SUMMIT’S AIM IS PEAK HOSPITALITY

Summit Hotel Galleria is focused on giving its guests Cebuano hospitality, says its general manager Ariel Banaag.

Ariel recalls experiencing this kind of hospitality himself when he first came to Cebu during his early teens. He recalled that his family, from Mandaluyong, moved to Cebu in 1985 and has stayed here ever since. Initially, he feared that he would be bullied in school (University of San Carlos-Boys High), being new and Tagalogspeaking. To his surprise, everyone was welcoming. It is this kind of experience, he said, that the Summit Hotel Galleria owners, the Gokongweis, would like their hotel guests to experience.

Ariel finished high school in USC-Boys High and started to take up political science at the USC-Main Campus. But he later shifted to business management in the International Academy of Management and Economics, a small school in Metro Manila. He used to be an introvert but his first job in a hotel, namely Shangri-La’s Mactan Resort and Spa, changed all that. He found satisfaction in interacting with the guests, particularly with one guest who came to the hotel—an angry foreigner and whose anger simmered down with the way he handled the guest (who, to this day, remains his friend).

In 1997, he found work in Melbourne, Australia, in a small 82-room hotel, where he was a jack of all trades: nursing attendant, gardener, front office receptionist and night auditor. Then, he moved to a bigger hotel still in Melbourne, Crown Towers, where he worked as cage cashier, then bell room attendant, then receptionist, then VIP service coordinator and finally, by 2006, as duty manager.

He came back to Cebu to get married (to Maria Concepcion de Castro) and worked briefly as duty manager in ShangriLa. From there he was part of