San Pedro Sula, Honduras

For the past week I've been in Honduras. This is my second CESO assignment in as many years and the second one to Honduras. A year ago I spent a couple of weeks in the capital, Tegucigalpa.

The plan this time? To spend three weeks working with the food & beverage department at Copantl Hotel & Suites in the city of San Pedro Sula in the northern part of the country. This 190 room hotel sits close-by the international brands of Intercontinental, Hilton and Holiday Inn in a town of 700,000 people, but is decidedly Honduran in flavour and ownership. San Pedro's international airport is the jumping off point for the nearby Caribbean coast and Hondura's Bay Islands including the most famous, Roatan. It is also a thriving centre of the textile and other industries and the nearest city to the stupendous Mayan ruins at Copan (more about that later).

My host here, Food & Beverage Manager Désirée Ammann, already has the place running like a fine watch from her native Switzerland. With a solid hospitality management background from the Schweizerische Hotelfachschule in Luzern, she has guided the two restaurants, one bar, and considerable catering operation through three ownerships in nine years. And, while there is always something to work on in this biz of ours, the standard response to my many questions is always along the lines of "yeah ..... we do that already" or "yeah ..... we tried that and it didn't work too well". Very often it is "that doesn't work in Honduras because ...... ". My contribution will be with the quality of front-of-house service and I will likely spend some time in their kitchen offering-up some suggestions and ideas there.

If I think back far enough, I believe I got into this CESO gig thinking that I could help fix broken things. That has neither been the case here so far, nor with Aparthotel Guijarros in Tegucigalpa last year. 

It's more a case of justifying my existence.

Time to roll up the sleeves ..........