Campanile Hotels has moved to snap up one of the hotel industry’s promising young talents.
Twenty-six-year-old Michaela Tipp has been appointed general manager at the Campanile Hotel in Washington, Newcastle-upon-Tyne after spending ten years at Whitbread.
In her new role, Michaela is responsible for leading 23 members of staff in the 78-bedroom hotel which plays host to a variety of functions from business meetings to christenings and funeral wakes.
Michaela started her journey in the hospitality industry at the tender age of 16 when she joined her local Premier Inn at Hartlepool as a general assistant, and put in extra hours to learn about the trade.
At age 18 she was made duty manager, and bosses quickly noticed her drive and ability and moved to promote her to operations manager at 21, where she spent five years helping to increase audit scores at various hotels in the north east.
Michaela said: “I’m thrilled to join Campanile and hope to use all of the experience I’ve had over the past ten years to lead a close-knit team.
“I’ve learned so much in a short space of time by asking questions and sacrificing a lot of my time, and after spending years travelling around, I’m looking forward to having my own hotel and team to look after.”
The seeds for a career in hospitality were sewn from a very early age for Michaela, who spent many years travelling around Europe when her father was in the army.
She added: “When I lived in Germany and Cyprus I used to meet new people all of the time, and I’ve always been interested in finding out about people’s background and culture.
“When I moved back to England the army lifestyle of meeting new people stopped, so working in a hotel has helped me to continue the old lifestyle that I loved.
“I enjoy the unpredictability of working in hospitality because you don’t know who you are going to get walking through the door from one day to the next.
“We are doing a lot of training around expecting the unexpected. We aren’t just here to accommodate guests, we are their agony aunts and their shoulder to cry on.”
Mark Aldridge, director of operations for UK and Iberia at Louvre Hotels Group, was one of the people who appointed Michaela.
He said: “A hotel is only as good as the team that is inside it, and it’s a real coup for us to be able to appoint somebody of Michaela’s calibre to lead our team in Washington.”