get spent — it compounds.
I keep coming back to that first year, how untested the idea was, how much it rested on one GM’s conviction that Cebu’s hospitality workers deserved a night of their own. It has since outgrown that first uncertain room; it has now become something properties plan their business calendars around.
The 5th CTHA happens on the early evening of September 22 at Ayala Center Cebu — if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of good service in this city and wondered who was behind it, that room is where you’ll find them.
The numbers change, the faces change, but the story stays the same: someone in this city is doing the work that makes a stranger not feel like one. CTHA just makes sure, once a year, that we stop long enough to notice.
This year though, we notice a little longer, in memory of the man who started it.
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