Hospitality Management Concentration

What You’ll Learn

Why study hospitality management? In the hospitality management concentration at Merrimack College, you’ll explore the diverse areas of the service industry through courses in marketing, tourism, hospitality, human resources, leadership, emotional intelligence, organizational behavior and more. Meeting new people, seeing new places, acting quickly on your feet and keeping clients happy are all essential elements of this career path.

The Girard School of Business hospitality management concentration curriculum is business-focused, driven by the hospitality industry. You’ll graduate with an in-demand business administration degree from Merrimack and be prepared to launch a career based on world-class excellence as a hospitality leader.

By specializing in hospitality management, you will:

• Strengthen your soft and hard skills in management, leadership, teamwork-building and emotional intelligence – key hospitality skills that are also transferable to other career paths.
• Become a resilient hospitality leader by practicing positive leadership and learning from theory and practical application.
• Explore trends in hospitality industry operations and related case studies and follow hospitality industry news and hospitality and tourism current events.
• Develop relationships with talented Merrimack faculty who will share their own real-world experiences working within the hospitality industry.

Hands-on Learning

There are a number of internships and field experiences available in both Boston, a 20-minute ride from campus, and the surrounding Merrimack Valley area. You’ll work alongside professionals in hotel management, event planning, hospitality operations, tourism management and other hospitality industry jobs. You’ll also have access to industry expert speaker series and Merrimack’s O’Brien Center for Career Development to guide you with the resources, connections and tools you need to get career ready for a position in the hospitality industry.

Hospitality Industry Jobs

To be successful as a manager, you’ll need to develop a mixture of soft and hard skills. Soft skills are especially attractive to recruiters because they are essential to guest satisfaction. Hard skills like business knowledge and attention to detail are also crucial for an organization’s success.

You will learn both of these skill types in the hospitality management concentration, and you will also learn how to interact with people from different cultures and backgrounds. These valuable skills can be carried into roles in other industries as well. Leadership opportunities in the hospitality field exist in hotels, restaurants, resorts, casinos, cruise lines, ecotourism and clubs.

Career paths include opportunities in:

Courses You’ll Take

You will complete both the business administration major curriculum requirements and the hospitality management concentration requirements listed below.